A Bear's-Eye View of Yellowstone

"For the first time, trek into the wild backcountry of America's first national park and see what it looks like from a bear's point of view."

"Special cameras were attached to the tracking collars of two grizzlies and two black bears in Yellowstone. Massive and hungry, these bears prowl for food and confront danger along the way. It's a matter of life and death for all of them. Tag along as National Geographic gives you an unprecedented window into some of the most fearsome predators on Earth. And watch as these bears act as tour guides through their secret world, with little human intervention."

View National Geographic video

Data USA Attempts to Make Government Data Understandable

Data USA, a project by the M.I.T. Media Lab and Deloitte, is free to use. According to their site:

"Data USA puts public US Government data in your hands. Instead of searching through multiple data sources that are often incomplete and difficult to access, you can simply point to Data USA to answer your questions. Data USA provides an open, easy-to-use platform that turns data into knowledge. It allows millions of people to conduct their own analyses and create their own stories about America – its people, places, industries, skill sets and educational institutions. Ultimately, accelerating society’s ability to learn and better understand itself."

Visit Data USA

Stuff in Space

Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.

The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.

The creator of this site is James Yoder; He's an alumnus of FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 624 and an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.

Visit this site. 

Smarty Pins

Do you like maps, love trivia, and you know where most cities are on the map, then you're going to love Google's new SmartyPins game. This map-trivia game runs on the Google Maps platform and allows you to spend 1,000 miles trying to mark the correct location to each question asked.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A Model of the Solar System

Artist and designer Josh Worth wrote on his blog:

"I was talking about the planets with my 5-year-old daughter the other day. I was trying to explain how taking a summer vacation to Mars in the future will be a much bigger undertaking than a trip to Palm Springs (though equally as hot). I kept trying to describe the distance using metaphors like “if the earth was the size of a golf ball, then Mars would be across the soccer field” etc., but I realized I didn’t really know much about these distances, besides the fact that they were really large and hard to understand. Pictures in books, planetarium models, even telescopes are pretty misleading when it comes to judging just how big the universe can be. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring all the emptiness?

So I thought I would see if a computer screen could help make a map of a solar system that’s a bit more accurate (while teaching myself a few things about javascript, SVGs and viewports along the way). Not that pixels are any better at representing scale than golfballs, but they’re our main way of interpreting most information these days, so why not the solar system?"

Click here to visit some of the big spaces out in space and be prepared to scroll!

Google Street View World

Google™ Street View refers to panoramic 360° images taken by a special camera mounted on various types of vehicles. These images are view-able via Google Maps™, Google Earth™ and custom applications and websites developed using the Google™ Street View Image API. Google Street View started capturing images a way back in 2007. Since then, Google™ Street View has captured images from over 56 countries and hundreds of attractions ranging from walking trails to theme parks, museums to zoos, and everything in between.

Google™ Street View World endeavors to capture some of the more “interesting”, funny, and crazy situations passed by via the Google™ Street View project.

 View Source

I'm Just Walkin'

In 2010, Matt Green, walked across the United States from Rockaway Beach, Queens, to Rockaway Beach, Ore. The journey took five months, during which he averaged 20 miles a day. Now he's doing a new walk. He's walking every street in New York City. "This is the counterpoint to my walk across the US. Instead of seeing a million places for just a minute each, I'm going to spend a million minutes exploring just one place. By the time I finish walking every block of every street in all five boroughs, I'll have traveled about 8000 miles on foot — all within a single city."

View Just Walkin'

The Nine Eyes of Google

Artist Jon Rafman created this compelling collection of images from Google Map's massive Street View project to photograph the world's highways and streets. Scroll through the fascinating photos or click the 9-camera image on top to read Rafman's essay about the project.

The artist explains: "Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world. Every ten to twenty meters, the nine cameras automatically capture whatever moves through their frame. Computer software stitches the photos together to create panoramic images. To prevent identification of individuals and vehicles, faces and license plates are blurred."


View Jon Rafman's Project

A9.com Maps and Block View Images

Amazon.com has a search-engine subsidiary called A9.com. This site offers street-level photographs so travelers can see pictures of the buildings they're planning to visit and landmarks along the way (the photo above is 6th St. and Congress in Austin,TX). The photos are linked to maps from MapQuest. There are photographic images of many streets of the 24 U.S. cities they have done so far.

Check out one of the U.S. cities at: A9.com Maps

Crace Collection of Maps of London

"This is the essential guide through the history of London: some 1200 printed and hand-drawn maps charting the development of the city and its immediate vicinity from around 1570 to 1860. The maps were collected, mainly during the first half of the nineteenth century, by the fashionable society designer, Frederick Crace.."

Crace Collection of Maps of London

Mappr! Where It's At.

"Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found on Flickr, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.

Mappr takes advantage of the cornucopia of descriptive information provided by Flickr's users to organize their photos. Flickr's admirable policy of openness with its data provides a way to anticipate and envision a future where cheaply-available GPS technology generates this placement as a matter of course. There's no reason to wait for this technology to become common; by mapping the millions of photos that Flickr makes available, we can start looking at its broad scale potential now."

Mappr! Where It's At.

World Sunlight Map

"The World Sunlight Map provides a computer-generated approximation of what the earth currently looks like. While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us."

World Sunlight Map

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

"The sport where YOU are the search engine. A GPS device and a hunger for adventure are all you need for high tech treasure hunting. Here you can find the latest caches in this fun and exciting sport. Geocaches can now be found in over 200 countries!

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache."

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

A Map of Languages in the U.S.

"The Modern Language Association Language Map is intended for use by students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning about the linguistic and cultural composition of the United States. The MLA Language Map uses data from the 2000 United States census to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages and seven groups of less commonly spoken languages in the United States. The census data were based on responses to the question, 'Does this person speak a language other than English at home?' The Language Map illustrates the concentration of language speakers in zip codes and counties. The Data Center provides actual numbers and percentages of speakers."

MLA Language Map: A Map of Languages in the United States

Virtually "Fly" over the entire US

"Simply enter an address, and TerraFly will put you at the controls of a bird's view aerial imagery to explore your digital earth."

Visit: TerraFly