Is there anything Google Maps CAN’T DO? An interactive design firm in Estonia has pulled together tourism data and created a heatzone map of the entire world that shows where tourists visit the most. Things get a little too fuzzy as you zoom in, but from the country level on up to the whole globe level is pretty cool. (via Information Is Beautiful)
If you’re having a hard time grasping the scope of the sheer size of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick, this looks like a job for Google Maps! Someone has whipped up a website called “If It Were My Home.com” that superimposes the current dimensions of the oil slick onto whatever geographical coordinates you might call home (or whichever ones you type into the interface).
Placing the epicenter of the spill on Boston, the current slick would extend as far north as Brunswick, Maine, as far south as Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island, and as far west as Albany, New York…and then some.
While I appreciate the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position this situation has put Barack Obama in, I was still more than a little disappointed to read this Daily Beast story yesterday that reveals that he was briefed at the outset about the actual severity of the leak and the length of time it would take to properly correct it and chose to play a waiting game before public opinion forced him to “get angry”. Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection points out that it’s SOP for Obama to sit back rather than act, and then when he does get around to doing something it’s usually the weakest possible response.
Now THIS is a technology whose time is WAAAAAY overdue: the City of San Francisco is pilot testing a program to use an array of sensors embedded in the streets that can determine parking availability, then share that data over a meshed wireless network that can be accessed online so that you can get a reasonably accurate idea of where you can find a place to park. The picture above shows how the data can be plugged into Google Maps to display the parking availability on a block-by-block basis. The program uses different kinds of sensors to determine the density of parked cars (though they primarily rely on magnetic sensors), but the actual sensor arrays are small, and the combination of sensors means that they could also be used to relate other types of real-time data like pedestrian density, micro-climate data, and more.
I would pay almost anything to have this information available on my GPS. I cannot tell you how many hours of my time I have wasted trolling for parking, particularly in Harvard Square and its immediate surroundings. Not to mention the number of times I have just bitten the bullet and parked in a permit-only space knowing that there would be a ticket on my windshield when I got back, but having little other choice. The article also mentions that the developers are hoping that they’ll also be able to develop an algorithm that will predict parking availability for some point in the immediate future; say you want to know where you might find a space within a block of your destination sometime between 2:00 and 2:15. Wouldn’t THAT just be the cat’s ass?
More link dumpage:
MSNBC reports that the Discovery Channel says it has remastered all of the NASA film footage from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space flights in high-definition video, and that NASA will make the videos available to the public for free at its archives. The story doesn’t say whether that includes online access, but the films have been incorporated into a six-hour series that will run on the Discovery Channel in June, so get your TiVo ready.
Contrary to popular belief, people do not use only 10% of their brains (unless, of course, they are Republicans). PsyBlog, a British blog about topics in psychology, offers this list of Top Ten Brain Myths that most of us have at one time or another heard and/or accepted as fact. You might be surprised at one or two of them.
eSkeptic, the website of Skeptic Magazine, has this feature article from environmental engineering expert Dr. Tapio Schneider entitled “How We Know Global Warming Is Real”. Recommend this to your disbelieving right-wing friends and associates, but don’t expect them to pay much attention because it includes things like facts and figures that most of them think are “pretend”.
Concerned about the proliferation of RFID tags in everything from passports to grocery packaging? I am. Luckily, the always-enterprising folks at Instructables.com have devised a fool-proof method for neutralizing RFID tags: smash them with a hammer. It causes the least-visible cosmetic damage to those flat RFIDs that are in your passport or on your credit card, so that The Man won’t tase you, bro when he thinks you’ve tampered with it.
Geeks everywhere are limbering up their salivary glands for the expected release of the 3G iPhone in June, but the suits at Research In Motion (R.I.M.), which makes the Blackberry (the favorite toy of gadget-head biz-wizzes everywhere), are none too pleased. This NYT article from a couple of weeks ago explains how Steverino has decided to aim for the enterprise market, and how his Reality Distortion Field may be strong enough to push the Crackberry out of the briefcase of every road warrior in America.
Lastly, joe of the eponymous bookofjoe.com tells us that those crazy youngsters have figured out another totally cool thing you can do with Google Maps and “smart mobs”: find stolen cars faster than Lojack.
I’m sure you’re aware that Google has recently launched street-level views as part of their Google Maps service.
It didn’t take very long for people to start noticing that the roaming vehicles that have been taking the pictures had managed to catch people in some activities they might not have wanted photographed: breaking into stores, urinating on the sidewalk, fighting with their S.O., and so on. One woman was surprised to see her cat sitting in the window of her apartment in one picture and began to wonder just how far Google was going to peek.
For the moment, the street-level views are only available for a few select cities, but Google is pouring it on to photograph quite a few more, including the Boston metro area. Adam at Universal Hub points us to this local blogger who says he’s seen a car with a roof-mounted multi-lens camera driving around Cambridge, and, since he just happened to have a camera with him, starting taking pictures of it…which apparently freaked out the driver a bit.
Didn’t anyone ever tell them that it’s not polite to look into people’s windows?
Is there anything you CAN’T do with Google Maps?
Yesterday everybody was posting about how you can now get real-time traffic data when you request a map of some major cities in the U.S., but a week or two ago I ran across this site, too: a real-time tracker of satellites and other space objects orbiting the Earth.
The traffic mapping is probably a good deal more practical than the satellite tracking, but not nearly as much fun, if you ask me. In the picture above, you’re looking at the real-time position of the International Space Station as of about 10:15 a.m. ET this morning. you can track the Hubble Space Telescope, commercial satellites, and even some military satellites (the ones we’re allowed to know about).
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