Try Marree Man, as seen by Google Siteseeing.

Humorous inspiration that shows what can be done with a little imagination and a camcorder.

Now that I have a little camcorder, I’m interested in free software that I can use to build cool bits of media. Wikibooks has a very nice Linux in Film Production page with many links to good stuff.

In the last couple of days, we’ve seen an explosion of butterflies (well, I mean a lot of butterflies, not actually exploding butterflies) around the neighborhood. If you like butterflies, perhaps you could use the University of Minnesota Extension Service’s guide on Butterfly Gardening, converting your garden into an attractive locale for the insects that don’t elicit an “ew!” response.

Molly Wood has an article on CNET detailing Five reasons social networking doesn’t work. I think it’s worth reading. Her top reason:

There’s nothing to do there.

Amen. The real problem is that once you bother going to a social networking networking website, there is nothing to actually do except email and posting, and we already have perfectly good ways of doing that without them.

It’s also interesting to note how her opinions may differ from those of men. There is a definite undercurrent of sexual harrassment that should not be ignored.

Addendum: I just tried to log into orkut for the first time in months. I suddenly remembered why I stopped using it. Within 30 seconds I got an error message indicating that there server had “done something unexpected”. Uh, yeah. Bite me.

While surfing, I found this cool scan of Photo Miniature magazine which was published in 1903. It covered the field of aerial photography, and includes some amazing photos taken from kites and balloons. Check it out.

Google Maps is pretty cool, but they watermark all their images which makes their satellite data a little less than entirely useful for goofing around with. That’s why I’m pleased to see the USGS has the Seamless Data Distribution System, which allows you to download high resolution imagery, maps and all sorts of other data. The image on the right is some high resolution imagery of my house. You can see my next door neighbor’s blue van. Cool stuff.

I like maps. I thought I’d archive a couple of useful links for generating your own maps:

• First, a site to describe how to take latitude and longitude and project them into two dimensions. Contains lots and lots of formulas. Map Projections: How Projections Work
• Of course, to use those formulas you need some raw data. The CIA World Databank II has such data, and is public domain to boot. The linked site has them in an easy to parse textual format for easy manipulation.

Addendum: the wikipedia has links to these sites, which is how I found them.

Addendum2: I also found this website to be useful. It countains outlines for the continents, which I used to generate this animated gif of the earth’s rotation.

All sorts of projects based upon the Star Wars universe are making the rounds of various blogs, so why not take a break and build a Dalek instead?

Bonus link: here are some behind the scene pics from this season’s episode (a very dark episode incidently) of Doctor Who which features a Dalek.

Another fun link from the make blog: Systm, a video show produced by a couple of young geeks. In their first episode, they build a warspying setup into a modified cashbox and go in search of wireless video cameras. Despite the socially marginal justification, it’s pretty well done and worth a few minutes of bittorrent downloading.

Cool science link of the day: an amateur launch of an amateur balloon to a height fo 52,000 feet. Pretty nifty pictures

UTARC UX-1 Balloon Launch

Thanks to long time raytracer Eric Haines for recommending this link to general craziness: Facepunch Studios – Just Goldbergs

People with too much time on their hands construct elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions that use the physics engine built into Halflife 2. Even if you don’t have Halflife 2, check out some of the videos. Very funny stuff.