The Sinister Vision Of Street View
9eyes is one of the best collections of Google Street View screenshots, providing a haunting glimpse of the world we live in, culled from all seven continents and presented without context. Are all of these real? Some of the strangest entries can be confirmed as legitimate.
Google Shoot View
The whole world as a first-person shooter game. It’s down at the moment due to a the kibosh from Google, but Google Shoot View allows you to traverse Google Street View will holding an assault rifle, and to fire upon anything (to no effect). It’s quite existentially disturbing. Perhaps, visit your childhood home and unload a few rounds, to symbolize releasing and moving on from the burdens of the past:
Travel Back In Time With Yahoo! Maps
Long-term decay on the internet can be a fascinating thing. Google Maps’ not-quite-as-popular sister site Yahoo! Maps hasn’t updated some of its street images since the nineties, giving you the ability to virtually explore a pre-millennial London which some people prefer to the city today, Londonist writes:
Remember the days when Arsenal still played at Highbury? Those halcyon times when Heathrow was content with four terminals, when you could catch a train to Paris from Waterloo, and when Westfield was, if you had to guess, the latest boyband off of that new Popstars show on ITV.
In Yahoo! Maps, London is stuck in a new-Millennial timewarp. The satellite view still shows the old Wembley Stadium, complete with twin towers. Demolition of the landmark was completed in 2003, but hasn’t even started here. Over at St Pancras, work on the mammoth new Eurostar terminal has barely begun, while Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is a giant building site.…
A Continent Made Of Plastics
Taken from a 1940 issue of Fortune, a rendering of a map of an imaginary future continent, ‘Synthetica’, composed of synthetic materials and plastic debris. This is our magical future. Via Strange Maps:
“On this broad but synthetic continent of plastics, the countries march right out of the natural world – that wild area of firs and rubber plantations, upper left – into the illimitable world of the molecule. It’s a world boxed only by the cardinal points of the chemical compass – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Rayon is a plastic island off the Cellulose coast, with a glittering night life.”
Google Earth Begins Mapping Amazon Rainforest
Photo: Alex Guerrero (CC)
Not sure if ’street view’ is the right term for it, but Google has begun mapping the Amazon much like it does streets in cities and towns. Via The Australian:
Two women washed clothes in the dark water of the Rio Negro as a boat glided past with a camera-laden Google tricycle strapped to the roof, destined to give the world a window into the Amazon rainforest.
A “trike” typically used to capture street scenes for Google’s free online mapping service launched last Thursday from the village of Tumbira in a first-ever project to let web users virtually explore the world’s largest river, its wildlife and its communities.
The project was the brainchild of Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), which two years ago went to Google Earth with a vision of turning “Street View” into a river view in the lush and precious Amazon Basin.
[Continues at The Australian]
…
Fireflies: iPhone Movement Across Europe
Created by Crowdflow, a visualization of the movement of 880 iPhones across Europe during the month of April, 2011, made from the phones’ location data. In the dystopian future, a thousand video feeds like this one will flicker across a wall of screens in Big Brother’s central surveillance facility:
DARPA Creates Interactive 3-D Holographic Map Table
A 2D Representation of UPSD's 3D Image. Source: DARPA
Popular Science reports via DARPA:
Long gone are the days of pushing plastic armies around hand-drawn maps. Today’s military planners deserve technology of the future, and that means nothing less than 3-D holograms will do. Luckily, we have DARPA, ever-ready to step in with a solution. The Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD) allows up to 20 participants to simultaneously view and manipulate the 360-degree, 3-D image on the table, without having to wear 3-D glasses.
The display can be expanded to as large as six feet, and has a visual depth of up to 12 inches. UPSD is also interactive – battle planners can freeze, rotate and zoom in on the images. They can also print out two-dimensional representations of the 3-D data (seen above) that troops can carry with them on their missions.
Zebra Imaging won the contract to create the technology for UPSD, and…
This Is What Global Alcohol Consumption Looks Like (Map)
Who knew? Moldovans are the heaviest drinkers in the world, downing more than 18 liters/person every year. And the United States is well behind Europe, with most Europeans drinking nearly double as much as Americans.
So you’re not #1 in this respect, USA. Americans, what are you going to do about this? Via the Economist:
Another “fun” fact: Moonshine accounts for almost 30% of the world’s drinking…
World Climate Change Vulnerability Map
Maplecroft, a “global risks advisory firm,” has just released a world map for 2011 that shows the risk from climate change borne around the world. (Dark green/blue areas are most vulnerable.) The calculation is based on both the odds of sea-level-rise/natural disasters, and the ability of local authorities to deal with those issues. The countries least likely to suffer due to climate change are those in Scandinavia, while the United States is graded as “medium risk”…although things look pretty calm out in Idaho, at least.
Mapping Stereotypes
UK-based graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov has created a fun set of maps revealing what he terms “the geography of prejudice.” Just one example is shown below, but a visit to his site reveals many more.
Europe According to the United States of America
How Much Does Weed Cost In Your State?
Price Of Weed gives you approximations of the cost of an ounce of marijuana in every U.S. state, based on user-submitted information on local pot purchases. Where is pot most expensive? In a handful of Southern and Midwestern states, topped off by Iowa ($465/high-quality-oz.),Tennessee ($464), and Louisiana ($463). And really, what else is there to even do in Iowa?
Secret Caves of the Lizard People
So now we know where David Icke got his reptilian conspiracy concept! From the wonderful world of Strange Maps:
This map is an essential ingredient of a story that has ‘Indiana Jones’ written all over it: secret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles.
Below are two extracts from the LA Times of 29 January 1934, in the first of which reporter Jean Bosquet details the incredible story of G. Warren Shufelt, a mining engineer, who had been told of the underground city and its treasures by a wise old Indian, had consequently located it via ‘radio X-ray’ and was currently sinking shafts into the ground to reach it.
The second extract explains the whereabouts of the putative underground city on the map, and provides the legends for a few photos showing…
Mystery of Argleton, the ‘Google’ Town That Only Exists Online
Rebeccal Lefort reports in the Telegraph:
Argleton, a ‘phantom town’ in Lancashire [England] that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn’t actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.
The town appears on Google Maps in the middle of fields close to the M58 motorway, just south of Ormskirk. Its ‘presence’ means that online businesses that use data from the software have detected it and automatically treated it as a real town in the L39 postcode area.
An internet search for the town now brings up a series of home, job and dating listings for people and places “in Argleton”, as well as websites which help people find its nearest chiropractor and even plan jogging or hiking routes through it. The businesses, people and services listed are real, but are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode area.
Google and the company that supplies its mapping data are unable to explain the presence of…
