Google Earth Community sysop PenguinOpus writes:
Feb 13th Updated data layers: Google Earth Community layers updated (as of Jan24th), North American Car Ferries, improved Community Showcase layers.
Zoom in close enough, and indeed, there are now ferries aplenty:
Driving directions don’t yet include ferry routes, however; Google Earth still sends you from Fire Island to Rhode Island via New York City. Volkswagen drivers beware:-)
A few days ago, Alex posted an example of giant writing to Google Sightseeing and calculated it to be 141,732 point type. Google will tell you there are 2,835 points to a meter, and Google Earth makes measuring giant writing easy (using the built-in Measure tool), so the obvious challenge presents itself: Where is the world’s largest writing? And how big is it?
Recent candidates in the news have proved disappointing. The Register’s profanity from a few days ago is a mere 15 meters tall, or 42,525 point type.
Another promising candidate was posted to Google Earth Community recently: A bored weatherman in Northern Canada is alleged to have spent two years crafting a profanity with a bulldozer. A blurred area in Google Earth was mooted to be the spot, but data from Windows Live Local showed this up to be wishful thinking.
The largest text I could find was posted soon after Google Earth’s launch, over on Google Earth Hacks:
The writing measures an astonishing 4km across and is 940m high, good for 2,664,900 point type. It’s to be found in Texas, clearly. Is this the world record?
On Java.net, the APRSKML server project, which converts amateur radio positioning data into a KML network link for Google Earth.
It’s vaporware at the moment, but GeoAgriTrace, a project partly funded by the EU and partly by Europe’s agro-industrial complex, wants to make it possible for European consumers to track where their food comes from, using geobrowsers like Google Earth.
While more information is always a good thing, in this case I suspect it’s a blatant attempt by lobbying groups to shore up popular support and otherwise entrench the Common Agricultural Policy, arguably Europe’s most harmful program in humanitarian terms, especially for the developing world, but also for consumers at home.
The PDF explaining the project is a dry read, but luckily ZDNet has done all the heavy lifting when it comes to an overview for those who are intrigued by what European taxpayers’ money gets up to, so over to them.
The first book dedicated to Google Earth is out and available for immediate delivery from Amazon: Google Earth Schnellanleitung by Artak Mushegjan. Artak runs a German Google Earth site, googleerde.de. Unfortunately for most people, the book is in German:-)
For everybody else, there is Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth, out in July.
This is mainly of interest to me, Swedish readers, and those of you coming over for a visit: Stockholm Tunnelbana routes for Google Earth, courtesy of Kildor. (While you’re here, check out what’s happening.)
You’ll find other European subways at the Google Earth Community Mapping Experiment, initiated by ink_polaroid a month ago and which has garnered a huge response in the meantime.)
Ogle Earth’s newsfeeds dredged up a gorgeous widget this morning, both for OS X and for Yahoo’s widget engine: Xavier M. Jubier’s solar eclipse circumstances calculator, with data for solar eclipses from 1970 to 2039.
The reason it’s mentioned here is that the widget links each each eclipse to a fully annotated Google Earth network link. You don’t need the widgets to access the Google Earth files, though. You can head on over to a page on Xavier’s site where each eclipse is directly accessible as a KMZ file. He’s also got a very good cloud cover network link at the bottom of that page.
Both widgets are downloadable from here.