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April 14 2011
What the Heck is Google Earth Doing to the Bridges of Our Fair Planet?
Perusing Google Earth’s quilt of aerial images is good for hours of stalkerish fun (Find your house! Find your ex’s house!). But every now and then, Google’s geo toy can also bend the fabric of reality—literally:
Something’s wrong with this picture…
Get ready for a bumpy ride!
Artist and programmer Clement Valla has discovered 60 strange, beautiful scenes where Google Earth’s mapping has gone awry, as you may have seen in a post on Boing Boing. So what’s really happening in these pictures? Here’s Valla’s explanation:
The images are the result of mapping a 2-dimensional image onto a 3-dimensional surface. Basically, the satellite images are flat representations in which you only see the topmost object—in this case you see the bridge, and not the landmass or water below the bridge. However, the 3D models in Google Earth contain only the information for the terrain–the landmass or the bottom of the ocean.
When the flat image is projected onto this 3-dimensional surface, the bridges are projected down onto the terrain below the bridge. In other words, the bridge appears to follow the terrain that it actually goes over.
The view is further complicated ...
August 10 2010
Look at the Size of That Chinchilla Poop–to Know How Much It Rained
The bigger the fossilized feces the more ancient rain. A team of paleontologists has uncovered this apparent correlation during a study of chinchilla scat at nine sites in South America’s Atacama Desert.
Claudio Latorre Hidalgo of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago presented his findings on this rainfall metric at a talk held yesterday during the ongoing American Geophysical Union’s Meeting of the Americas. Science News, where we found the story, reports that Latorre Hidaglo looked at fossilized feces from middens–shared rodent poop piles that contain “fecal pellets cemented together by crystallized urine.”
Latorre Hidaglo’s team carbon dated organic bits from the largest twenty percent of the chinchilla pellets (so as to exclude pellets from rodent youth). Given information on rainfall from other sources, they correlated the larger feces with periods of greater rainfall. According to Science News, Latorre Hidaglo suggests that the more rain, the better the environment to support bigger chinchillas; the bigger the chinchillas, the bigger the chinchilla poop. The poop test, the researchers say, may provide a way to estimate past rainfall when other tests aren’t available.
The American Geophysical Union talk announcement advises researchers to keep digging into the middens for more information:
A correlation between the size of rodent droppings and rainfall quantities is enabling researchers to establish a new paleoclimate record. Plus, a study of the contents of middens accumulated long ago by rodents offers further insights into the Atacama’s past.
Related content:
Discoblog: Is Muskrat Poop the Next Penicillin?
Discoblog: Archeologists Find the Darnedest Things Digging Around in Hyena Poop
Discoblog: To Maintain Clean Nests, Social Insects Hold in Poop for a Very Long Time
Discoblog: Whale Shark Poops on Camera; Scientists Rejoice
Image: flickr / nosha
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