Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Carbon Dioxide Emissions on Google Earth
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
The Vulcan project brings us a map of the US and the amount of pollution that can be found. The Vulcan project is a collaboration of a few universities, NASA, and the US D.O.E. Check out their site for more information, they do a lot of good work.
They have released a CO2 emissions map that looks like a pretty interesting application. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the right plugin for Firefox on my MacBook Pro to run this, but it looks like it is very well done, and I hope to get it up and running on windows at some point soon. Please comment on this if you are able to get it to work.
Google Earth maps carbon dioxide emissions (via LATimes.com)
UPDATE:
I reinstalled The Google Earth Plugin, and now this works! I think the problem was that I reinstalled Firefox since the last time I updated Google Earth. Anyway, it works now, and the information is very impressive. This is a screenshot from my local area. Carbon County is one of the worst polluters, and it’s all from industrial uses. So Carbon county is still aply named even after all these years! (This is Pennsylvania’s Coal region, as well as the Slate Belt, and home to many Cement Factories.)
Gurney, K.R., D. Mendoza, Y. Zhou, B. Seib, M Fischer, S. de la Rue du Can, S. Geethakumar, C. Miller (2009) “The Vulcan Project: High resolution fossil fuel combustion CO2 emissions fluxes for the United States”, http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/research.html.
Pantagraph.com is having a Google Maps Scavenger Hunt
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
It looks like the Google Street View car took a detour through Bloomington, IL, and it has caught the attention of the local media
Although Google only covered a few major roads, the local newspaper is encouraging readers to go out and look for people they know, and try to figure out when the car came through.
It’s kind of a cool idea to use Google Maps as a town-wide Scavenger Hunt. I’d like to see how this turns out!
Pantagraph.com | News | Mysteries abound as Bloomington finally shows up on Google Street View. (via Pantagraph.com)
Universal Phone Chargers may exist in my lifetime!
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
CNET reports that by 2012:
All the major handset makers, including, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, have agreed to use the Micro-USB technology as the common universal charging interface
Also from the article:
All in all, it’s huge win for the planet and for me–the consumer. It’s such a no-brainer. It makes you wonder why no one thought of this sooner.
I believe this is because the companies could make tons of money by selling us a new $30 charger everytime we found ourselves away from home with no way to charge our phones.
Now if there was only a green way to get rid of my excess of old phone chargers. Any ideas?
GPS Support Added To Google Earth Free Version
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009I’ve been wanting to hook my GPS up to Google Maps for a while, and have always needed to boot into Windows to run MS Streets to track my position. It appears that Google is finally allowing the free version of Google Earth to use a GPS.
This news has been overshadowed by bigger news, such as the Ocean Floor Mapping, and Historic Satellite Imagery, but it may be something I’m more likely to use on a regular basis!
GPS Support Added To Free Version Of Google Earth. (via FreeGeographyTools.com)
OpenFlights Airport and Airline databases released
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
I’m always on the lookout for new GeoTagged data, and it made my day I came across this database. It contains almost all of the airports in the world, along with their positions in WGS84.
I’ve gone through their data a little bit, and it’s not 100% perfect. There are no parameters to specify the type of airport (General Av., Heliport, Seaplane, etc) and some of the airports have ceased to exist since. (ie. Denver Stapleton Airport)
Despite its shortcomings, this is still a great chunk of geographic data.
Recently, a buddy of mine put together a map of the Major US airports on Google Maps, which can be found here. A lot of work was put into it to only include commercial airports and to specify the larger airports. Its main intent is to aid travelers in finding the commercial airport nearest their destination.
It has inspired me to use the data from OpenFlights to create a maps of the World’s airports. The resulting file was over 5mb, so I decided to create a subset of United States airports. So check out the OpenFlights Airport Database – United States Airports on Google Maps.
Airport and airline databases released (via OpenFlights)
As always, there is a song attached. The flash player was giving me trouble, so here’s the mp3 straight up.
