James Stafford (aka “Barnabu” at the Google Earth Community) has created a cool way to show a realistic sky in Google Earth. He’s written about it in his blog, and Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog has two posts about it as well.
Google has just pushed out their June update to the 3D buildings layer. Some cities with updates include Chicago, Christchurch (New Zealand), Karachi, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Moscow.
In addition, there is a big bug in this update. There is a building in western Turkey that looks like a normal house but is about 11 miles wide! You can view it here, but hurry — Google will likely fix it soon.
Google Earth Blog has the rest of the details about this update.
GuiWeather has just released a network link that shows current lightning strikes (well, within a few minutes old) around the world, in the form a slick 30 minute time-animated network link.
Google Earth Blog has the details
.
This is both amazingly cool and horribly frustrating. The Institute for the Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has built a complete 3D model of the city of Rome
as it was in 320 A.D. “Rome Reborn”, as it’s called, is astoundingly sharp and consists of billions of data points. FTA:
“To create the digital model, researchers scanned a 3,000 square foot, 1/250 plaster model of the city – the “Plastico di Roma Antica” – which was completed in the 1970s. Because of the model’s intricacy – the Plastico’s Coliseum is only 8 inches tall — Italian engineers used laser radar originally designed to measure precise tolerances on jet parts to scan within a tenth of a millimeter. Each 6-by-6 section contained 60 million data points.”
As of now it has only been licensed to a tour company in Rome, but they’re in talks with Second Life to bring it there. We can only hope that it might find its way into Google Earth or one of the other digital globes one day as well.
Google Earth Blog has a write-up describing a technology that Google is working on to scan books, dig out the location information, then plot it in Google Earth. From there, you’ll be able to browse the locations from a book, or click a location and view the page where it was mentioned. Very cool!
I’ve read a lot of comments over the last few weeks with wild theories about how PageRank works. Some things I’ve heard:
Four of those are completely wrong. One is right — incoming links. When calculating PageRank, all that matters are the links coming into your site.
Understand, of course, that hundreds of other things can affect your ranking in Google, including those items listed above. However, for PageRank it’s just simple math.
Here is the formula Google used when PageRank first came out. The currently formula is possibly a bit different, but certainly quite similar:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
Let’s break it down:
PR(A) — The PageRank of your site
(1-d)
— d is the “dampening factor”, typically 0.85
+ d(PR(t1)/C(t1) — PR(t1) is the PR of a site linking to you. That PageRank is divided by the number of outgoing links on that page so that each link from that page gets an equal slice of the PageRank.
PR(tn)/C(tn) — Same idea as the last one, just showing us that it keeps adding the totals from every page that is linking to you, the multiplies that total by d, the dampening factor.
The dampening factor serves two purposes. First, it makes sure that every page has some PageRank, even if there are no links coming in to it. In that case, the PageRank is simply (1-d), or 0.15.
The second reason is so you couldn’t get a page up to a certain level and then run single links off of it to other pages and have them all instantly at the same high level.
It’s also important to note that the number calculated here is not the same as the 0-10 number that you see in the Google toolbar. That number is based on this one.
The 0-10 number in the toolbar is set on a logarithmic scale. Google won’t say what the scale is, but most people figure it’s around 5. This means you need five times as much PageRank to move up to each new level. This also means that there are 1/5 as many sites at each higher level.
Here’s the bottom line. PageRank is based on three things and three things only:
That’s it! Nothing else goes into it. Again, though, hundreds of things go into determining your exact ranking position, but nothing else goes into your PageRank calculation.
Johannes Kebeck, Technology Specialist for Virtual Earth, has just released some drawing tools
to make it easier to add lines and shapes inside of VE. You can find them here.
It’s shame that something as simple as drawing basic shapes in still such a chore in VE — even this solution requires a bunch of code. Google Earth has them beat badly on this front, but they continue to make progress.
Update 6/14/07: These drawing tools were already in VE – they were just hard to find. You have to “add pushpin”, and then change it to a poly. This is simply UI tools for drawing for the dev community.
The June 2nd imagery update for Google Earth is now available in Google Maps, including most of England as well as various other places around the world.
Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog has just posted a file that shows exactly which areas of the western US are now covered by the 10m 3D terrain.
As he suggests, you really need to head out there, turn your terrain detail up pretty high and enjoy the view!
In an effort to get more cities modeled in 3D, Google has created a new category in the 3D Warehouse titled “Help Model a City“. They’re encouraging users such as yourself to go in there and help create some of these models. So far they have five cities listed — Ann Arbor, Michigan : Amherst, Massachusetts : Astana, Kazahstan : Brookline, Massachusetts : San Jose, California.
It seems like a good way to encourage more people to help model the buildings. I still expect Google to create a semi-automated process to handle this (similar to how Virtual Earth does it), but in the meantime this could help get more buildings up there.
The Google Lat Long blog has more information.