Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

A wonderful piece on the ever excellent Google Sightseeing blog, looking at using trees to write words on the landscape.

Arboreal sign-writers agree that uppercase lettering is a no-brainer, as legibility is obviously impaired due to the decrease in the letter size… Here in Bismarck, North Dakota, the typographer has decided on a Grotesque sans serif face, not dissimilar to URW Grotesk Extra Light Condensed, and has chosen to set it at 261,354 point (approx.)

"261,354 point?" I hear you ask.

That's nothing!

It also points out a forest's worth of 2,592,000 point text in Texas...

NASA's World Wind 3D mapping tool (like Google Earth on steroids) now goes where only 12 men have been before: the moon.

"We have just digested the best of the Clementine images, so we can now deliver the moon at 66 feet (20 meters) of resolution," said Patrick Hogan, manager of the World Wind Project Office at NASA Ames. "This is a first. No one has ever explored our moon in the 3-D interactive environment that World Wind creates," noted Hogan.

Launched in early 1994, Clementine took 1.8 million pictures of the lunar surface during a two-month orbit of the moon. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and NASA jointly sponsored the Deep Space Program Science Experiment that included the Clementine spacecraft. Its principal objective was to 'space-qualify' lightweight imaging sensors and component technologies for the next generation of Department of Defense spacecraft.

w00t!

There are email mailing lists that dare not speak their name. Or at least not unless you know that the person you're talking to knows about it.

One in particular is full of alumni from a certain Silicon Valley company, and it's interesting how many people we meet are on that list. I've even heard stories of people only realising who the other was when they when a list thread came up in conversation. "Oh, you're X! Ah..."

Is it something about companies that their employees believed in that lends itself to coherent post-employment communities?

Only one of my ex-employers has built such a community - and it's something to say that the mailing lists are soon about to rival the now-defunct company for longevity! It was a company that prided itself on its employee community, with Chief Morale Officers in each office, and regular social events (then, again the way we worked there, our fellow employees were our only social life!).

Just noodling...

...digital cameras that are on when you flip the switch.

A big batch in for us to review, and they all have one thing in common: they're ready to go as soon as you power them up.

I never understood why I couldn't just turn it on and take photographs. After all, my film cameras could...

So why did we wait so long?

Getting my Friday Cat Blogging in a little early with this shot of Bentham - taken while experimenting with Super Macro mode on a Fuji Finepix 9500.

Nice camera, and a cat that didn't mind posing (unlike the rest of the mogs...).