Google Earth & More

If you haven't seen Google Earth yet, now is a good time to take a look. Google Earth lets you zoom in on any place in the world, viewing satellite images, maps, terrains, and 3D buildings. That's just the standard package. Individuals can now also create their own maps and make them available for others to use in Google Earth. Here are a few examples:

• Real-time Earthquake Data shows recent earthquakes on the map with links to data about the earthquakes. View by time line, severity, etc.
• Natural Hazards shows significant earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. The real neat part about this is that you can view known events all the way to 2000 BC.
• Drilling in Alaska gives a visual story on the current political/environmental struggle in Alaska oil drilling. The map shows where current oil wells are, the protected territory, and the habitats of various herds of animals.

Google Earth also now includes a Sky view which lets you view the night sky from the Hubble Space Telescope. This lets you see star locations and information, planetary orbits, constellations, etc. Just click the "sky" icon in the top menu to switch views.

Online Scientific Calculator

It's been a few years since I've had a math class, so I cannot attest to just how comprehensive this "eCalc" calculator is. But to the casual observer who knows at least that sin, log, and e^x buttons are handy, this looks pretty cool. It might serve at least for those days when you forgot your own scientific calculator at home. The unit conversion part on the right is something I could definitely use.

8 Useful Tips to Manage and Avoid RSS Overload

I found a really nice article on Dumb Little Man that talks about how to avoid being a slave to your RSS reader with 8 simple tips. It can be very easy to let yourself get carried away with interesting feeds. I currently have 57 feeds in my reader, and so far I've been able to get my news through RSS without losing control.

The article recommends a few rules that you should set for yourself. A few of them were new to me, but the others were just common sense ideas that I figured out as I went.

Jaw-dropping Photosynth Demo

Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs demonstrated Seadragon and Photosynth at TED last year. I just came across the demo which is truly amazing. Check out the video:



You can actually play with the technology now at Microsoft Live Labs.

Academhack

Academhack is a really decent instructional technology blog. It is biased towards the humanities and many of the applications highlighted are Mac only, however, there are plenty of resources for non-humanities disciplines and non-Mac users. I often find great new technologies here, but the blog also lays out some best practices for the less high-tech stuff (e.g., Handling E-mail for Professors).

Quia.com

At quia.com, you can create simple games in disciplines as far ranging as chemistry and music. I just played hangman showing my knowledge of technology terms, matched chemistry equipment to uses, and researched the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as part of a scavenger hunt. Although targeted primarily at high school students, Quia lets you create your own games at any level--I'm thinking about using it in my undergraduate course next semester to help my students learn about IT laws, something that they've had difficulty with in the past.

TED

Like Pop!Tech below, TED is a conference of visionary thinkers, whose presentations have been filmed and posted to the web. Do you wish to see artwork that walks on the beach by it self or Peter Gabriel speak about concrete ways to stop torture; see Jan Han demo his amazing touch screen or Jan Chipchase on mobile phones. Poke around and find something delightful.

Make Magazine

Make is a magazine and blog that channels and expresses the desire to make things. Newsweek called Make "geek DIY (do it yourself) porn". There is a store where you can buy things from derby racing kits to DIY motherboards for video games. I recommend the rentable library of instructional videos (from machine lathe operation to painting water colors). There is an annual event called the Maker Faire (which included silliness like a lifesize version of the Mousetrap game using bowling balls instead of marbles and massive fire-breathing robots)

Cool Tools, Street Use, Out of Control

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired and Whole Earth Review has a collection of web pages called Cool tools full of gear, gadgets and approaches that ate more of my time than I care to admit. A related site is Street Use which includes backyard pulse jets and match box cameras. He also wrote the acclaimed Out of Control, a book about technology, biology, decentralization and self-sustaining systems. (It was also required reading for some of the cast of the Matrix movies.)

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell

Blink by Malcolm Gadwell / Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.

Pop!Tech

Pop!Tech is a yearly conference in Camden, Maine where several hundred visionary thinkers come together in an ongoing conversation about science and technology and their implications for the future. All Pop!Tech sessions are available to watch free of charge as Pop!Casts. Pop!Casts are Creative Commons licensed high-definition videos and MP3 audio files.

Digg

Digg is a social network that relies on its users to collectively determine what has value on the Web. There are no editors at digg; all stories are submitted and voted on by its users. Categories include: World & Business, Technology, and Science. As a user, I can follow others in order to find like-minded individuals, increasing the likelihood that I will find content that is interesting to me.