The International Commission on Stratigraphy has done a lot of work this year, and the world-standard geologic time scale has changed enough for me to update everything to match the new divisions, dates, and map colors. Start with the high-level eras and eons scale and poke around the last 4 billion years of Earth history.

The new color scheme is interesting, and I rather like it. The old International color standard had some garish aspects, and I never warmed to it—of course, as an American I was imprinted by the U.S. Geological Survey standard at an impressionable age. But this year the Committee for the Geologic Map of the World put together a new color standard that curbs the worst of the International standard and makes the USGS standard look a bit drab. Compare them and see if you agree.
_{New Paleozoic colors — Geology Guide image}

California is full of wineries and faults, but only one active winery sits on an active fault. Last weekend's Wall Street Journal visited the DeRose Winery and posted photos and a video to go with the story. The winery is in the Cienega Valley in the creeping section of the San Andreas fault. Continual slow movement on the fault steadily crumples the winery building, making the place a magnet for geologists, wine-loving and otherwise.

There was once another winery in the same situation—the Gallegos winery building straddles the Hayward fault, but only its ruins remain today. The US Geological Survey maintains an instrument package there, and the transit agency BART plans a facility there some day.

More:
Tour the San Andreas fault's creeping section
About the San Andreas fault
About the Hayward fault
Geology-related wine labels Gallegos Winery site — Geology Guide photo

People have asked me for years if there are geology courses online. There are lots of places where you can see professors' lecture notes, but nothing exists like the many business-oriented online degree programs. The blogger known as GeoCastAway pointed me to MIT's extensive Open Courseware offerings, which include dozens of courses from the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department. While most of them, again, are lecture notes and no more, they are freely accessible and reusable under Creative Commons license.

More:
Take My Minerals E-mail Course
What Should a High-Schooler Study?
The Digital Earth
Teaching and Learning Geology

ISIHighlyCited.com is a service of the Institute for Scientific Information or ISI, now owned by Thomson Reuters, that picks the most prominent scientists on the basis of their citations in the literature by their fellow professionals. If you go to its browse page and pick "Geosciences," it will serve you 343 names from Keiiti Aki to Mark Zoback. Those two guys certainly belong on this list, and so does one from my alma mater, climate scientist Robert Talbot.