LIDAR is essentially radar or sonar with [freakin'] lasers, plus GPS. A plane with a LIDAR unit can scan the ground below and get really accurate high-resolution 3D maps of the terrain and buildings. You can spot old roads and even trails in forest, buried volcanic craters, odd hidden geological features, map wetland, measure tree [...]
Jerry’s Map from Jerry Gretzinger on Vimeo. Chance Map art project, endless and fascinating. Jerry’s Blog is here: http://jerrysmap.blogspot.com/
Nothing stirs more excitement than the word “Amtrak,” but if you’ve be wondering where that train you’re waiting for is and remembering the handy diagrams the dispatchers had in “The Taking of Pelham 123″ and “Runaway Train” then this is for you. The site is not pretty, but it works far better than Amtrak’s own [...]
The quake in Japan was detectable in the Cascade volcanoes earth monitors. Did you know that part of Japan is in the North American tectonic plate?
Museum of the Phantom City is a free iPhone app that catalogs and maps the unrealized grand visions people have had for New York City in the past 100 years. Put another way: Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder designed the Phantom City iPhone app to “transform the city into a living museum of speculative proposals [...]
Openstreetmap.org is an open, user-created map of the world. There are already people competing to make their city the most detailed. My favorite quote from the founder: “With OpenStreetMap it is not a case of whether Jesus did or did not exist. The fact is there are either 25 exits off Highway 101 or there [...]
Why can’t they make the maps on the plane interactive? I don’t care about the global view or the temperature and local time where I’m headed: I just want to look at the closest most detailed map they have.
Play along from home (hopefully not while nursing oinky sniffles) with this Google Maps Swine Flu Map. View 2009 Swine Flu (H1N1) Outbreak Map in a larger map Note that for some reason this map defaults to a zoomed Pacific Ocean–click out about halfway to see the map properly.