Ever wondered how much "nature" your lifestyle requires? You're about to find out. This Ecological Footprint Quiz estimates how much productive land and water you need to support what you use and what you discard.
After answering 15 easy questions you'll be able to compare your Ecological Footprint to what other people use and to what is available on this planet.
GIS PILOT links for ALABAMA GIS sites:
They do not have an extensive library like the University of Texas map room, which is by far the best, but the availability of links is a great starting point. The U of Texas map room has a huge selection of down loadable maps from everywhere in the world. Their backlog of maps is just insanely huge.
GIS PILOT GIS links for Virginia
GIS PILOT gets a visual update with new graphics and tables. The layout is the same and all the links are still available. There are still almost 2,000 GIS LINKS broken down by state and country. GIS LINKS are quickly located on the table and lead to individual pages for each section of links.
One important concern of cartography is solving how to project, i.e. transform or map points from an almost spherical lump of rock (our Earth) onto either flat sheets of paper or not-so flat phosphorus-coated glass. Find out all you need to know about Map Projections from Cartographical Map Projections.
Pressure situation! It's only the lower 48 states, so that should give you an edge. The purpose is to get the correct location of the capital in a good time.
For the second time in over a month, an earthquake has rattled the island of Hawaii. On October 15, a 6.7 magnitude quake hit the area. Today's is labled around a 4.5 to 5.0 . No Tsunami is reported to be expected from the quake
According to various unsubstantiated reports by eyewitnesses, it would appear that the 169 islands of Tonga is gaining island number 170. Developing from an undersea volcano, the new island is located between the islands of Kao in the Ha'apai Group and Late in the Vava'u Group. The Matangi Tonga news source has all the latest details.
Thanks to Matt for the article.
Since I last posted on these 2 guys hitchhiking across the US to see all 50 capitals in 50 days, they've made a lot of headway and started to drum up a little publicity for both themselves and this site.
I was lucky enough to have my post mentioned on the guys in a couple of blogs. Hopefully, there were a few extra rides comin' the guys way to make their journey a little easier. As of this post, they are in Arizona getting near the end. Hawaii is the trick. Find out how they do it at Hitch50.
Check out the mentions in MSNBC.com and ATTU's WORLD!
Blog, Tech, Internet, technology, Art, Humor, Entertainment, Media, Fun, Funny, Travel, Gps,Geography, blogger, Google Maps, scotty, basset hounds, fiddy,hitchhike,hitch50
Jim has been painting aerial views since 1986 and has completed over 200 illustrations for resorts, tourist bureaus, and chambers of commerce. His images are used in brochures, web sites, ads, maps, posters, art prints, signage, post cards and retail items.
What if mapping the world was more like a video game?
What if you could fly like Superman and figure out where to meet your friends for a good meal and which routes to avoid to beat traffic?
With Live Search maps you can find yellow pages and white pages information, get live traffic conditions and view stunning 3D and Birds Eye …just as if you were gaming in Second Life, but with real-world information embedded in real-world cities where advertising really matters?
Check out our beta for Virtual Earth™ 3D , a new online mapping feature launched this week by Live Search. You can see terrain information for all over the world, and explore these U.S. urban areas with textured buildings (with many more to come in the next month!): San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth. There is a virtual tour that you can review before diving into the goodness.
While many folks will opt to use their keyboards, you can even use an Xbox controller to navigate the three-dimensional world for greater deftness and speed.
In addition, developers can use the Virtual Earth 3D application programming interface to build these search capabilities into their own applications and Web sites. This and other APIs for Live Search are open to developers, with the option to acquire additional support and other benefits through a service-level agreement with Microsoft. Developers can find more information about the Virtual Earth API at http://dev.live.com/virtualearth and in the Virtual Earth SDK http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/. Also, contact maplic@microsoft.com for details about additional support.
Some folks in the blogosphere noticed and we appreciate it: Liveside.net , TechCrunch, Brady Forrest , Robert Scoble, Search Engine Journal to name a few. Keep talking about it and also, let us know how to improve. As with any beta product we’d love to have feedback. You can let us know on the Virtual Earth blog at http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/, where product updates are posted continually, or use the handy feedback link at the bottom of the application.
--The Spaceland team
NOVA SCOTIA (CBC) - Canada is trying to chart new territory off the East Coast and in the Arctic to claim the resources below, but the right to stake that claim has turned into a race against the clock. The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis St. Laurent has spent four months in the Arctic laying plotting points on the outer edge of the continental shelf, an underwater mountainside that slopes as deep as 3,000 metres under the sea and ice.
"Once the edge is defined and that data is submitted to the United Nations, once that's approved, then that's Canada's territory," said Capt. Andrew MacNeil.
Dick MacDougall, with the Hydrographic Service of Canada, the agency that makes ocean maps, says the area in the East Coast is a million square kilometres, while the area in the Arctic is about 750,000 square kilometres.
"It's roughly the size of the three prairie provinces, to which Canada would have the rights to the sea bed, the resources on the sea bed and the resources below the sea bed," said MacDougall.
Finding the edge of the shelf and measuring the land that extends from it can be blocked by rocks and sediment on the bottom. To get that proportion right, mappers must look at where the sediment starts to thin out.
Dam It All! Catch the Angry Beaver as he looks out on the world and wants to conquer it the only way he knows how - by building dams! Dark Tees, Light Tees, Thongs (Yeah! I went there!), Bags, cards, stickers, and gifts. Nice!
What a Beautiful Blue Planet is a series of satellite pictures of the Earth with the goal to help people realize what a nice home we all have.
Directions Magazine was first published in 1998 and remains the premier news and resource guide for geospatial professionals.
Directions Magazine publishes weekly newsletters about geographic information systems, global positioning systems, desktop mapping, cartography, computer-aided design, remote sensing, web services, and more.
Have you ever wondered what the heck the programmers were thinking when they set up the games in your local market. In East Tennessee, they have a simple formula: pick the lamest game. This market is exempt from the rest of the country, however, as indicated in the NFL Blackout Maps which show the local programming for each area of the country.
mappingCountryReports.org — Country Information
CountryReports.org was established in 1997 out of a love for international relations and culture. Entirely web-based, we offer more than 26,000 pages of content covering a wide-range of topics. Our statistical data and cultural information has proven to be valuable to students, parents, teachers, and researchers alike. In a sea of competing websites, CountryReports.org stands out as a leader, ...:
CITY-DATA.COM
We've collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as we could. We have over 30,000 city photos not found anywhere else, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment...), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, housing, businesses, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government employment, weather, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, user-submitted facts, similar cities list, comparisons to averages... If you ever need to research any city for any reason, from considering a move there to just checking where somebody you know is staying, this is the site for you.
www.multimap.com is Europe’s most popular mapping web site, offering a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and a number of cities worldwide; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs with map overlay; and local information. Multimap also provides a range of complementary services through its partners. These include hotel, holiday-cottage, and restaurant-booking services, and the ability to buy both historic and aerial photograph prints.
Since its launch in 1996, Multimap has become one of the 10 most-visited sites in the UK. The consumer web site regularly receives more than 12 million unique users and delivers more than 190 million page views per month. Traffic continues to grow on average by 30% annually.
Multimap.com – Online Maps to Everywhere
For $5.99 per month, you can turn a cell phone into a surveillance device and track when your target leaves home, where he or she travels and at what speed. You can even detect how much battery power is left on the phone. Marketed as "virtual eyes" on your kids or employees, the service also allows you to construct a virtual "fence" so that you can receive electronic alerts if the phone’s carrier crosses into forbidden areas.
Billion of Bytes Sized Data Sets for National Security and Commercial Applications Demand 64-Bit, High-Performance Compute Only SGI Altix Systems Can Deliver
ORLANDO, Fla., GEOINT 2006, Booth 207, (November 15, 2006) — In anticipation of the spring 2007 launch of an extremely high-resolution Earth imagery satellite, GeoEye (Nasdaq:GEOY), the world's largest commercial satellite remote-sensing company, purchased high-bandwidth, high-performance compute technology from SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC). At the Dulles, VA, ground station for the new GeoEye-1 satellite, four SGI® Altix® systems were delivered during the first calendar quarter that will drive core satellite image processing for the .41-meter panchromatic (sensitive to all visible colors) and 1.65-meter multi-spectral (sensing and recording radiation from invisible as well as visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum) imagery. GeoEye-1 is anticipated to collect more than 700,000 square kilometers - billions of bytes - of high-resolution imagery every day. A long-time SGI customer supplying imagery to the U.S. government, international governments and a growing number of commercial clients, GeoEye selected SGI systems because the record amounts of image data from the new satellite will require 4X the processing power.
"We have three satellites currently in orbit - OrbView-2 and 3, and IKONOS - but when GeoEye-1 becomes fully operational, it will be the world's most powerful and most accurate high-resolution commercial imaging satellite. It's going to collect more imagery on a given day than any commercial system currently on orbit," said Don Koboldt, senior principal geodetic engineer, GeoEye. "I chose SGI Altix because it has 64-bit processing power, not 32, and because there's a lot of computing power required for everything we do, including modeling the sensor and re-sampling all this data onto a geographic system. Not to mention the actual volumes of pixel data that has to be processed. It's both an I/O-bound problem and a compute problem, and SGI is taking the lead in designing systems for this need."
The GeoEye-1 satellite's ability to go down to a .41-meter resolution means, in simple terms, the high-resolution imagery taken from orbit and processed by the SGI® Altix® 350 systems will be capable of discerning objects on the ground 16 inches in size or larger. At that resolution, one would be able to identify home plate on a baseball diamond or count the manholes on a city street. In general, GeoEye's products are utilized in a wide variety of applications including defense and intelligence for large area mapping, state and local governments for urban planning and mapping, insurance and risk management, environmental monitoring and disaster relief. Such imagery is also ideal for on-line mapping search engines.
It's a little harder than it looks because they throw in a bunch of "...stans" that I had trouble with. 
By AUDREY McAVOY, Associated Press Writer
HONOLULU - Tsunamis generated by a major earthquake near Japan left behind little damage but offered a legitimate test of international warning systems.
The waves, some measuring a few feet high, struck Hawaii shores Wednesday, slightly injuring one swimmer and temporarily flooding a harbor. A surge along California's northern coast destroyed two docks in Crescent City Harbor and damaged a third.
The waves hit Hawaii about six hours after a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck north of Japan. Tsunami warnings were issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which reported that its system of sending alerts functioned properly.
"It went very smoothly, and there weren't any major problems at all," said Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at the center. "We issued a warning for 1,000 kilometers surrounding the earthquake and an advisory for the rest of the Pacific Ocean."
The alerts were canceled once the center received further information that showed the tsunami was going to be small, he said. The center canceled the tsunami watch for Hawaii when it became clear the waves were unlikely to top one meter, or about 3.3 feet.
But local civil defense authorities still warned people to stay out of the water and to exercise caution near harbors, given the possibility the earthquake would generate unusual currents around Hawaii.
A woman swimming at Waikiki suffered cuts when she was sucked through an opening in a seawall as the water receded just before the swells arrived. She was otherwise fine, said John Cummings, a spokesman for Oahu Civil Defense.
On Kauai, a 2 1/2-foot swell flooded a parking lot at Nawiliwili Harbor. No serious damage was reported.
"Some of the boats hit the bottom with their keels when the water receded, sort of jostled them around their moorings when the wave came through," said Mark Marshall, Kauai County civil defense administrator.
In California, the weather service issued an early-morning tsunami advisory but dropped it by the time waves traveling up to 30 mph moved in at Crescent City, about 20 miles south of the Oregon state line.
Harbor workers there noticed a fast-moving current around mid-afternoon that harbor master Richard Young described as a "river within the ocean."
As the surge rushed out of the harbor, two floating docks in the inner basin were destroyed, Young said. Another surge followed, severely damaging a third dock, he said.
Several vessels attached to the destroyed docks bobbed away from their anchorage and likely received dings and possibly greater damages, the harbor master said.
Young said the replacement costs of the docks could range from $300,000 to $700,000.
Some 400 miles to the south, waves pounded the Santa Cruz yacht harbor all afternoon, causing several boats to break away from their moorings and capsizing a small sailboat.
"It wasn't wave action," said Dave Reynolds, a Monterey-based weather service meteorologist. "It was the current that caused the damage. This is almost like a fast-moving river of water that is coming in, so ... it's the currents that toss the boats around."
Thousands of people living along northern Japan's Pacific coast fled to higher ground, but Japan's meteorological agency withdrew its tsunami warning after about three hours. The waves near Japan did not swell higher than 23 inches.
___ On the Net:
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center
Source Article
The BREATHING EARTH is a simulation of birth and death with a touch of pollution added in. As it runs, the births and deaths are recorded along with CO2 emissions from around the world. Thanks to Dave and Thomas for the link to BREATHING EARTH.
A powerful undersea earthquake prompted tsunami warnings Wednesday for Japan and Russia but the danger appeared to pass after a series of tiny waves hit the northern Japanese coast.
The waves did not swell higher than 16 inches and rapidly diminished in size, but Japan's meteorological agency said that it would wait for at least several hours before withdrawing its warning of possible larger waves.
Keeping tabs with the new ArcGIS 9.2, I spotted a post from James Fee on an update of the shipments of the mapping software. It's starting to trickle in.... GIS Sites - GIS links from around the world
Appalachian Mountain Club is an educational resource to help you understand important natural landscapes of the Appalachian region and the conservation challenges and opportunities that face them.
It includes maps that have been prepared by the AMC to illustrate a particular topic, as well as custom maps that allow you to select and view data layers of your choice from all layers available for that geographic region.
Appalachian Mountain Club GIS Sites - GIS links from around the worldBEIJING, Nov. 14 (Xinhuanet) -- The world's largest software maker Microsoft Corp. will start selling the Zune portable music player and the Zune Marketplace in the United States on Tuesday, hoping to take a bite out of Apple's dominant iPod and iTunes powerhouse.
The rectangular "Zune" player is similar in appearance to the iPod with a round click wheel, but is slightly bulkier with a larger, 3-inch screen.
The 30-gigabyte Zune allows the device to locate other nearby Zunes and wirelessly exchange music and pictures with a few touches of the button.
The wireless sharing ability of the Zune is meant to overcome what Microsoft sees as the biggest drawback of portable players: the inability of users to share music and listen with others.
The Zune represents the software giant's most ambitious attempt to date to challenge Apple's iPod, which accounts for more than 75 percent of digital music players and legally purchased downloaded songs.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has said it plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and market the Zune, which is merely a starting point for a new entertainment platform and a "Zune community."
Microsoft said it's grown interested in entertainment because technology now plays a bigger role in the way people do everything from watch television to listen to music. Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, said that's a change that plays to Microsoft's strengths.
"We're moving from just a device that you use on your own to what we call connected entertainment," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told the crowd in downtown Seattle, before demonstrating the Zune's wireless song-swapping feature. "We'll be able to upgrade the software here, connect you up to the capability you'll have in your car, your PC, your phone."
Analysts don't expect the early effort to make a serious dent in Apple's market share. "It's not even going to give the iPod a bad headache for the time being," said analyst Michael Gartenberg with Jupiter Research.
Ha!
A picture of Elizabeth Vargas breastfeeding her child at the newsdesk is a hoot! I love the response of Elizabeth Vargas in that she wouldn't wear that blouse. Nothin' like a little Photoshop to sell a magazine! Nice touch to an unusual development. Drudge is reporting her official response as:
"Elizabeth was more than happy to sit for the interview but was disturbed that the magazine would set aside basic journalistic standards to photoshop her head onto a fake image. Vargas did joke that her real baby is cuter, that she is proud to breastfeed her newborn but wouldn't do it at the anchor desk and that she wouldn't be caught dead in that ugly gold blouse!"
From Dave And Thomas
Well, it's official. "BORAT" is a hit and like sharks smelling blood in the water, groups of people are lining up to sue for part of the profits. Lawyers are drooling at the chance of finding a loophole in the contracts signed by people who appear in the movie so they can start to repair the damage done by their clients "unwise" actions. As the media hunts down the people who were part of the prank, one common story arises: They got paid.
Dave and Thomas can't help but noticed that they got paid and signed releases, even if it were under funny pretenses. Most didn't read through the legal paperwork after taking wads of cash then putting down their "John Hancock's." These people should run for Congress, not ask for our sympathy. Dave and Thomas really like how the villagers called Sasha Baron Cohen, who plays "Borat", an 'ugly, tall, moustachioed American man', even though the 35-year-old comedian is British.
Now, here's a way to use Google Maps. 2 guys are indirectly helping internet surfers learn the 50 state capitals by using Google Maps and blogs to hitchhike to all 50 state capitals in 50 days. Here's a little about the guys:
"Our names are Scotty and Fiddy and we're hitchhiking to all 50 state capitals in 50 consecutive days or less. We started in Times Square, NY on October 10th. If you want to offer a ride, give us a shout at 310-494-8058 or hitch50@gmail.com. Our current location is on the above map. If the dot is moving, that means we're on the move. If the dot isn't moving, then this is probably what's going on right now. "
They have started to create a buzz on local media as well as the internet as they breeze through towns. Head toward their site to catch a map of where they are right now. And, if you can offer a ride they'll be more than happy to take you up on that offer. Lean more about the Hitch50
Google has provoked the wrath of Iran's notoriously suspicious authorities by appearing to question the country's sovereignty over the province of Azerbaijan in an entry on its Google Video website.
In a move tailor-made to wound Iranian patriotic pride and arouse a blizzard of protest, the Azeri provincial capital, Tabriz, is located "in southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran". To add insult to injury, the ancient city is listed as being in Azerbaijan, rather than Iran. Tabriz and southern Azerbaijan have belonged to Iran for more than 4,000 years.
The text of a tourist film on the site has drawn accusations that the US-owned search engine is deliberately trying to undermine Iran's territorial integrity by fomenting separatist sentiment in the mainly Turkish-speaking province.
Valiallah Azarvash, an Iranian MP, said: "An Iranian never accepts such slights. Since the second millennium BC, eastern Azerbaijan and Tabriz have never been separated from the body of Iran. How can they now belong somewhere else?" The information technology ministry has branded the entry an attempt to intervene in Iran's internal affairs and has urged Iranians to flood Google with emails.
"This act is a typical example of interference in the affairs of another country," said Samad Mohmen Bela, the IT ministry's representative in parliament. "The simplest, most effective response is for all Iranian users to reflect their objection to Google's management."
The reformist Etemad newspaper accused the company of a "strange, suspicious and dubious act" in apparently trying to relocate Tabriz - one of the major flashpoints of the 1979 Islamic revolution - to the independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, to the north of Iran.
The republic consists of territory annexed from Iran by Russia in 1813. Joseph Stalin tried to seize the rest of Azerbaijan after the second world war but was rebuffed by US and British opposition.
Tabriz and other cities in the province witnessed violent protests earlier this year after the publication of a cartoon in a Farsi-language newspaper depicting a cockroach speaking in the local Azeri tongue.
Iran's Islamic authorities have shown little tolerance towards regional autonomous movements and have accused the US and Britain of trying to stir secessionist sympathies in different provinces, including Kurdistan and Khuzestan.
The row echoes a controversy two years ago when National Geographic magazine was swamped by protests after labelling the sea between southern Iran and neighbouring Arab states as the Arabian not the Persian Gulf. The magazine was banned in Iran and its reporters were barred from the country. Web surfers launched "Google bombs", causing searches for "Arabian Gulf" to produce a site announcing: "The gulf you are looking for does not exist, try Persian Gulf."
American Origins Project: 1877 Atlas
What is the American Origins Project?
Beginning in the late 17th century settlers began to establish themselves in many portions of the Delmarva Peninsula. These early settlers built a foundation for a America. To better understand the past, staff at the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture have initiated a web-based archive for researchers to gather information on some of the earliest settlers to the region.
Currently the on-line database includes information on some 3,000 of the earliest settlers in Somerset County with emphasis on those who lived in the Mt. Vernon region from 1663 to 1759. Plans are underway to include settler information from a wider time span and geographical location. The majority of information listed was transcribed directly from primary source materials at the Nabb Center including tax rolls, wills, personal inventories, maps, judicial proceedings as well as records of births, deaths and marriages.
The Mt. Vernon region of Somerset County includes Monie and Wicomico hundreds, specifically, those settlers who lived on the neck of land just south of the Wicomico River. Somerset County, officially organized in 1666, is on the southern portion of the Delmarva peninsula. The 180-mile peninsula lies between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean and is one of the earliest seedbeds of America. Today Delmarva is comprised of southern Delaware as well as portions of Maryland and Virginia.
American Origins Project: 1877 Atlas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats, who won control of the U.S. Congress, said on Sunday they will push for a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq to begin in four to six months, but the White House cautioned against fixing timetables.
"First order of business is to change the direction of Iraq policy," said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is expected to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the new Congress.
Democrats will press President George W. Bush's administration to tell the Iraqi government that U.S. presence was "not open-ended, and that, as a matter of fact, we need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months," Levin said on ABC's "This Week" program.
Bush has insisted that U.S. troops would not leave until Iraqis were able to take over security for their country, and has repeatedly rejected setting a timetable for withdrawal because, he says, that would only embolden the insurgents. (...Continue article... )
Sony's PlayStation 3 made its highly anticipated debut in Japan to long lines on Saturday, with local stores selling out their supplies of the video game console in a pattern that's expected to be repeated around the world.
Throngs of people lined up for hours around Bic Camera, an electronics retailer in downtown Tokyo, to get their hands on one of the consoles.
The enthusiasm was so great, clerks with megaphones asked the crowd to stop pushing, warning that all sales would end if there were any injuries.
"Standing in line today is the only way to make sure I got one," said Takayuki Sato, 30, among the buyers who queued up at Bic Camera, snaking around the building in a complete circle.
But would-be buyers were turned away even before the store opened at 7 a.m.
The retailer refused to say how many machines it had, but a spokeswoman speaking on condition of anonymity per company policy said the store had ... (CONTINUE ARTICLE)
Enjoy the weekend with as many ballgames as you can possibly stand. In between, here's some news and links to keep you busy.
This week, the Oakland A's and San Francisco 49er's announced they would be leaving the long time home on the bay to newer stadiums in the suburbs. The 49er's plan to move to nearby Santa Clara while the A's announced they would move to nearby Freemont from Oakland (above). If the A's get their way, the new stadium would be state of the art in many ways. Cisco Systems, Inc, the computer sponsor of the park has big dreams for the park which include:"Fans will swipe electronic tickets stored on cell phones. Bleacher bums will view instant replays at their seats with laptop computers. And digital advertising displays will be able to switch images based on the buying habits of the people walking by through data embedded in their cell phones."
"Personalized Search is part of Google's ongoing effort to make your search experience more relevant to you. Using Personalized Search, you can:·
Get the results most relevant to you, based on what you've searched for in the past·
View and manage your past searches, including the webpages, images, news headlines and Froogle results you've clicked on·
Create bookmarks you can access from any computerPersonalized Search orders your search results based on your past searches, as well as the search results and news headlines you've clicked on. You can view all these items in your Search History and remove any items you'd like.
Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search results, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve." (Google Help Center)
Long week is now over. Updated this week on GIS PILOT were some European GIS Links and the creation of a Canada GIS Link page. The Canadian updates include:
Palance died of natural causes at his home in Montecito, Calif., surrounded by family, said spokesman Dick Guttman. Palance was 85 according to Associated Press records, but his family gave his age as 87.
When Palance accepted his Oscar for best supporting actor he delighted viewers of the 1992 Academy Awards by dropping to the stage and performing one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his physical prowess. ...continue article at Washington Post
More about Jack Palance
WOW!
This is not Rummy's week.
TIME is reporting this exclusive about charges being brought against Rumsfeld for human rights violations. I have a feeling that Dick Cheney is going to be taking Rumsfeld Dove hunting soon, if you get my drift...
El Nino, perhaps!?....
Hey, as long as it doesn't make the Seahawks lose this weekend then all's well. Well, that and I hope no one gets hurt...
Police Brutality Video stirs up YouTube.
If anyone knows how to properly beat down people, it's the L.A.P.D. Not that I blame them. I mean this guy is nuts, totally out of control.
The weekend's coming up and I just know you could use something to pick up the spirits (non-alcoholoic version, that is).
So, here you go:
Sometimes Thursday rolls around and you really have no idea what it will bring you. Could you have ever imagined watching Office Space cut to look like a slasher flick? God bless the wonders of modern-day technology and the internet. What the Maynard? has recut scenes from Office Space into a trailer that makes it look horrifically good as a fear-inducing movie starring Milton as the killer. Come on, he's creepy, he mumbles, is misunderstood and he carries a red Swingline stapler. What's not to fear? He's a horror film baddie just waiting to be unleashed on the unsuspecting masses.
In fact, I've watched this trailer several times now (that really says a lot about me and how I spend my time, but I don't want to take away from the quality of the people who worked on this edit, so do your best to now ignore this entire parenthetical) and it gets better each time. It makes me want to see this version of the movie. Although they could have just as easily made Michael Bolton the bad guy if they used the footage from when he goes to town on the printer. That's scary enough in the normal version of the movie, although not quite as scary as fat David Herman in Idiocracy. Yikes. Check out the trailer
It's always fun when a new program hits the users. For awhile, all of us have been hearing about the potential of Virtual Earth 3D and now that it is out we get discover all the neat features that we didn't know about. Here's one that shows the bridges in Virtual Earth 3D that is posted by James Fee. 
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has seen something never before seen on another planet -- a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's South Pole with a well-developed eye, ringed by towering clouds.
View the ArcGIS usability enhancements.
This presentation covers various enchancements to help make the ArcGIS 9.2 a more efficient program for the user. Keyboard shortcuts, "My Place" tool, new zooms, and various other improvements are covered.
Thanks to Jason @ Flordia GIS Data Blog for this heads up.
I was reading the lengthy story into the death of former NFL Arizona Cardinal Pat Tillman's murde....I mean accidental death when the news of Ed Bradley passing came through. Mr. Bradley was a fixture on "60 Minutes" since 1961 and was CBS's first black White House correspondent. 
More on the "Virtual Earth" as Microsoft gives its Google Earth rival and new facelift.
The first reactor-on-a-barge will bring power to Russia’s electricity-starved Arctic
While the U.S. hems and haws over reviving nuclear energy as a less expensive alternative to oil, Russia has dug back 30 years in our nuclear history to find a solution for some of its own energy woes: the floating nuclear power plant.
The Russian nuclear-energy company Rosenergoatom is planning a mobile plant to deliver electricity to hard-to-reach northern territories near the White Sea, where harsh weather makes regular coal and oil fuel deliveries unreliable and expensive. The $200-million floating plant—slated for construction next year—could provide relatively inexpensive, reliable electricity to 200,000 people.
Although the concept of a water-borne nuke plant might sound outlandish, it isn’t new, nor did it originate in Russia. Westinghouse Electric Company considered the idea in the 1970s and built an immense dry-dock facility in Jacksonville, Florida, where plants would be launched and floated north along the Eastern Seaboard, con- veniently doling out power to towns in need.
Not only is this a real site and CD but you can go to iTunes and sample it before you buy it. There's just not much to say about this. It is what it is: an Irish guy singing Irish drinking songs with cats in the background. I'm stunned...
http://www.catdrinkingsongs.com/ 
Bush Says Rumsfeld Is Stepping Down
By DAVID ESPO and LIZ SIDOTI
WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary on Wednesday, one day after midterm elections in which opposition to the war in Iraq contributed to heavy Republican losses.
President Bush said he would nominate Robert Gates, a former CIA director, to replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
Asked whether his announcement signaled a new direction in the war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,800 U.S. troops, Bush said, "Well, there's certainly going to be new leadership at the Pentagon."
The Mid Term Elections have come and gone but there will be a few more days to tally some recounts. Doesn't matter as long as the commercials are off the TV I'll be happy.
"In a word: Wow. Microsoft is doing with its Earth program what I've wanted from Google for a while: Making one integrated mapping and globe-exploring service, not two products with different interfaces. With Virtual Earth, you get all of Microsoft's Live Local features (traffic data, email integration, bookmarks) with the additional capability to zoom around the 3D planet and see your locations from any angle. "
The online mapping applications war of Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth gets another component to it with Microsoft launching 3D city views for select areas. Here's a quip from their press release:
Watch the verdict unfold in the Saddam Hussein trial as he is sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.
GEORGIA gets a much needed update this week. The links have been updated on GIS PILOT already and I'll get to add them to this blog later. GEORGIA GIS Links Update include:
Bacon County Assessor Jackson County Assessor Baldwin County Assessor Brantley County Assessor Burke County GIS Butts County Assessor Candler County Assessor ... and about 30 more
News from around the world:
I've made sure you have something to do this weekend in between games. Take your pick:
How to draw a car in Microsoft Paint!
Ever wonder how your Nike's were made. Me neither. But, now that I've seen how they are made I recommend checking out the photos of the factory in China.
CBS News Exclusive: Data Found In Drug Raid Contains Weapons-Design Secrets
(CBS/AP) The recent security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory was very serious, with sensitive materials being taken out of the facility — possibly including information on how to deactivate locks on nuclear weapons, officials tell CBS News.
Officials say there is no evidence the information taken from Los Alamos was sold or transferred to anybody else, but there is no way to be sure right now.
As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was first to report, secret documents apparently taken from the lab were found during a drug raid at a Los Alamos-area home last month. The FBI was called in to investigate.
Based on the concept of Afrikatourism, the Open Africa project is linking the splendours of Africa in a continuous network of tourism routes from the Cape to Cairo. The achievement of this vision for Africa has been enabled by the integration of leading edge GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology with the Internet. The result is this website and the route maps that you can access on it. This means that viewers can interrogate maps down to the finest details of what they want to see and experience, while suppliers of facilities and providers of services can market their wares in the most cost efficient and effective manner possible. [more info]
More on the Linux situation from the AP here.
Microsoft gets ready for Zune, launches Zune.net
It's time for Microsoft to go after iPods huge digital music market. With Apple's iPod getting around 80% of the digital download market, you can see why companies like Microsoft are getting excited about new products. However, a few have tried and failed already. Anyone remember Sony's Music store about a year back? Didn't think so. But, Microsoft has built in advantages, namely creating the computers and browsers for most anyone that uses the internet. The Microsoft Internet Explorer released the newest version of its web browser, version 7 which is available for downloads. New features include tab browsing and built in search engine.
And, with the Microsoft XBox comes the soon to be released Playstation 3, which is brazen enough to command a price tag of around $500-600. Jeez!
Now, it's official. The new Windows program, VISTA, has an official release date!
"Microsoft announced that they will begin to ships their Windows Vista to corporate customer starting 30th November 2006 and the commercial release will be 30th January 2007. The big launch event will be held on 30th November at the NASDAQ Stock Market in midtown Manhattan and the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will reported be there."
Overfishing May Harm Seafood Population By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID WASHINGTON (AP) - Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems," said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are - beyond anything we suspected," Worm said.
While the study focused on the oceans, concerns have been expressed by ecologists about threats to fish in the Great Lakes and other lakes, rivers and freshwaters, too.
Worm and an international team spent four years analyzing 32 controlled experiments, other studies from 48 marine protected areas and global catch data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's database of all fish and invertebrates worldwide from 1950 to 2003.
More Features Added to Free Version!
The time feature implemented in the last version has been refined. You can now slow things down better, you can restrict the time slider to the current folder, and you can now choose "Bounce" for the animation instead of just "Wrap" or "Once".
Choose your flavor and go to town as Maps for MySpace layouts are available. This Myspace world visitor map will track all of the people that visit your myspace profile and record them with dots.
A few of my friends wanted me to post about the new Playboy issue with Cindy Margolis, the 1990's calendar girl. There's a bunch of people who have been waiting 10 years for her to drop the bikini top and now it has happened. And, you have to love the internet. The issues out and already online at Attu's World.
Margolis poses for a purpose in Playboy SUSAN BULLINGTON KATZ Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - She's been heralded for years as the most downloaded person on the Internet, which means ... aw, heck, you know what it means. People love looking at Cindy Margolis.
What it hasn't meant, all these years, though, as all those millions of lookers know, is seeing even one picture of this 21st-century pinup queen without at least a little something covering her.
No longer.
Margolis, who says she's 40 - her California birth record says she was born on Oct. 1, 1965, which would make her 41 - has been titillating fans since she was an undergrad at Cal State Northridge with her own line of greeting cards, has posed very au natural for Playboy.
. . . continue article on Cindy Margolis
View Pictures of Cindy Margolis from Attu (View at your own risk, she's all kinds of naked)
Ha!
Finding yourself in a FEMA Flood Zone can be a huge headache. To help you understand the process and effects of FEMA Flood Mapping here is a great article from Flordia, one place that knows about flooding.
By AMY REININK Sun staff writer
The winds raged and the rain poured, but Laura Wilson's home survived hurricanes Frances and Jeanne without so much as a puddle outside.
So Wilson was shocked to get a letter from her mortgage company about a month ago "telling me that if I didn't buy flood insurance within 30 days, they would buy it for me," Wilson said.
The letter was the result of an update to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Flood Insurance Rate Maps that placed Wilson's home in the Mentone subdivision off SW Archer Road in a flood zone - a classification Wilson said is almost certainly flawed, as she's miles from any body of water and her property never floods.
Alachua County officials said roughly 3,000 parcels in the county may be in the same situation.
Wilson said she didn't get really annoyed until she learned that the new maps were updated using maps drawn in 1974 - decades before her house was even built.
"This whole thing is sort of a fiasco," Wilson said. "Your property values are dropping if you're in a flood zone. The implications for homeowners are kind of big here."
Wilson is one of many Alachua County residents planning to attend a meeting with a FEMA representative tonight at the Alachua County Commission chambers, and one of many who hopes the meeting provides some answers.
County Manager Randall Reid said FEMA will not discuss specific parcels of property with individual homeowners. FEMA also will not make a presentation. The representative will answer general questions about the flood map program.
Modernizing maps
FEMA started to administer the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968.
As part of the program, FEMA has long offered maps showing which parts of a community are in a 100-year-flood zone, or an area that has a 1 percent or higher chance of flooding in a given year.
Anyone can buy flood insurance, but most mortgage companies require anyone who lives in a flood zone to carry it. That makes the FEMA flood maps especially important, as they determine who has to pay for flood insurance and who doesn't.
A few years ago, FEMA started working with municipal governments to modernize its flood maps, which in many cases were 30 years old or older.
FEMA approached Alachua County officials about modernizing its maps in 1999, said Michael Fay, assistant director of Alachua County's Public Works Department. At that point, the most recent FEMA flood maps for Alachua County were created in 1984 and updated in 1988, Fay said.
To update those maps, FEMA requested maps created by the North Central Florida Regional Planning Council in 1974 that were updated in 1986, saying they provided more detailed information about flood zones than the existing FEMA flood maps, Fay said.
But even with the 1986 update, Fay said the planning-council maps didn't include any information about recent developments in Alachua County or any recent stormwater improvements.
"FEMA viewed those as having the most accurate information available to them," Fay said. "They didn't ask for any development plans or anything like that."
Alachua County's Public Works Department started getting calls from residents like Wilson in August and September, Fay said. Several residents from subdivisions like Haile Plantation and Huntington approached the County Commission about the maps last month.
County commissioners and staff scheduled a meeting to discuss how to assist homeowners in newly designated flood zones.
Residents can appeal their flood-zone designations through an individual map-amendment process. To do so, they must pay the county $10 to issue a letter with information about the current flood-zone status, then pay for a survey of their land.
If the survey shows that the land is not in a flood zone, it isn't required to carry flood insurance, though the actual FEMA flood map stays the same, Fay said.
Wilson said the survey cost her $350, and said if her house isn't in a flood zone, it will cost an additional $100 for the surveyor to file paperwork with her mortgage company to relieve her of the flood-insurance requirement. Her flood insurance itself costs $317 per year, she said.
"It's not cheap," Wilson said. "And none of this has been fun."
Reid said county commissioners are committed to doing everything possible to ease the burden on affected homeowners, and said they would discuss waiving the $10 fee at the meeting.
But Fay said he's not sure what else county officials can do.
"We've tried to talk to FEMA about this," Fay said. "It appears that the remedies people are taking now - applying for individual letters of map amendments - it appears that's our only option."
State of the state
Alachua County isn't the only county to have problems with the new maps.
Reports from across the state describe homeowners protesting changes that place their homes in flood zones, with most saying they believe the new designations are erroneous.
And then there's the problem in Philadelphia. In 2002, a team of Temple University researchers started mapping a flood-prone region near Philadelphia to provide FEMA updated, detailed information about flood zones.
The maps they produced illuminated new flood risks in exacting detail, highlighting risks from minor tributaries and breaking down risks to a house-by-house level.
The problem: The maps were too specific. FEMA officials told the Temple researchers they couldn't use the maps because they were too detailed and only available in a digital format, said Jeffrey Featherstone, the Temple University hydrologist and planner who headed the project.
FEMA did not respond to questions about the Temple maps.
Featherstone said he's working with FEMA to find ways to make the maps usable. He said the situation was not only infuriating, but dangerous, leaving flood-prone people without knowledge that could save their lives and homes.
"The hydrology and modeling done for 90-some percent of all the areas mapped by FEMA is 30 to 40 years old," Featherstone said. "Once you develop in suburban areas, you change the hydrology drastically. However, most of the ordinances cities and counties have in place are based on old data and old maps and old information. We're having a real frustrating time with FEMA procedures and obsolete protocols that only encourage mediocrity. Some are understandable, but requiring paper maps at coarse scales doesn't seem too enlightening in a digital age."
Local solutions
Reid said the county's fledgling stormwater management program will provide hydrological information for timely, accurate flood maps in the future.
And Fay said the county's land development regulations require developers building on areas with flood hazards to apply for a map revision with FEMA. He said that allows FEMA to change its flood maps to reflect changes from new subdivisions, relieving the residents of those subdivisions of the problems people like Wilson are having.
Featherstone said based on his experience with FEMA, the agency will do everything within its power to help - even if its power is limited.
"The dilemma is that FEMA understands these problems," Featherstone said. "This is an agency that's getting beat up, and it seems like it wants to do the right thing, but doesn't have the resources to do it."
The Gainesville SunCopyright 2006, The Gainesville Sun
