Archive for April, 2009
Cosmos on Hulu!
April 7th, 2009
It seems that the entire series of the 1980 Carl Sagan-narrated Cosmos is now free on hulu! Hearing Sagan say “billions and billions” more than makes up for hulu’s crippling streaming problems.
I’m also pretty sure that this is my 150th post! Woo.
magic number, old dead white guys, science, video | 2 Comments »
Need a Problem?
April 6th, 2009
“The biggest enemy of happiness is – apart from pain – boredom.”
– Schopenhauer
Need A Problem is a Swiss company that sells you problems. Ah, the modern world!
Coastline Mappings
April 2nd, 2009
When I was a little kid, I’d look at topographic maps of coastlines* and imagine what the area would look like if the sea level rose or fell. This has not changed. As a side side effect of the popularization of global warming, there now exist interactive maps that let me raise and lower continents as I please. None of them are exactly what I’d like, but these two examples are the closest:
- http://flood.firetree.net/ — This map lets you raise the ocean by up to 14 meters, but it can’t be lowered. It’s a google map, so you can zoom in as much as you’d like. The blue shading is a little clumsy, though.
- http://merkel.zoneo.net/Topo/Applet/ — You can raise or lower the ocean as much as you please, and the coloring is great, but it’s only applied to a few selected areas. I’m looking for arbitrary scales of devastation here, people.
It looks like I’ll need to learn the Google Maps API and do this thing myself.
* My childhood involved a lot of thinking about land bridges and oxbows and alluvial fans. How I ended up in math/compsci instead of geology I’ll never know.