Daily Archives: 5/11/2005

Brainwagon Radio: World Wind, and Pick My Next Car

Where your host records a brief blurb about World Wind, and then asks his thoughtful, knowledgeable audience which car he should purchase to replace his aging, gas-guzzling SUV. I’m interested in hybrids, notably the Toyota Prius, the Civic, and more conventional cars like the Toyota Matrix, VW Jetta or Passat, Mazda 3, and maybe even the Scion xA to replace my son’s car which seems to be spending too much time in the shop these days.

Links:

NASA World Wind

I ran across a cool Windows program the other day: NASA World Wind. It’s an application that allows you to view landsat and shuttle radar topography data from any view on earth. What’s doubly cool is that it has high resolution photography of urban centers throughout the US, at considerably beter resolution than the imagery available via Google Maps. For instance, check out this image of Pixar via WorldWind and compare it to this Google Maps view of Pixar. Quite a big difference.

It’s a fairly big download (180 megabytes) but very cool. Try it out.