- KML presentations on video: On April 23, the Geophysical Institute and Arctic Region Supercomputing Center hosted a symposium about use of KML by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Now the videos of the presentations are online. UAF’s John E. Bailey writes:
We now have some videos online from our “KML in the North” event:
You might especially like Michael Weiss-Malik’s talk on “Why KML matters”. Also, the Kate Riffey and Zach Meyers presentations were from two of the students in my Google Earth class this past semester. They were presenting their class KML-based projects…. previous to the class they had no knowledge of KML.
- Google Earth lit crit: I had read the start of a review of Joseph O’Neill’s new book ‘Netherland’ in the International Herald Tribune a few days ago, but stopped when the reviewer was less than laudatory. (Life is short). Luckily Brian Timoney persevered, and mailed me to point out this passage in the review:
O’Neill knows how to deploy the quotidian fripperies of our laptop culture to devastating fictional effect. There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.
More proof if you need it that Google Earth has firmly ensconced itself in the mainstream mindset as a revelatory technology:-) Luckily, a review in the New York Times does rave about ‘Netherland’, which is good, as now I am looking for an excuse to read it.