Map thyself
Posted: Thursday, September 18, 2008 6:06 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
Games, That thing in the news
Am I crazy or does the alligator in photo number 6 look kind of happy? I actually tried to use the Bird's Eye View in Live Maps over Gilchrist, Texas to see if I could find the house in photo #11 but I can't make it out. I did learn from a colleague where Jeff Ranieri was standing when he shot this video. If you've got two monitors you can pan Google street view at the same time he pans his camera for a before/after perspective.
Speaking of using Google Street View to explore the real world, Google Street View goes mobile
Speaking of new stuff from Google, they launched audio indexing. The software can translate the audio in YouTube clips and offer that translation to search. That's cool in itself but if the thing can understand audio, why am I still typing into it? Is it time for the audio revolution?
Speaking of audio, I was watching the Bandcamp video here when I saw the adjacent link to this cool Droste effect video. From the Flickr category I saw the mention on this photo of GIMP plugin MathMap. (Reminder: GIMP is a free open source photo editor.)
Mr. and Mrs. Vader
I enjoyed this collection of computer generated art. Each photo links back to a gallery of the artist on computer generated art site called CG Hub.
If Wikipedia was a college professor...
How to switch back to the old Facebook layout if you hate the new design.
The Bike Of The Future: Vetrix Electric Super Bike - Yes! All this talk of electric cars is making me crazy. Why not put a battery in a motorcycle to introduce the technology in a much lighter form? Vetrix already produces a "maxi-scooter" so how far away can a proper motorcycle be?
The anti-theft lunch bag is a brilliant idea. I bet you could do something similar with food coloring on the bread itself.
YouKnowster lets you make your own "You know you're ... when/if..." lists.
Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!
Ze Frank has updated his memory game. Funny how the basics are so satisfying.
The new Sticky Note Experiment video from the Diet Coke & Mentos guys.
Company to help content owners "monetize" illegal content - Assuming the "monetizing" isn't completely obnoxious, this could be a great idea. Instead of yanking illegal clips from YouTube, the clip automatically pulls in an appropriate ad. Everyone wins.
Differences between liberals and conservatives and the foundations of moral psychology. Nearly 20 minute video but contains interesting ideas. The temptation to personalize or politicize what he's saying may undermine its value but it's good food for thought as a context.
More than 20 million homes have cut the cord on landline phones - Wow, that is way more than I would have guessed. We hear about this more often lately because every time a poll comes out someone points out people with cell phones instead of landlines can't be reached by pollsters. I'd always dismissed that as an academic argument but wow, 20 million.
You may have heard about the scandal that an Mtv reality show taping left the natural setting of the show in shambles but did you know there is such a thing as the Tree Climber's Coalition?
"...Astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of." According to Femia's Law of Schlocky Science Reporting, whenever scientists admit they can't explain something we are free to speculate not only about the explanation but also the implications of any imaginable hypotheticals. And so it's my duty to report that the mystery object has been speculated by some to be an alien race of life farmers, returning to seed-planet Earth to restock supplies before heading back out into space to spread life through the galaxy. Should this possibility prove correct, they're going to be pissed when they find out we're all out of Tasmanian Tigers.
The Internet has blessed us with the original recording of that John McCain interview in which he appears not to know the leader of Spain. Sorry, but I'm giving this one the "non-scandal" stamp. That lady is wicked hard to understand. Maybe he should have asked her to repeat herself but I could barely make out what she was asking and I had the notes in front of me.
At this point the Palin e-mail hack story is probably mainstream enough that I don't have much to add. It's interesting to note that, as Bob Sullivan warned about a few weeks ago, the common suspicion is that the password was obtained through research, not decryption or other kind of technical hacking.
I also notice Bob's report from earlier this month about some of Palin's SS# being revealed. That's not really a big crime but it makes me think back to when she was first announced as McCain's running mate and everyone was fighting about whether she'd been vetted. Almost immediately someone had copied photos from her kids' MySpace pages and I remember thinking that she must not have known the announcement was coming because her family didn't have time to set their accounts to "private." But maybe living our lives online is too new for there to be such a thing as a "digital lockdown" performed on a person suddenly entering government life.
It's funny to see Gawker bearing the brunt of so much pro-Palin rage for posting the contents of the hacked mail account. They were hardly the only place to find that material. NOTE: If you click that voicemail link, put on your headphones, it's curse-laden.
More compelling will be whether there's any follow-up with Ctunnel on who actually did the initial hack and whether they can be caught.
UPDATE: Gateway Pundit is blogging the heck out of the tracking of the hacker.
Also, Obama's G-mail was hacked.
