This was August 2007 | « July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
DinnerTV: Microblogging
Posted on Friday, August 31, 2007
The video (June07, Amsterdam, 49:40) and the corresponding slides.
Google Earth and Google Sky Currently Don't Connect
Posted on Friday, August 31, 2007
Currently..? Above screendump shows a response by Googler ManoM on the KML Developer pages which caught my eye while doing my weekly checkup on new discussions and topics. Still no time to do a proper scope of all the new stuff that came out with kml2.2 and Google Earth 4.2 but this provides an interesting lead when I'll find that time.
Banking the Internet
Posted on Friday, August 31, 2007
Google in the economist tells us that Google's rapid ascent and its role in the market more resembles a bank than Microsoft (via), while O'Reilly Radar talks about infovis and similarities between web2.0 and financial markets. In essence, a quick friday afternoon post.
YES2 Launch Getting Closer
Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007
More at the YES2 blog and ESA's YES2 website.
Art2.0?
Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007
Nice how the EPFL lab below uses above image of Magritte for their lab (aptly named 'pic home.bmp').
NASA2.0 & OBE
Posted on Saturday, August 25, 2007
Another good move by NASA: NASA partners with Internet Archive to put space archives online. More over at CNET NEWS. Meanwhile, in Lausanne, a team of researchers recreated an Out-of-Body Experience in the lab...sweet.
Google Turns To The Sky
Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2007
If you haven't heard about Google Sky yet, well, than you're not reading Google LatLon, Google Research blog, the Official Google Blog (that's a lot of Googleblogs...), Google Earth Blog, OgleEarth, BBC NEWS and all the rest of the Blogosphere which has found their way to Google Sky. I'm a bit short on time so I'll just let the others do the first scoop of its features. I plan to come back with some personal insights when I find a chance to spent a good few hours with it. Diving in for the first time, above views I found quite intruiging as a universe kind of equivalent to the patchy Earth that is Google's Earth.
User Generated Content Generator, aka a human being
Posted on Monday, August 13, 2007
Talking to a friend here in Amsterdam who is in the online video business (MyVidayo), he points me to a website with the term 'User Generated Content Generator' (click My Media Stream)...what is that all about? Recursion? Abstraction? Web3.0? Agents? Meanwhile, Tim O'Reilly posts an insightful list of quotes.
Where Fiction Meets Fact
Posted on Sunday, August 12, 2007
It gets even better with the Earth Polar Lander Mission (earlier post), cause it now turns out above image I originally took from this Guardian article (and which they on their turn took from Reuters) is in fact from a scene appearing in Titanic...yep, the movie ;) It was only discovered after a 13 year old kid told a local newspaper about the similarity with a scene in Titanic:
Last week when papers around the globe ran a story about Russia planting its flag on the North Pole, many also ran Reuters-supplied images purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the North Pole seabed. As it turns out, those images were actually stills from James Cameron’s 1997 movie Titanic. A 13-year-old boy called Reuters out when he contacted his local newspaper to tell them that the photo looked identical to an image of two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that appeared in one of Titanic’s wreckage scenes.
Reuters has since apologized and conceded that it borrowed “the images from Russian state television channel RTR and wrongly captioned them as file footage originating from the Arctic,” according to the Guardian. “RTR had also used the footage to illustrate stories about the North Pole expedition, but it is thought as library footage, and it never claimed it was actually of the flag-planting.” (via, and more indepth at the Guardian (subscription)
Wow, that would be like pluggin' scences from what...2001 or Mission to Mars into official ESA or NASA mission coverage...beautiful!
Signs of Singularity: The Floraweb Is Coming
Posted on Friday, August 10, 2007
Are you ready for the Floraweb? Then watch below video ;) (via O'Reilly Radar):
Earth Polar Lander mission
Posted on Thursday, August 9, 2007
Who'd expected that "exploration" would be taking place so close to home? I know its late in coming, but I just gotta blog/archive this for the shear resemblance of the undertaking to the 'traditional' space paradigm. Just the images are a brilliant PR stunt. Reminds me of the film 'The Wild Blue Yonder' by Werner Herzog.
The Future is Progress, Not a Destination
Posted on Thursday, August 9, 2007
Just got word from my collegue Erik van der Heide over at Delta-Utec that the video of the Foton-M1 launch failure (oct 2002) has been uploaded to Youtube (see below). Don't you just love web2.0 ;) Lets hope Foton-M3 carrying YES2 to orbit has a better faith a month from now.
SciFoo
Posted on Thursday, August 9, 2007
Update from Duncan Hull (keep me posted Duncan!):
There is talk of EuroFoo, probably to be held in Cambridge. There will also be "bar camps" again, in Cambridge and soon in Manchester.
Man, I wish they'd bring SciFoo over to Europe, how cool is this ? To get a taste, have a look at this Flickr series ! Maybe a SpaceFoo? Probably a bit too exciting for ESA, but ISU perhaps?
User Generated Jobs
Posted on Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Google Blogoscoped drives home the point of increasing online behaviour in the real world (earlier post) by describing the hypothetical 2030 Google Robot FAQ's. A nice read ;) Meanwhile, in 2007, Google has on offer for you the role of Business Referral Representative.
NASA and Microsoft: Photosynth Exploration
Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007
Just in (and spreading on the Internet like a wildfire, like here, here, here and even here): NASA & Microsoft collaborate by making available a Photosynth environment of the Shuttle launch pad at the Cape. Beautiful job!! (its only viewable on XP SP2 or Vista, but for Mac users there is at least a video to see what they are missing ;)
I remember posting a remark on the Photosynth website once suggesting they'd make a Photosynth environment of all Earth photos taken from space, but I wonder whether that is actually feasible given de lack of depth of these images and the changing weather patterns.
Btw, in case you're interested, here's a 58min GoogleVideo going into some of the details of a tool like Photosynth, except this one is not Photosynth but Photosketch (via).
DinnerTV: Vint Cerf on the architecture of the coming Geoweb
Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007
Thought provoking videos have come from the Geoweb2007 conference in Vancouver end of July (via). My shortlist:
Vint Cerf (a must-see)
Jack Dangermond (fresh view for me)
Michael Jones (always interesting)
I was especially struck by the conceptual insights of Vint Cerf where it comes to the architectural design of something as intangible as the virtual Geoweb. And of course his opening remarks to keep the Geoweb conceptually open for the eventual SolarSystemweb are music to my ears ;) Quote of the day comes from Michael Jones:
A map has become a searchable information landscape
DinnerTV: Using Google Earth for Near Real Time Natural Hazard...
Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007
Embedded below is an interesting video from Feb'07 about using Google Earth in the Earth sciences. Also here, I see the idea of "Real-life bots mapping the physical world" apply (earlier post), but in this case its not humans but satellites so the scale at which the mapping is done is quite a different one. The video is part of the indispensable Google Tech Talks, with this one unfortunately hosted on Youtube. I kinda liked Googlevideo better for these kinds of 30+ minute videos because of the option to download the entire video file to disk for later viewing in the stand alone player.
Dry Run on Earth
Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007
The NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group is using Google Earth as part of the communication of their robotic field test up in the Arctic region of Canada:
From July 10 through August 3, 2007, the Intelligent Robotics Group is conducting a robotic field test in Haughton Crater (Devon Island, Canada). Two NASA Ames K10 rovers, "Red" and "Black", will be used to perform surveys of several simulated lunar outpost sites, including a roughly 700m x 700m region called "Drill Hill." The rovers will carry ground penetrating radar to map subsurface structure and a 3D scanning laser to map terrain topography.For all I know it could be the real thing taking place on the Moon right now. And I just read that NASA on a slow month has some 4 million unique visitors to its portal...from the US alone.
RocketCam
Posted on Friday, August 3, 2007
Another interesting 10-year anniversary: RocketCam (SpaceDaily post). Brilliant stuff (check this video!). Around the same time as Mars Pathfinder (earlier post), didn't know, but both firsts got me started on the space explo - cyberspace thing. Its the media stupid! Funny how nowadays everybody is zooming into the Earth from space, while these fragile rockets are trying to escape it...
Google NASA co-op update
Posted on Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Google Earth CTO Michael Jones gives a brief update on the Google-NASA co-op in this article 'Geospatial Democracy' (30th July 07):
Google and NASA have entered a partnership to make NASA’s information available on the Internet. How is the work progressing?JONES: There are technical challenges and logistical challenges. NASA is a federal agency with federal employees, and just the style of management is a little bit different than Google. It’s not better or worse. NASA is more like a real company, and we’re more like a bunch of graduate students.
We spent a honeymoon period just trying to figure out the tens of thousands of kinds of data that NASA has. Each of their researchers feels their data is the most important data in all of mankind. But which of that data is the most important? So we’ve had a lot of juried, refereed internal NASA panels deciding that historic pictures of the moon might be good, but the temperature of Pluto might not be.
So we’re working on that, and then we were working together on getting the data organized and marshaled so that it could be rolled out on Google Earth.
The future is process, not a destination
Bruce Sterling
Everything is ultimately becoming information technology
Ray Kurzweil
Data is the Intel inside
Tim O'Reilly
There is only one machine and the web is its OS
Kevin Kelly
The medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan