Perhaps this is only an instance of our tendency to see faces everywhere. But nonetheless, located at coordinates 50° 0’36.67″N 110° 6’51.38″W in the mountains of Alberta, Canada is a geological formation which arguably bears strong resemblance to a Mayan chieftain. One wonders how he feels about recent oil drilling in the area:
How to find the giant profile head on Google Earth. Share this with anyone and everyone who also seeks weirdness.
(Adopts sarcastic tone) Ooo, what an unusual angle for a UFO story!
It’s always great to allow reporters to demonstrate their “hilarious” sense of humour isn’t it?
Via the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman on Google and Apple’s quests to map the world in ever greater detail, and how our maps’ creators shape how we engage with the world:
[Almost a decade ago], Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been fascinated by the zooming satellite imagery used by US news networks to report on bombing raids in Iraq. Those terrain graphics were provided by Keyhole, Inc, a software company that the CIA had helped to fund. Unlike the rest of us, Page and Brin had the wherewithal to act upon their fascination: they bought Keyhole, repackaging and releasing the firm’s software as Google Earth in 2005.
“They say they bought it because it looked cool,” says Brotton. “But my view is that they absolutely knew what they were buying. They marketed it in this touchy-feely way, as an environmental thing, and they called it ‘Earth’ – ‘Google World’ would have sounded imperialist.
Amazing, the Mayans’ breathtaking pyramids can now be wandered remotely. The Los Angeles Times reveals:
For travelers who’ve never been to the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza, a virtual window into the site’s pyramids and plazas is available online, among 30 archaeological zones in Mexico now mapped by Google Street View. A viewer can almost feel like they might tumble into the Sacred Cenote, or natural sinkhole, where Maya priests practiced ritual sacrifice. Or imagine cavorting on the Plaza of the Thousand Columns.
Google and Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, announced the new maps last week. Using a 360-degree camera mounted on a bicycle, Google captured “street views” of other major archaeological sites in Mexico, such as Monte Alban in Oaxaca and Teotihuacan outside Mexico City.
Lesser-known Mesoamerican sites are also now mapped by Google Street View, including Tula in the state of Hidalgo and Xochicalco in Morelos.
Via Google Sightseeing, a series of aerial shots of Richmond, California that captured more than intended:
The ever increasing resolution of Google’s imagery has continued to reveal greater detail people’s lives, but this is the first time an aerial photgraph of such a graphic nature has been published on the site.
We can’t be sure about the details of the scene – there’s no sign of injury from this distance – but the number of police officers and vehicles (both marked and unmarked) suggests that this is unlikely to have been a case of accidental death.
Get ready for augmented-reality glasses that stream information to your eyeballs about the people and places surrounding you. Also, they will look like Oakleys worn by dads on motorboats. The New York Times writes:
People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.
The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.
9eyes is one of the best collections of Google Street View screenshots, providing a haunting glimpse of the world we live in, culled from all seven continents and presented without context. Are all of these real? Some of the strangest entries can be confirmed as legitimate.
The whole world as a first-person shooter game. It’s down at the moment due to a the kibosh from Google, but Google Shoot View allows you to traverse Google Street View will holding an assault rifle, and to fire upon anything (to no effect). It’s quite existentially disturbing. Perhaps, visit your childhood home and unload a few rounds, to symbolize releasing and moving on from the burdens of the past:
Long-term decay on the internet can be a fascinating thing. Google Maps’ not-quite-as-popular sister site Yahoo! Maps hasn’t updated some of its street images since the nineties, giving you the ability to virtually explore a pre-millennial London which some people prefer to the city today, Londonist writes:
Remember the days when Arsenal still played at Highbury? Those halcyon times when Heathrow was content with four terminals, when you could catch a train to Paris from Waterloo, and when Westfield was, if you had to guess, the latest boyband off of that new Popstars show on ITV.
In Yahoo! Maps, London is stuck in a new-Millennial timewarp. The satellite view still shows the old Wembley Stadium, complete with twin towers. Demolition of the landmark was completed in 2003, but hasn’t even started here. Over at St Pancras, work on the mammoth new Eurostar terminal has barely begun, while Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is a giant building site.
Note: click on the image below to see on Google Maps. Harry Haydon writes in the Sun:
A desert sheikh has carved out a big name for himself — by having his moniker etched in capital letters visible from space. Workmen scoured “HAMAD” into the sand on the orders of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan.
The name is two miles across — with letters a kilometre high. It is so huge that the “H”, the first “A” and part of the “M” have been made into waterways. The mega-rich sheikh, 63 — a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi — in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates — boasts a £14billion fortune that is second only to the Saudi king’s.
