- Navideo is software for GPS enabled PocketPC that claims to perform some nifty tricks. You can track other Navideo users in real time, be tracked in turn, or send your position to others via sms/email. Navideo Controller for PC can keep track of multiple clients (using Google Earth), and send them new destinations. I’m sure it’s intended for car fleets, but just think of the real-life games you could build on top of this system…:-) (Via coolsmartphone)
- Simplified Building Concepts is starting up a free SketchUp Library specializing in components and objects to place inside larger projects. You can also upload your own content. It’s in beta, but it looks good.
- Valery Hronusov takes Geology professor Ron Blakey’s renditions of global plate tectonics stretching back 600 million years and wraps them around Google Earth, adding time stamps. His task is made much easier by using EditGrid thus. If you’re wondering whether Google Earth’s timeline supports events 600 million years ago, the answer is No. Valery had to cheat:-).
But one serious question: Is it really at all possible to know where mountain ranges were on these continents half a billion years ago, or are those drawn with a huge dollop of paleopoetic license?
3 thoughts on “Short news: Navideo, SketchUp components, paleogeography”
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We know (more or less) what causes mountain ranges to form, so we can make pretty good guess where mountain ranges would have been in the past based on the geography and the tectonic movements.
Most of those old mountain ranges are still around, just in different forms.
Modern techniques of paleomagnetism, radiodatation and paleontology permit to effectively reconstruct the early history of the Earth. 500 Million years (500 Ma) isn’t that old for us geologists… after all at 500 Ma more than 90% of the Earth’s history has already passed! So us humans on the Planet Earth now are just a temporary ripple which won’t last long… geologically speaking.
Both paleomagnetic and paleoclimate data offer evidence of true paleolatitudes and thus these reconstructions can reasonably infer paleolatitudinal position (relative to the poles and equator). Paleolongitude is a lot trickier to constrain. Relative paleolongitudinal separations between continents can be backed out of some of the paleomagnetic data, but unlike latitude there is no absolute frame of reference for longitude, so the chosen frame of reference is arbitrary.