General





ChronoZoom and Big History

Mar 16th, 2012 | By

Ars Technica featured a pretty nifty new site, ChronoZoom, that attempts to show the history of everything in an easily explorable format.  Several things caught my eye with this site.  First, it’s written using HTML 5.  I’m really impressed how functional it is given the spotty support of browsers with HTML 5 (although they’re getting [...]



Panoramic View of Angel Falls, Venezuela

Mar 6th, 2012 | By

We’ve featured AirPano before on the site, but a set they’ve put up just took my breath away.  They have a wonderful 360 degree air panoramic of Angel Falls in Venezuela.  You can see these falls from the base on up to the top of the waterfall.  The waterfall drops water nearly a half a mile to [...]



Foo Fighters Rock The Planet

Dec 15th, 2011 | By

Nice try Scorpions. Not good enough. The Foo Fighters ACTUALLY rocked us WITH earthquakes! Real, honest to goodness earthquakes! The band took the stage in New Zealand after Tenacious D for a 3 hour set that caused tremors a mile away. How do they know it was the band and not a freak occurrence? Science [...]



Gall-Peters just doesn’t get any love

Nov 14th, 2011 | By

What Your Favorite Map Projection Says About You… don’t forget to read the info tag by hovering over the image! From the always hilarious xkcd.com



How Long Is A Piece Of String?

Oct 25th, 2011 | By

It’s amazing what you can find if you slow down when you’re flipping through the channels.  The other day I happened to stop at PBS and caught this wonderful documentary, “How Long Is A Piece Of String?”, published by the BBC.  It features comedian Alan Davies attempting to accurately measure the length of a piece of string. [...]



And Another Great Tech Pioneer Leaves Us

Oct 13th, 2011 | By

The news around the Internet today is that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, passed away over the weekend. I think it’s a mark of his impact that it might not be readily apparent exactly how important Ritchie was to our modern technology world. The fact of the [...]



A Story As A Map

Oct 11th, 2011 | By

I’m a pretty big fan boy of Wil Wheaton (although I still hate Wesley Crusher – SHUT UP Wesley!) I’ve never had a situation when the Venn diagram of my fan boy nerdness (it’s a pretty big chart) has overlapping circles in both ‘geo’ and ‘Wil Wheaton’… until today. In his blog, WWdN In Exile, [...]



Transportation… OF THE FUTURE!

Sep 14th, 2011 | By

If you’ve ever heard me chatting with Elvin of the ArcPad team, you’ll know that I can wax poetic about cars almost more easily than I can about GIS. I think an awful lot about transportation (mostly old cars, but still…) It always fascinates me to think how well all get around in the future. [...]



XKCD Gets It Right Again

Aug 22nd, 2011 | By

AND makes me feel like a slacker… If the artist wasn’t so great at this comic, I’d say he should become a geographer



Kansas Flatter Than A Pancake

Aug 18th, 2011 | By

Don’t let anyone tell you that geographers aren’t cool! A group of three geographers from Texas State University and Arizona State University decided to test the old adage, “Kansas is flat as a pancake”. To quote the authors: “To the authors, this adage seems to qualitatively capture some characteristic of a topographic geodetic survey 2. [...]