howbigreally.com, awe-inspiring geographical visualizations.
Archive of posts filed under the maps category.
Devotion to favorite author – 12,328 miles worth
“Read Ayn Rand”.
Still haven’t.
And this display of too much time on somebody’s hands isn’t like to persuade otherwise.
What if the Earth stood still?
Instead of spinning on its axis, that is.
Witold Fraczek’s article explains the consequences.
Due to the disappearance of centrifugal force, the oceans would be completely realigned. As gravity would be the only meaningful force, the ellipsoidic “bump” would disappear and the water recede towards the poles.
Finland would be submerged completely, and a globe-spanning mega-continent would connect the existing landmasses around the equator.
21 Steps
21 Steps, the novel told using Google Maps as the medium, is functional again.
Maybe this time my 21 second attention span is not able to prevent me from finishing it.
Touristing around
Differentiating where locals and tourists snap pictures.
Red by tourists, blue by locals, yellows by indetrminates.
Pictured: San Francisco, where Golden Gate is entirely tourist-ridden.
Go walla!
Gowalla is a location-based social networking game that’s rapidly expanding all over the world.
It resembles waymarking, the cacheless version of geocaching, a lot.
Basically participants use their location-enabled gadgets to log their whereabouts. The social aspect is the effortless ability to let your friends know where you are, the gaming aspect is the potential to visit as many locations as possible. And to create plenty of new locations, since the world is mostly unmarked thus far.
Most of the locations are tagged with a default icon (one per subcategory such as a bar, pharmacy or a park), but the most famous ones get a dedicated symbol. Thus far Finland doesn’t seem to have any, whereas Sweden has accrued already several.
Unlike its slightly more famous counterpart Foursquare, Gowalla works well with the Nokia N900. Originally geolocation had to be enabled with a browser add-on, but these days it works out of the box.
Very much like Foursquare, the Gowalla service rewards progress with badges – testimonials of progress (such as visiting and creating new spots).
I can see my house from here!
Google’s Streetview has expanded to cover Finland. The image have been taken last summer, so the country is fortunately not seen in its full November glory.
The HQ is visible, without any suspicious activity outside. Quite unlike what happened when Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne’s house was photographed.
A compendium of geographica
Atlas Obscura, a collection of world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica.
In other words: a cornucopia of material with which to kill time in boring meetings.
At war with SUVs
Brennende Autos documents the arson campaign against luxury cars that seems to be endemic to Berlin.
In the air tonight
An unorthodox map provided by the always interesting Strange Maps blog proves that this summer the arachnoid inhabitants on the planet orbiting Chi Draconis are puzzling over who shot J.R.
The light cone from early eighties encompasses quite a few stars already.
Visualizing the distance
Triptropnyc is a new service that shows how long does it take from place A to place B in New York using the subway.
While a similar service (tied to subterranean transport alone) would be useless in Helsinki, in properfly metro-infested cities like London or Paris this would be very useful indeed.
Metro used to reign over this ecological niche. The curious omission of an iphone version seems to be rectified soon.
Geek Atlas
O’Reilly is about to publish a geek atlas.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a few of the featured sites (no doubt heavily concentrated in California between San Jose and San Francisco): CERN ought to be there on multiple accounts, Linus Torvalds’ crib on Pietarinkatu might be.
Google Maps Typography; visual grep at its very best.
Our Dumb World
Onion’s atlas, a very iconoclastic take on the whole world seems to be increasingly available on the web as a Google Maps-application.
It’s far more enjoyable in book form since countries are not added by the week, they’re already there. Like Finland, which is missing from the web right now.
Tripping through the ruins of Manhattan
Cloverfield, the recent Big Monster Romps Through Gotham-movie, as visualized on a map. Obviously, there are major spoilers involved.
Coolest maps in a long while
Old school paper maps have been badly sidelined by the constant innovation in the electronic realm.
Panamaps brings in multilayering.
Looks nifty in the ads, obviously – but the techology’s worth in real life remains unproven.
Tuesday's links
Do not attempt to locate a hidden message in the selection.
There isn’t any.
- Color-shifting tiles, just the thing for the upgraded bathroom.
- Let no internet meme be uninvited to this party.
- Origami CD case. Probably a bit more difficult than the garden variety crane.
- When did Star Wars jump the shark? What about Star Trek? And bad things in science fiction in general… Certainly the have been named and numbered already. You bet they have.
- Vector Magic, surprisingly effective tool to convert bitmap images into vectorized format.
- Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an …
- A collection of Kindle links.
- Shredz64, a game for the Guitar Hero-controller on the commodore 64. Respect.
Not only the entire universe, but a game as well
The unexpected inclusion of a flight simulator in the newest version of Google Earth seems to be the worst-kept easter egg in a while.
And the program itself, these days equipped with a treasure trove of stellar images from several sources, still ranks amongst the worst time stealers there is.
Some links to brighten a dull day?
Why, certainly!
- One more great map from strangemaps, this one showing which US state matches with which country size- and GDP-wise. Finland = Colorado, which ain’t bad at all.
- Photographs of speed. Some seriously great snaps.
- The end is nigh: multicore programming is hard.
- With candidates like these, the seven new wonders are bound to be boring. Where’s teh internet from the list?
- Been a happy google reader user for quite a while, but with their recent data loss issues, having another RSS-reader might be worthwhile. Or not. Anyway, seems that there’s quite a selection of the tools available.
- Sushi books.
- Editing CSS isn’t exactly the best fun available, a good editor makes it less of a chore.
- Airlinemeals, just the thing to check before a transatlantic crossing in the cattle section of a 757.
- The 65 million dollar pants-case makes it to the court. By the description the session was high on surreal, and fortunately low on understanding the accuser.
[ image nabbed from goopymart's photoset on flickr. ]
Tuesday evening mishmash
No rhyme or reason, just things to poke and click.
- What would the world map look like if the countries were sized according to named criteria.
- Presentation files from O’Reilly’s recent Emerging Telephony 07 are available.
- Economist, the next generation? That’s what Project Red Stripe attempts to be.
- Amazing kids’ book on typographic animals.
- Evolution of blogging.
- Dance Dance Immolation, for those among us that are really confident in their steps.
- Over a million free stock photos at everystockphoto.com.
[ Abba the Hutt image from studio muscle. ]
Mapping Books
Google Maps + Books = showing where the story happens. Brilliant.
Now if only somebody put up a map of the Middle Earth or Westeros in fully zoomable form.
