NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

Here's the article that Maggi emailed out to us this weekend: The following article was published in the New York Times yesterday - "NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet" by Andy Revkin This is a topic that should be important to all ESSN members, so a discussion thread has been initiated on the ESSN website (http://www.earthsystemscholars.org). Please login and share your thoughts and insights on this matter.

Road rage = emotions + location

The New Scientist has an article in their blog about an artist who is mapping people's emotions. Basically, he's got people hooked up to simple arousal sensors on their skin and has those sensors plugged into GPS units. From there, he aggregates stress levels across a number of people. Perhaps even cooler, he's allowed the people with the sensors to tag what they were doing or how they felt at certain points. Check it all out at the project's site to download and view the data via Google Earth.

DIY Earth Art and Aerial Photography

Formerly the exclusive domain of egomaniacal artinistas and well-funded academics, corporations, and governement agencies, earth art and aerial photography are know within reach of the common man! Ingredients: rake, kite, digital camera: rake art and kite photos! Once again, via Boingboing.

Google Earth, meet World Wind

NASA has their own (open-source) competitor to Google Earth called World Wind. Right now it's only available for Windows, but NASA will be releasing Mac OS X and Linux compatible versions starting with version 1.5 (they're now at 1.3.5). Expect 1.5 to drop around the end of September.

Demographics API

http://belay.extendthereach.com/api/ a free javascript API to access 2000 census data by address.

change of scenery

with a little patience, you can check out some different imagery within google earth via network link to aerials-express.com go here for the .kml

Mapping gas prices

Since I'm about to embark upon the most poorly-timed road trip in the history of automotive travel, I appreciate any opportunity to visualize my own masochism. That's why I was so happy to find GasBuddy's USA National Gas Temperature Map, which compiles GasBuddy.com's user-entered gas price data into a nationwide map of average gas prices by county. As you can see (and your wallet has been feeling) California is a festering red sore. My only consolation is that most of my meandering will occur in the lush green of the sub-three-dollar Southeast. The money I save shall be spent on smoked delicacies.

Lidar in Machu Picchu

Cool article...esp. for Tim! in GeoWorld http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/featurearticle/0602da.asp

speaking of Iraq…

check out these images of the effects of war (Iraq) http://www.landsat.org/Earth_from_space/Effects_of_war.htm

ASPRS 2006 Links

I don't personally have much to report from ASPRS 2006, since I'm not really a remote sensing guy. Here are a few links I got from the Web / Data Transfer sessions that I am far too lazy to annotate: http://www.americaview.org http://www.wisconsinview.org http://gtvgis.gtri.gatech.edu