The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
We've got video and audio files, millions of pictures and more word documents than we know what to do with. Information is in no short supply in the modern world. We're drowning in it. We have more information available to us in an hour of net surfing than people in the middle ages had access to over their entire lifetimes. Now we have new types. Google, not content to have a stranglehold on the text, image and video world, has released Google Earth as a free version. A few months old, Google Earth is one of those tools that once you have it and get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever went without. Google has done a fabulous job of creating a virtual globe out of billions of satellite photos that users can fly around on, zooming into cities and landmarks around the globe. This tool lets you either search for places by simply browsing around a globe. If you're searching for a landmark, it will automatically fly you there. For example, type in "pyramids of Giza" and the globe will rotate, fly you over to Egypt and zoom in down close to street level until you can see all of the buildings and the cars on the streets of Cairo. The major urban areas of Europe and North America are mapped down to incredible detail. My grade seven and eight students have spent considerable time comparing the types of vehicles in the parking lots of Chicago and Los Angeles, but heading to Snow Lake or Flin Flon only gives you a blurry outline of the town. Amazingly fun, informative, and addictive, you can spend hours looking through the harbours of Hong Kong, the traffic circles of the Middle East, and finding every house or apartment you've ever lived in. Of course, being an online product, Google will also help you to find hotels, restaurants, and gift shops near every landmark that you are interested in. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you are using Google Earth to scout out a tourist spot before you travel. Worth the download time, Google Earth only works if you have a high-speed connection with a fairly new computer, so make sure you check out what is needed before you try running it. The other map I've recently been playing with is the exact opposite. This Christmas, my wife bought me a telescope, something I've wanted since I was a little boy. But telescopes have changed. No longer the long white tubes, my Meade EXT 125 is a short tube about 2 1/2 feet long, but it has mirror in it about 10 inches in diameter. One of the most interesting things about this machine is the handheld computer that comes with it. About the size of a palm pilot or a paperback book, this small machine can hook up to an Internet connected computer and download whatever are the best sites to see in your area for that very night. Setting up the telescope and turning it on, it automatically orients itself to the sky; the motors inside the machine whir, it finds North, the North Star and then is ready to use. Hooking up the handheld, it has a database of 30,000 celestial objects, ranging from stars to planets, galaxies and moons. An amazing array. This machine also has the capability of being hooked up to a digital camera, and can take beautiful pictures of objects in the night sky. Meanwhile, online mapping has boomed in the past year. In the last few days the European Union has launched the first of its Galileo satellites. A global positioning system similar to the GPS, the Europeans have finally decided that being reliant on a system run by the U.S. military Ð one that can be blocked at any moment Ð is possibly not the wisest plan. Devices will be available beginning in 2008 and they promise this system will be even more accurate then the U.S. version. What new information will this make available to us? ([email protected])
