Sunday, February 20, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Geography as art

Posted: 19 Feb 2011 09:23 PM PST

Google LatLong: Geography as art

While maps are often considered guides to get from here to there, on the Google Maps and Earth team, we're constantly thinking of innovative ways to express geographic information. From helping you see the world from a street-level perspective with Street View, to enabling you to dive into the Ocean layer in Google Earth, new geographic visualizations are top of mind for the team. With that mapping mindset, Group Product Manager Lior Ron was struck by the abstract landscape paintings he saw at the Sausalito art festival.

Ben Joyce's painting of San Francisco caught his attention: "The color scheme, brush strokes, and the open frame prompted my imagination freely to think about San Francisco and what I love about this city. What a wonderful way of visualizing spaces!"

San Francisco at Night by Ben Joyce

Ben describes his work as Abstract Topophilia: "The affective bond between people and place. The Love of Place," and explains how cities like San Francisco inspire his artwork: "There is great beauty and intrigue in the layout of a city - from your everyday drive to work, to the historical creation of the streets, to your personal relationship with the town."

When Lior shared Ben's work with some teammates, we too were fascinated by the bold color schemes and dramatic visualizations of geographic information, and were thrilled to learn that Ben has consulted Google Earth to create his city artwork. To share these creative visualizations with the team, we invited Ben to show some of his artwork in our team building, with depictions of cities ranging from Florence to Moscow.

Moscow by Ben Joyce

When we first hung up the paintings, we omitted location descriptions and opened a contest for the team: who could identify all of the paintings first? Google Earth Community Program Manager Robin Ziegler identified all of the locations about 30 hours after we started the challenge, and even plotted all of the paintings in Google Earth. Here you can see how Robin aligned Ben's painting of Miami with the corresponding imagery in Google Earth.




Ben's artwork will stay in our team's building for the next three months, and will continue to remind us of the creative potential of geographic information.

Posted by Emily Henderson, Administrative Assistant, Google Maps & Earth
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/02/geography-as-art.html

[G] Explore our U.S. Presidents on a map

Posted: 19 Feb 2011 09:23 PM PST

Google LatLong: Explore our U.S. Presidents on a map


When I was in elementary school, I got two days off every February; one for George Washington and another for Abraham Lincoln. I remember classrooms were usually wallpapered with a potpourri of decorations left over from Valentine's Day and token silhouettes of these two Presidents thumb-tacked to the bulletin board. My teachers would talk about the significance of the holiday during class but with lack of visuals to pique my interest, it was always hard to retain (and fully enjoy!) the information. With that in mind, we're pleased to celebrate the President's Day holiday in the U.S. by letting you go back in time to learn more about our past presidents in a visually fun and interactive way.

We've created a U.S. Presidents Showcase to map the birthplaces of all 44 presidents, and provide details about their presidential terms, using the Google Earth plug-in. You can also see the states that voted during each president's election by clicking on the tours in the left column of the showcase.


Whether you're a history buff or simply curious to learn more about U.S. presidents, we hope you enjoy exploring a little further using Google Earth. In addition to the U.S. Presidents map, educators can use some of our other resources in their classroom to explore more aspects of history. Here are a few ideas:
  • Explore the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and other historical monuments in 3D and have students explain how architecture is used to honor people, concepts and establishments
  • View a 3D model of Valley Forge National Park in Google Earth
  • View a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and map the areas where slavery ended, as well as the areas that were not initially covered by this executive order
  • Discuss the famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the width of the Delaware River
We hope you have fun exploring and learning a little more of the history behind the President's Day holiday. And when you're done, go out and enjoy your day off!

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/02/explore-our-us-presidents-on-map.html

[G] I Have Come From The Land Down Under....

Posted: 19 Feb 2011 10:11 AM PST

Google Open Source Blog: I Have Come From The Land Down Under....



Along with an unintended tan from the Brisbane sun and a serious sense of awe at how large golden silk orb-weavers are, I came home from linux.conf.au (LCA) 2011 with a bunch of new ideas from the plethora of terrific talks at the conference. You can find videos of most of the talks on the conference wiki but I have to call out some of my favorites here.

First and foremost, Vint Cerf, Googler and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols, gave a thoughtful and humorous keynote on where he thinks the internet is going, and what we need to do to get it there. Despite widely held concern around the rapidly decreasing number of available IP addresses, his deeply informed take on the situation was characteristically upbeat.



While Google has released more that 20 million lines of open source code through the years, we're always trying to release more. My colleagues Dan Bentley and Daniel Nadasi gave an extremely useful talk about Make Open Easy (MOE), their program within Google to make the process for Googlers to open source code as fast and easy as possible, and how this methodology might be used by other businesses. They also talked about the challenges a project faces in trying to be useful to both the public and the internal teams that depend on it.



Last but far from least, I was wowed on Thursday by Paul Gardner-Stephen's talk on "The Serval BatPhone: Making Mesh Mobile Telephony Practical, Anywhere, Any Time." Especially in light of recent catastrophic weather events in Australia, the potential to free cellular phone communication from the constraints of significant and expensive infrastructure is hugely exciting.



This LCA, completely relocated because of extensive flooding 10 days before opening, was one for the record books. As always, LCA was stimulating, exhausting, warm, and a wonderfully well-organized meeting of over 700 curious minds.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-have-come-from-land-down-under.html
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