TechCrunch just posted a story about a hidden feature of Google Earth: a flight simulator. To get there on a PC, just hit Ctrl-Alt-A and on a Mac, it’s Command-Option-A (capital A). You can choose between flying an F16 or an SR22 prop plane. The F16 is fast but the controls are a little pickier, [...]
Archive for August, 2007
Google Flight Sim
Posted: 31 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: flight simulators, google, new york, niftiness
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Whenever we make up our bed and put all the decorative pillows on it, Willow loves it. After a night of visitors, we came into our bedroom to find Willow passed out beneath a minor avalanche. This picture was taken with my new cell phone on the highest quality level (1600×1200). The image was too [...]
Supergeek to the rescue!
Posted: 31 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: bill gates, charity, developing nations, harvard, large hadron collider, microsoft, philanthropy, yellow journalism
Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired a short while back that explains why we can all rest easy: there are geeks like Bill Gates in the world who can have compassion on more than eight people at once. Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen [...]
Don’t wash windows – become a prostitute
Posted: 29 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: dumb laws, gypsies, italy, politics, rome, stupidity, weird news
A friend of mine sent me an odd story about how Italian police officers are now spending their time: stopping the heinous crime of washing your car windows at a stoplight. At first, I thought, well that’s a bugger-all odd thing to be concerned about (I always think to myself in incorrect, bastardized British slang). [...]
Abandon New Orleans
Posted: 29 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: geology, hurricanes, new orleans, politically incorrect, rebuilding, rivers
I am going to say this even though it is not politically correct. Abandon New Orleans. Help the people there move out and establish new digs. It has long been known that New Orleans is sinking. As sediment is poured into the ocean from the Mississippi River, the Earth’s crust (1) bends under the weight. [...]
CICLing 2008: CFP
Posted: 28 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: call for papers, cfp, cmu, computational linguistics, conferences, professors
The 9th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics is calling for papers. The conference will be held in Haifa, Israel from February 17-23, 2008. Two of the keynote speakers were professors of mine last semester. Alon Lavie works on machine translation (including for low-resource languages) and machine translation evaluation. Kemal Oflazer was [...]
Chinese internet watchdog
Posted: 28 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: censorship, china, human rights, internet, liberty
Well, Chinese internet users are getting the shaft yet again. Beijing police are going to be putting cartoon police officers on the top Chinese web portals. These nifty little guys will warn users that they shouldn’t be looking at illegal websites. Isn’t that sweet? We wouldn’t want all those minds polluted by notions of liberty, [...]
The Space Station goes gimmicky
Posted: 28 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: gimmicks, nasa, space, space station, spaceflight, star wars
As a big fan of both Star Wars and the International Space Station, you would think that the upcoming marriage of the two would delight me. You would be wrong. Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber will be flown to Houston, where it will be sent off by Chewie and a host of other minor Star Wars characters, [...]
FreeAlert.org
Posted: 28 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: freealert, friends, non-profit, programming, python, web design
Last year I worked on a project with my friend Israel Kloss called FreeAlert. The site is not-for-profit and was originally intended to help refugees entering the Washington, DC area find things they need for free. It now covers major metropolitan areas all across the United States and is intended to benefit everyone. The idea [...]
Total Lunar Eclipse Blues
Posted: 27 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: astronomy, lamentations, lunar eclipse, meteor showers, moon
Much to my sorrow, it looks like seeing the total lunar eclipse that is to happen early tomorrow morning is not in the cards. The eclipse will begin just after 4:51am. At that point, the moon will be 18 degrees above the western horizon, which means I’ll have a hard time getting to a place [...]
