Clip Art for GIS and Geography

Sunday May 24th 2009
Filed Under Fun, Link Library 

Find commercial free sources of clip art for globes, maps and other images useful for developing reports, web sites and banners relating to GIS and geography. Read more

         

Cartographers Anonymous

Monday February 23rd 2009
Filed Under Fun 

toothpaste for dinner
toothpastefordinner.com

         

Google’s Street View Car Adventures

Sunday June 29th 2008
Filed Under Silly but Fun 

Apparently one of Google’s Street View car drivers decided that an up close and personal tour of Microsoft’s Campus was in order.  According to Gizmodo (the site refers to it as the GooCar):

The GooCar…wasn’t just covering regular roads, they were going in-between buildings and getting as many angles as they could of the campus….the Google guys were driving around the team that does Windows Live Maps, like nothing was wrong, when other Microsoft guys were laughing and yelling at them.

Gizmodo: Google Street View Car Drives Into Microsoft Campus, Gets Laughed At By Windows Live Maps

         

TrackThePack

Thursday May 29th 2008
Filed Under Features, Silly but Fun 

Here’s another fun application to be mesmerized by instead of working.  TrackThePack is an application that allows you to follow shipments from multiple delivery companies as your packages travel across the United States.  You have to register to take full advantage of the service, unregistered users can only track a single package at a time.  The shipping routes and package locations are displayed onto Google Maps.  There’s also a Firefox extension that enables package tracking by right clicking on the tracking number. 

TrackThePack is still in development so they are looking for guinea pigs to try out package delivery from a variety of services:

We need your help! We’re working hard to expand the number of carriers we support, and to do that, we need a lot of different tracking numbers to test. So if you have any tracking numbers that are NOT UPS, FedEx, DHL, or USPS we’d love to have them to try out. Your numbers will only be used for testing and will be kept completely private.

 

         

Earth as Art

Tuesday April 22nd 2008
Filed Under Current Events, Fun, Remote Sensing, World GIS and Data 

Happy Earth Day!

The USGS and NASA jointly maintain the “Earth as Art” website which brings to the public stunning images of the Earth taken by the Landsat-7 satellite and the Terra Satellite’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). The site was originally created in 2002 by the USGS National Center for EROS in order to publicize the Landsat program. The images on the web site were selected for aesthetic purposes rather than for the scientific value that they offerr.

Visitors can browse the images by continent or alphabetically to access high resolution JPEGs.

Image of the Shetland Islands

         

Twitter in 3D

Monday April 21st 2008
Filed Under Fun 

Now you can see all your Twitter messages mapped across a globe. TwittEarth is a Flash application that pinpoints Twitter messages as they pop up around the world. The globe spins in response to new geolocated Twitter messages every 10 seconds. Either login in to post your own messages or simply space out to the globe spinning in response to new Tweets popping up.

Seen via Wired.

         

Walmart Expansion Across the U.S.

Monday April 07th 2008
Filed Under Trivia 

Starting with the first location in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962, this video maps out the growth of Walmart across the United States. The video shows the progression of Walmart’s expansion that starts out slowly in the late 1960s and rapidly speeds up starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, Walmart has over 3,800 stores in the United States.

Walmart Expansion

Per the site, the map was created using Freebase with detail about the methodology described in the post.

Seen via About Geography

         

G-I-Yes!

Tuesday December 18th 2007
Filed Under Fun 

Enjoy:


         

July 4th Fun Facts

Monday July 02nd 2007
Filed Under Fun 

The United States Census Bureau has published their annual list of interesting trivia concerning the Fourth of July.

         

Editable Vector Maps

Thursday June 14th 2007
Filed Under Fun 

Digital Vector Maps offers royalty-free, digital vector maps in PDF and Illustrator formats. Map styles include World Maps, Globe Maps, Country Maps and other maps.

         

What is the longest river in the world?

Thursday June 14th 2007
Filed Under Trivia 

This standard geography textbook question was always answered “The Nile”. Now, research, in part done through remote sensing, may change that answer to “The Amazon.”

         

Drop Spots

Saturday May 19th 2007
Filed Under Fun, Google Maps 

If you like the idea of geocaching but don’t have a GPS unit, this is an alternative to treasure hunting. Similar to the idea of geocaching in which a treasure is hidden and coordinates are provided for clues, “dropspots” are also hidden locations but clues are provided via a Google Maps interface and a description of the treasure’s location. You can search for locations by address or ZIP code or use the simple interface to drop your location onto the map and add a description of where your dropspot is hidden.

         

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