The Earth Is Square

That is a link that catches your attention at CNN: Google Earth guru missing off California coast.

Jim Grey has been missing since Sunday and one of the key points in that CNN article is:

helped develop Google Earth technology

I hope they find him all well.

James has a better writeup.. apparently CNN is full of dodo in regards to GE facts

want to be an alpha tester for World Wind Java? Then head over here and tell me WHY I should pick you to sent to the NASA Project Manager as a choice for the closed alpha testing.

This is for MAJOR bug hunting, so would prefer people that have Java development experience. I will pick 10 to 15 people to sent up the line to have the 10 or so picked from for testing. You have to post a reason WHY you should be picked though.

Once the Alpha bug hunt is done, the "everyone can try" betas will come out.

Most people already know that World Wind's elevation data is far better than what Google Earth uses. What most people don't know is that you can use your own elevation data as well, it is just not that easy to do.

As you can see in this post on the World Wind forum:

... using more or less the same method than for the images
Our company developped its own set of tools to process the DTM and integrate it in WW.

On this page you can see some examples of GE terrain data, World Wind terrain data and the user added terrain data.

Here is an example of a location in GE:

Here is the same site in WW:

And with user processed high resolution terrain:

Planetgs: As most everyone knows; their favorite addiction, other than using Manifold, is back on-line in a lite version.

Image Blurring: But the more interesting article I found on slashdot is about more blured locations in Google Earth.  Now, is it Google blurring or the provider of the imagery?  And more to the point.. does it really matter?  (Blurring or blocking something out will bring MORE attention to that point than if it was just left alone.)

Well, one way to find out who is doing it, is to download the imagery and look at it.

In looking at the World Wind's ZoomIt! page, I saw that Mass is covered in 2003 dataset.  And the imagery is NOT censored in 2003.  See here:

Now, this image is different from what is shown on the Google Maps page.  So I am guessing they have the 2005 dataset instead of the 2003 imagery.  So, now to download and look at 2005 and see if there is a blur there.

This is the MassGIS 2005 dataset imagery, and it is censored there.  So, we can take Google off the hook in this case.

And if you want to see what the building looks like, just use the 2003 imagery.

guilhem on the World Wind forum has put out a plug-in he is developing to have the 3DConnexion's Space Navigator control the World Wind camera.

I don't have a Space Navigator so I am not sure how well it works.. so maybe someone that has one can give this plug-in a try.

This plug-in should be considered unstable still, but any debug info would help the author greatly.  You can see his forum post and the download link for the plug-in here. You will also need World Wind 1.4 RC5, it should work on older RC's as well.

I came across this on wikipedia... I don't think I have come across a worse map than this one.

It looks like it was done in MSPaint... Just hurts the eyes to even look at it.

Anyone come across anything worse than this they want to share?