I'm sweating blood!

Or it feels like that anyway. I think I'm about to enter my busiest work period ever.

Anyway, for your amusement, check out this time-lapse map of the Middle East imperialism.

The Stone Mountain Punisher

My second attempt at GeoTracking turned out much better. I mapped my usual bike route, with a bit more attention to detail. The addition of waypoints helps a lot.

It's called the Punisher due to the extreme hills on the route.

Check it out

My first try at trackpoints

I'm having problems putting it directly in the blog, but here is the map on a stand alone page. Pretty cool. The missing parts are where I had turned off the gps unit momentarily or put it in a pocket and it lost signal.

Updated Mapping

I finished my Geocoder/Ajax app and now my personal GMap is more fully automated.

Wednesday Rapid Fire

• Yahoo News with Yahoo Maps - I'll give Google 5 days to do this too. HT: Make
• Google Maps with Transparencies - HT: Make


• A glut of flat screen technology - which would be cool.


• Google Maps Walking Distance


• New MS Money


• Mencken
  

  "All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."



• Tom G Palmer has some nice words about Admiral Stockdale, clearly the classiest guy to run for national office in quite some time.


• Yet another review of Freakonomics, this time by James Q Wilson, the authors are on the Charlie Rose program tonight. Money quote
  

  "...quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have trouble enough predicting the past."

GMaps at last

As promised yesterday, here is my first experiment with GMaps.

On the whole, I like the technology. It does a lot of the work for you in terms of plotting and it works off on an external xml file. The only real downside is that it does not use actual address information, only latitude and longitude coordinates. There are a number of free lookup services online, I used GeoCoder.us which worked very well, still it's an extra, probably unnecessary step.

I'll look around and see if there is some automated process out there which does automatic conversions and reports back.

On the whole though, a very good and easy proof of concept.

With no further ado, here My Week So Far

Google Earth is staggering

Google Earth was released today and I'm blown away. Basically it's a free version of their KeyHole software, but with incredible capabilities. Skylines, tilting and foreign cities, it's all just staggering.

Sunday link smorgasbord

• ChicagoCrime.org - a wonderful marriage of Google Maps and publicly available crime stats. Now one can see where the bad neighborhoods really are. Hat Tip: Defense Tech


• Arnold Kling on starting a business instead of going to college.
  


• From one of the Jane Galt Commenters:
  

  "Warning: the author of this piece is completely absent in any training in mathematics, science, or any other discipline involving rigorous thought that might qualify them to form a decent critical opinion. Read with caution."
  

• Very good thoughts over at the Belmont Club, particularly "We live in a strange world where the Beslan story vanishes in weeks while Abu Ghraib lives on for years."
  


• The Daily Pundit's has come up with a very good blogger's kit.

Google Maps just keeps on getting better

Now they have Area 51 from the satellite view.

And in another Defense Tech link, is this article on installing windmills in Guantanamo Bay, which is really cool when you think about it. I suppose we're reaching the point at which some alternative energy sources are actually viable, though that oil prices will stay this high for too long.