Feb 152011
 

Central Park mapCentral Park Nature effectively maps the huge park, but there’s no online version at all. And lugging the five foot long physical copy around in the park to hunt for the different species of trees is on the impractical side.

The map would make a nice keepsake from a hike through the park, but at least the website doesn’t indicate it being available anywhere else but the webstore.

Aug 032010
 

Earth with no axial spinInstead 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.

May 032010
 

Gowalla logoGowalla 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).