Monday, November 14, 2005

Google risk!

In a comment to a [previous post] Simon mentioned that the barycenter of himself (in Durham) to me (in Hong Kong) is likely to be somewhere over the czech republic. Whilst he's probably not far off and way more sophisicated than Google Earth, I did have a little fun playing around with the measurement tool on the aforementioned program.

It turns out that we're separated by 5,901.17 Miles (that's 5,580,571.57 smoots) give or take a few inaccuracies in my ruler!!

Most of you know I'm a real sucker for anything with a 'global' theme. Hence I've been closely following another Google revelation - Google Maps. The cool thing for programmers is that Google have opened up their mapping software, allowing them to use maps in there programs.

Obviously this has some immediate implications - Housing Maps can now provide a clickable, zoomable, accurate map of their houses for sale in the usa (incidently driven by Craigslist), during Hurrican Katrina people were able to post online information about their whereabouts and the condition of the area they were in - great for worried families, and useful in planning humanitarian response.

But by far the coolest and funnest use I've found so far is Google Risk Its awesome! Not only do you get to play Risk (I love that game!) but you get to do it on a *real* map of the world that you can click and zoom and play with. We're gonna start a mass game in the office sometime thanks to XP's remote desktop feature!!!

Steve is very happy! :o)

1 comment:

Sipech said...

Not just myself. I was considering most of the old cell/CU gang and you. If it was just between you and me, it there would be two points equadistant from us that lie on the great circle connecting us. One might be somewhere off the west Mexian coast with the other point being somewhere near Uzbekistan, I'd guess!