About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
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 ...
February 02 2011
Google’s ‘Bing Sting’ Suggests Microsoft’s Search Engine Plays Dirty
Following a spy-novelesque stunt dubbed the Bing Sting, Google has denounced Microsoft for stealing its search results–and Bing’s reaction is nothing short of ambiguous.
Google reportedly got suspicious after it found that Bing’s search results replicated misspelled words from its own results, so the company decided to run a test by linking fake search results to nonsense search terms–and Bing took the bate.
Quoting Google software engineer Amit Singhal, the BBC reports:
“A search for ‘hiybbprqug’ on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page,” he said…. “We noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency,” he went on.
Bing’s reaction to the Google accusation is quite ambiguous: it refutes Google’s words at times, but seems to make excuses for itself at others. From the BBC:
Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: “We do not copy Google’s search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search ...
January 24 2011
Android… in… Space! A Smartphone Prepares for Blast-Off
Cell phones will soon make a giant leap for mankind–right into outer space. In the coming year, British engineers from Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) plan to send a cell phone into orbit to test whether cell phones are tough enough to withstand outer space, and whether they’re powerful enough to control satellites. As the BBC reports:
“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” said SSTL project manager Shaun Kenyon…. “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory…. We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is,” Mr Kenyon explained.
The jury’s still out as to what cell phone model will be the world’s first orbital smartphone–but the scientists have already decided to pick one that uses Google’s Android operating system. That software is open source, allowing the engineers to tweak the phone’s functions. Not every phone, after all, comes off the shelf with the ability to navigate a nearly 12-inch-long, GPS-equipped,
January 11 2011
Google’s First Science Fair Seeks Volcano-Builders From Around the World
Science geek teens of the world: Google wants to see what you can do.
This morning, the company announced its first worldwide science fair for students between the ages of 13 and 18. Students can participate from anywhere by posting a write-up of their project on the Internet (Google got one high school senior from Oregon to create an example). In its announcement, Google says it hopes this project will encourage talented young scientists to pursue their ideas:
In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered?
This science fair sounds fancier than your average high school competition–prizes include a trip to the Galapagos and a jaunt to the physics mecca, CERN. ...
October 21 2010
Coming Soon to the Internets: Digitized Dead Sea Scrolls
In a great convergence of old and new, Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority are teaming up to digitize the millennia-old Dead Sea Scrolls.
The scrolls are the oldest known surviving biblical texts, created between 150 BC and 79 AD. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and include nearly every book of the Old Testament (except the Book of Esther), and several other religious texts including the Gospel of Judas.
The scrolls have been tightly guarded because of their delicate nature. Only two scholars are allowed to study the scrolls at a time, which are held in a room where temperature, light, and humidity are all carefully controlled. Public access to the writings will change how they are studied, Rob Enderle told Computer World:
“This is information few have ever seen and a piece of our oldest written history,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “What makes this epic is that it could be important for generations of religious scholars. This is a project that could have an impact on thousands of years in the future. There are few projects that have that kind of life expectancy.”
As a part of the digitization, the scans will be posted online, and will have accompanying transcription, translations, and bibliography, the press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority said:
…upload not only all of the digitized Scrolls images but also additional data online that will allow users to perform meaningful searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats, which will result in unprecedented scholarly and popular access to the Scrolls and related research and scholarship and should lead to new insights into the world of the Scrolls.
The scans are being done at the highest possible resolution; the picture quality will be equivalent to actually looking at the scrolls, which will help keep the delicate papyrus and parchment from future handling. The scrolls were previously imaged in infrared light (in the 1950s), but the current digitization will be done using light of many spectra, which the press release said may yield new insights:
The technology will also help rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years; with the help of infra-red light and wavelengths beyond, these writings will be brought “back to life”, facilitating new possibilities in Dead Sea Scrolls research.
The project isn’t just a “plug and chug” exercise. The 900 scrolls have been fragmented into about 3,000 pieces, so the technicians won’t just be sliding papers into a scanner. As Pnina Shor, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls project manager, told National Geographic:
“You hear ’scrolls’ and you think of something big and rolled up. But we have thousands and thousands of fragments that are some 2,000 years old. A lot of this work is puzzle work, scholars piecing things together”—both physically and philosophically. “Now hopefully we will have a lot of new readings” by scholars worldwide who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to scrutinize the Dead Sea Scrolls in detail, said Shor.
The imaging will begin in early 2011 and the first images will hopefully be available within six months.
Related content:
Discoblog: World’s Oldest Bible, Now Available on Your Laptop
Discoblog: The Science of Virgin Birth
Discoblog: Retracted Study: Biblical Woman Had Flu, Not Demonic Possession
Bad Astronomy: Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws?
DISCOVER: In Search of John the Baptist
Image: IAA
October 01 2010
Google Street View Goes to Antarctica, Brings Maps to the Penguins
Google’s expansion of its Street View project to all seven continents has the sweet reward of allowing you to visit Antarctica while sitting on your couch in your leopard-print snuggie. (They also filled in the holes of Ireland and Brazil, but much as we love those countries, Antarctica is still more exciting.)
Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, told The Guardian that this feat was “hugely significant” to the Goog:
“One of the challenges we wanted to crack is to go to these remote places, and one of geo team at Google went to Antarctica so he took some kit and took some imagery. It’s called Street View, but there aren’t many streets in Antarctica,” he said. “This allows people to understand the contrast between New York Times Square and being on the edge of a glacier looking at penguins.”
It’s also making the chinstrap penguins and red-parka’d researchers that inhabit the island the victims of some pretty intense privacy invasion. The images were shot in Half Moon Island, a part of the South Shetland Island chain in the northern most part of the continent, under South America.
You can explore the colony and other views of the earth on Google’s Street View gallery. The Antarctica views were shot by Google’s own Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering, who carried around a camera while visiting the area with his wife. He announced the new features in a blog post, saying:
We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas.
Related content:
Discoblog: Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
Discoblog: Pedestrian-Removing Software Makes for a Creepy Google Streetview
80beats: Researchers Use Feather “Fingerprints” to Track Penguins
Not Exactly Rocket Science: A fossil penguin gets its colours
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Are emperor penguins marching to extinction?
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: The Coolest Science Experiments in Antarctica (PICS)
Image: Google Maps
September 28 2010
Bicycle Bubble/Monorail Transportation System—Crazy or Genius (or Both)?
A human-powered monorail system called Shweeb won $1 million from Google’s 10^100 innovations contest.
The company that manufactured the Shweeb is one of five to be awarded a total of $10 million from the competition. They will use the money to develop the Shweeb for use as a city commuter transport option.
The Shweeb efficiently uses human power from a rider sitting in the recumbent seat, pedaling the bubble-shaped pod through the air. This vision for public transportation is a little out there, but the Shweeb has some promise, says Gearlog:
Like all truly forward thinking ideas, Shweeb seems completely nuts at first glance. As a tech blogger I’d love nothing more than to mock Google and it’s choice of Shweeb with its poor-man’s take on the Jetsons opening sequence. But the more you read about it, the more Shweeb’s innovative take urban transport makes a whole lot of sense.
The pod gives you your own personal space (literally a personal bubble) while traveling and allows you to choose where you need to stop – without adhering to a timetable, like a subway or bus. The company will soon announce where the first public Shweeb will be built, and it could soon start cropping up in adventure destinations or cities near you, says PopSci:
Shweeb may not be practical for everyone or every city, but for some cities it might make both environmental and fiduciary sense. Compact cities like San Francisco or Boston could have Shweeb lines instead of open-air bus tours, or massive parks like Manhattan’s Central Park could avoid clogging up bike lanes with tourists by sticking them up in the air on a monorail.
The pods at the test track, which also doubles as a $30 adventure ride at Agroventures Park in Rotorua, New Zealand, can travel faster than Lance Armstrong in a bike race, but in use as urban transportation the Shweeb would be limited to around 16mph. The company’s website even claims that the Shweeb is easier than walking:
On firm, flat ground, a 70kg man requires about 100 watts to walk at 5km/h. The power required to move a Shweeb along a rail at 20km/h is only 33 watts. We rest our case!
And even if you get stuck behind a slow-poke, the pods can hook up to each other, and using the combined power of two go faster than either one alone. The website even claims that the pedaling is so leisurely that you can catch up on your email, phone calls, or texting and not even break a sweat.
If you’ve gotten this far in the post, you probably have a bunch of other questions or objections about how there’s no way this thing could work. Shweeb has anticipated many of these (or at least fielded them before) and put some useful info on their FAQ page.
Related content:
Discoblog: Bizarre New Treadmill-Bike Lets Gym Rats See the Outside World
Discover Magazine: Reviews: The Incredibly Strong See-Through Bicycle
Cosmic Variance: Get L.A. Moving
Cosmic Variance: An Easier Way to Get Around
Image: Shweeb
September 09 2010
Science Sing-Alongs: Higg Boson vs Google Periodic Table
If the 2008 Large Hadron Collider rap didn’t appeal to your musical sensibilities, you might try two science songs now making the internets rounds.
The first isn’t really new at all: Joe Sabia has employed Google Instant for a pastiche based on Tom Lehrer’s 1959 Elements Song, which in turn parodied Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 Major General’s Song.
[via Boing Boing]
Returning to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s control center has hosted a sing-along. What’s especially enjoyable about this parody of Flanders and Swann’s The Hippopotamus Song are the physicists working in the background. See twelve second in–when one guy appears to do a face plant onto his desk.
[via The Inverse Square]
Not satisfied? Stay tuned for a hip-hop neuro-rap and Dr. Dre’s forthcoming space-themed album, called The Planets.
Related content:
Discoblog: I Swear: Subatomic Particles Are Singing to Me!
Discoblog: The Mother of all Rube Goldberg Machines!
Discoblog: The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
Discoblog: Higgs Physicists’ Plan for Winning a Nobel Prize, Step 1: Stay Alive
September 03 2010
Ad Depicts Google CEO as the Ice Cream Man From Your Nightmares
Annoyed by Google’s revised stance on “net neutrality“? Pissed off by the company’s power to collect personal data in applications like Buzz (which can show others who you Gmail the most) and Street View (which shows the locations of cars and faceless people)? Worried about the news that a Street View project gone awry mistakenly collected information from the Wi-Fi networks that Google’s mapping vehicles cruised past? The activist group Consumer Watchdog feels your pain. And to spread the anti-Google message further, the group is running the video ad below on a 540 square foot video billboard in Times Square.
The cartoon shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt giving children free ice cream, body-scanning them, and divulging their parents’ secrets. Consumer Watchdog hopes the video will inspire viewers to pressure Congress to make a ‘Do Not Track Me’ list, similar to the existing ‘Do Not Call List.’
As Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog says in a press release:
“We’re satirizing Schmidt in the most highly-trafficked public square in the nation to make the public aware of how out of touch Schmidt and Google are when it comes to our privacy rights…. America needs a ‘Do Not Track Me’ list and Google is Exhibit A in the case for it.”
Questioning Google’s views on privacy, the group cites a statement from Schmidt where he said that children hoping to avoid their internet past might change their names, and an earlier Schmidt interview, where he said:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
For an interesting look on privacy and the internet, check our DISCOVER’s special 30th anniversary issue this October, in which MIT internet and society expert Sherry Turkle questions where we are headed in the next 30 years.
Related content:
Discoblog: Beware! Prolonged Internet Use May Cause Psychotic Episodes
Discoblog: And the Survey Says: Google Is Not Making You Stupid8
0beats: Opinions: What Google and Verizon’s Plan for Net Neutrality Means
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy For “Internet Addiction”
80beats: Have You Consumed Your 34-Gigabytes of Information Today
August 06 2010
Pedestrian-Removing Software Makes for a Creepy Google Streetview
The browser you are currently using does not support the Discover photo galleries. Supported browsers include recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 7 or later), Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.
If you have any questions or feedback, please email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Thank you for reading Discover, and we apologize for the inconvenience.
Tired of the faceless urbanites crowding their Google Street Views, computer scientists aimed to remove the pedestrians entirely. The images above show they succeeded, mostly.
The software was developed by Arturo Flores of the University of California, San Diego; earlier this summer he unveiled (pdf) the proof-of-concept. It’s built off of a previous algorithm developed in 2005 that can pick out pedestrians in urban settings. The new program removes the identified pedestrian and covers the gap using pixels from slightly ahead and slightly behind what appears to be someone walking down the street. But it only works in cities (where tall buildings give a relatively flat backdrop), can create a human smear when the photographed person walked at the same speed as the Google camera, and, one could imagine, has trouble in huge crowds–where neighboring pixel-swapping might result in blurry Frankenhumans.
But otherwise, it leaves a non-distracting, relatively “ghost free” image, a university press release says, that will further protect pedestrian privacy. When it almost succeeds, it gives users a good laugh: a post-apocalyptic cityscape including disembodied feet, ownerless dogs, and floating umbrellas.
Related content:
Discoblog: Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
Discoblog: And the Survey Says: Google Is Not Making You Stupid
Discoblog: My Name Is Topeka, Kansas, but You Can Call Me Google
Discoblog: Tweet Your Prayers, Google Your Ancient Texts
Images: Arturo Flores
June 01 2010
Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
On a midday stroll through Park City, Utah, you decide to turn onto the quaint-sounding Deer Valley Drive. You see this:
If you think you should turn back, you are not the intrepid Lauren Rosenberg. Armed with a Blackberry and Google Maps, she marched on, and could not believe when Patrick Harwood struck her with his car. She is now suing both Harwood and Google.
As CNET reports:
Perhaps some of you might think of Rosenberg as just a perambulating chaser. Yet she and her lawyers reason that Google’s walking directions were “careless, reckless, and negligent providing of unsafe directions.”
But what about Google Maps’ warning to such adventure-seekers? There’s a yellow box that appears whenever you request walking directions using their website: “Walking Direction are in Beta. Use caution–This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”
Apparently this isn’t enough. On Rosenberg’s Blackberry, the route lacked the warning. She feels this entitles her to over $10,000 in medical expenses.
Though GPS victims haven’t won in similar suits, Rosenberg’s turn in court will soon come. Here’s hoping someone drives her to the hearing.
Related content:
DISCOVER: Think Tech A GPS to Augment Your Entire Reality
80beats: Lost in Space: GPS System May Soon Begin Deteriorating
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Google Earth shows that cow and deer herds align like compass needles
Image: Google Maps / Danny Sullivan
May 25 2010
Did Google Pac-Man Destroy Worker Productivity? We’re Unconvinced.
May 05 2010
Video: Google Chrome Is Faster Than a Speeding Potato
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
