“Apart from the side-mounted railguns, I demand very little from my car but that it get me around in reasonable comfort and dubious safety.”
— J Greely, who has completely forgotten when, where, or why he said thisMystery Object
Something I found on Google Earth:
Usually, if none of the informational layers in GE has something, you can find a nearby picture in the Panoramio layer that will give you a clue, but there’s nothing nearby. A Street View camera on a nearby highway caught it, though, so I knew what sort of thing it had to be.
Not that I really had to work that hard. Opening the area in Google Maps revealed a clear label on a nearby building, for anyone who can read Japanese…
I promise
“I will not laugh. I will not laugh. I will not laugh.”
At this.
I suppose there’s a chance that he’s being deliberately vague about his actual project and the scale of the data involved, but he sounds so earnest.
Modern humor
I had an amusing encounter in the grocery store just now. I was all set to write about it, and then I realized that the simple, natural, accurate way to describe the other party could lead to accusations of racism. And sexism. And ageism. And classism. And probably a few other -isms under development by a crack squad of victimologists in San Francisco.
So, anyway, “a person of intoxication lacked sufficient funds to acquire three 40-ounce alcoholic beverages and a bouquet of flowers”.
Hope you liked it.
The Lexmouse will kill you
When I took my car in for service this morning, they gave me a 2010 Lexus RX-350 as a loaner. It includes their new “Remote Touch” controller for the navigation system, climate control, radio-station selection, etc.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a car. It’s a mouse. A five-button mouse. That drives an honest-to-gosh giant hand cursor on the display. Your right hand naturally and comfortably rests on a goddamn mouse that is active while you’re driving. And the “intuitive” user interface it’s controlling? Draws your eyes off the road, because even though the mouse “clicks” when you pass over a button, you still have free X-Y movement that can take you off of the buttons. And the UI has modes. Buttons aren’t in the same place in different modes. Functionality isn’t the same in different modes.
When I first heard about this gadget, and Lexus called it “…as natural to the driver’s hand as a computer mouse”, I just made a joke about car-pool tunnel injuries, but they’re serious, and so is the risk of distracting drivers.
Do. Not. Want.
(and, um, if you see someone driving one of these things, “steer clear”)
Eyeballing Google Earth
From 3,200 miles up, dots are visible representing the major population centers of Japan.
From 3,000 miles up, I can see the country’s name in English, as well as labels for the dots: Kōbe, 大阪, 神戸, Nagoya/名古屋, Yokohama, 東京, Saitama (yes, in this precise mix of kanji and romanization), and I gain one lonely dot in Hokkaido. Amusingly, I also gain two labels for the body of water to the west of Japan: East Sea, and Sea of Japan.
Just below 3,000 miles, that dot in Hokkaido gains the labels Sapporo and 札幌. Also, prefectural boundaries begin to fade into view.
At 1,700 miles, Chiba/千葉 gets a dot and two names. Since I’m centering the main island in the viewport, so does Fukuoka/福岡, and four islands get names: Shikoku, Kyushu, Hirado-shima, and Tanega-shima.
(note: mousing over any of the points highlights it for the renderer, so if my mouse passes over 大阪, it will gain the label Ōsaka, which will persist out to 3,000 miles until I highlight something else; after discovering this feature, I’ve been careful not to disturb GE’s natural selection mechanism…)
Just above 1,500 miles, the 東京 dot adds the name Tōkyō. The main island Honshu joins the list, as do Awaji-shima and Fukue-jima. We also pick up Seto Naikai, the inland sea.
Just below 1,500 miles, a dot and a name for 横浜, and off in the corner, lonely little Okinawa-jima gets a name. From here on in, I can’t keep everything from Okinawa to Hokkaido in view, so I’m going to center on roughly where I believe Kyōto to be. I can’t see it yet, but I know it’s near 大阪, whose label just disappeared. When I center it in the viewport, I don’t get 大阪 back, but the point is now labeled Ōsaka, so onward!
400 miles up, and still no sign of Kyoto. 300 miles, 200 miles, still nothing.
Just under 200 miles up, I get prefecture names for Osaka, Nara, Wakayama, and Mie. Perhaps if I shift the view a bit? Success! Moving Ōsaka to the bottom third of the viewport gives me prefecture names for Hyogo, Kyoto, Shiga, Fukui, and Gifu (and, yes, the prefecture names lack the long-o).
100 miles up, still no dot for Kyōto; the prefecture name is in the upper third of the screen, but it looks pretty sparse up there; that can’t be where the city is.
Below 100 miles, city boundaries start fading in, but still no new dots.
50 miles up, and the dots for Ōsaka and Kōbe are nearly offscreen, and the Kyoto prefecture name is soon to follow. Still no new dots.
40 miles up. Ōsaka and Kōbe gone, Kyoto prefecture name gone, no more dots, no more labels. There are two city-looking areas on the map, a small one near the center and a bigger one off to the right. Let’s center the big one in the viewport. Nope, still nothing.
25 miles up, and I’ve got ku! Within a single unlabeled border, I see Kita-ku, Kamigyo-ku, Nakagyo-ku, Shimogyo-ku, Higashiyama-ku, Yamashina-ku, Minami-ku, Kishikyo-ku, Fushimi-ku. Nearby bordered areas gain the labels Muko-shi, Nagaokakyo-shi, Uji-shi, Oyamazaki-cho, and Shimamoto-cho. I’ve got all the wards of Kyōto, but not the city itself.
12 miles up, and I’ve got new dots. Most of them add detail and kanji to my previously-known ku’s, but one of them actually says 京都市. Also, off in the corner, I now see Ōtsu/大津市.
As I pass the 10-mile mark and the display switches to feet, there it is at last, the label Kyōto. From this distance, I can see that Kyoto Station is neatly centered in the viewport.
Of course, I could have just typed “kyoto” into the search box and flown there in an instant, but where’s the fun in that?
Oh, and when I let GE find Kyōto for me, it took me straight to City Hall. When I zoomed in close and turned on the Panoramio layer, I found a photo insisting that City Hall looked a lot like Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion. I logged into Panoramio and suggested relocating that one 3 miles northwest.
Unfortunate romanization
Yukie Kawamura is a successful model in Japan. She has a nickname, ゆっきー, derived from her first name, ゆきえ.
If you can read hiragana, you can see where this is going. For the rest of you, her name should be pronounced as if it were three syllables yoo-kee-ay. Her nickname was formed by replacing the “ay” with an extension of the “ee”, and adding a glottal stop before the “k”, for “yook-(pause)-eeee”, which sounds precisely like something a devoted fan would shout upon sighting her.
What does it look like romanized on a mildly-NSFW DVD cover?
Dear Apple,
I thought you said that accounting rules required you to charge for iPod Touch software updates. So why is it that the big iOS 4.0 update showed up for free for me?
Not that I’m complaining, you understand. Perhaps if iOS 4.0 makes my iTouch more iuseful, I’ll eventually be persuaded to ibuy an iPad, a device that hasn’t yet caught my ifancy.
