Rambles at starchamber.com

I like maps and strange things, so a blog devoted to strange maps is double treat. I first came across the site because of this nifty map matching all 50 American states with countries having commensurate GDPs. Thus California, the wealthiest state, is paired with France, and so on down to lowly Wyoming-Uzbekistan. There are [...]

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I’m reading a biology book right now, The Making of the Fittest, that talks about how much information about the past we’re able to reconstruct from the forensic record of currently available DNA. One of the things that Sean Carroll, the author, talks about is the fossil genes to be found in our genome. Fossil [...]

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Only a couple of posts ago I was pointing to a short video demonstration of Photosynth. Now here’s a nifty video from mok3.com (which maps to http://travel.supertour.com/). The Supertour stuff that you see on the website doesn’t impress me so much… QuickTime VR was there years ago, but the video is a nice piece [...]

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Movies that depict fictional encounters with alien life forms always seem so tame compared to the weird animals here on Earth. The deep sea is one of the best places to go looking for the unusual, and the good news is that we’re getting lots of snapshots these days.
Claire Nouvian is the author of a [...]

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This is one of those videos you should just watch without knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen.
Okay, I can tell you that this video involves lions chasing down a water buffalo. This part is very much dog-bites-man, straight out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. We’ve seen it all before. Then things [...]

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You may have seen the demos pages for Microsoft’s Photosynth project, but here’s an impressive video of a live demo from the latest TED conference: Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth. Photosynth is a tool for managing and aggregating photos and information about photos across whole populations of people. I like how the presenter emphasizes [...]

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Regenerative braking is the process by which a car like the Toyota Prius can simultaneously slow down your car and turn some of your kinetic energy into electricity. The basic insight is this: a moving car is lovely energy source, waiting to be harvested. When you step on the brakes, as eventually you must, your [...]

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Zillow has gotten such glowing reviews of its real estate heat maps (cool blue is cheap; red hot is expensive) that it has made them available for much of the country. It’s fun to browse around at the state level looking for high contrast regions. For instance, you don’t need a realtor’s license to see [...]

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Be sure and look at the new street views in Google Maps. In some neighborhoods for a few big cities, they give you the ability to “drive around” and look in any direction. Amazon had something like this, but this feels better to me.
Here, for example, is the house where I lived when I [...]

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