Free High-res NASA Earth Images
NASA has released a huge number of high-resolution pictures of our planet earth at visibleearth.nasa.gov, which are, of course, free from copyright restriction of any kind, NASA being a government agency. Want a photo of our big blue marble planet? Check. Want to download infrared (IR) imagery of various parts of the earth? Check. Want to look at foliage, sea levels, or some other geological feature? Check.
They’re even using torrents (BT) to distribute high resolution photos of certain parts of the earth. Personally, I’ve never seen a 86400 x 43200 photo before, and one 1/4 of each dimension, or 1/16 smaller took 10 minutes to open in Photoshop with a gig and a half of RAM and a server scratch drive with a 16MB buffer. I’m glad they’re not using Apache to serve 2.9GB photos!
Very recently, NASA also put out this gorgeous picture of the southern lights, or aurora australis, as their IMAGE satellite circled the earth on September 11, 2005 after an unusually high burst of solar flare radiation:
The colored lights are the result of high-energy particles reacting with the earth’s magnetic shield.
It’s early in the morning!
But I’d like to mention that Google is now providing censored results via their .cn domain. This doesn’t bode well for the promulgation of American free speech, but it will certainly be more profitable for them to comply with local governance. Google’s also on my good list recently for refusing to turn over search data to the US government. On the other hand, the amount of raw data they collect hourly is probably quite scary too. Can you imagine what they could do with geographical information from the IP addresses, coupled with complete knowledge of what every page on the web means? Basic analysis aside, like clustering the web into topical areas and then matching your pages with those clusters, timeseries analysis of this kind of data could reveal the conversation of a young French man to Islam, and then to more fundamental Islam, and finally into a terrorist. If you have so much data and so much ability, do you then have a moral responsibility to mine it for patterns that could bring about change for the greater good?
Too Much Space in my Schedule
There’s way to much space in my schedule this semester for my liking–I should take another class I think, but I’m already at 20 credits. Take a look for yourself:
I guess to fill the space and light load I’ll try the following:
- 1) Getting As in all my classes
- 2) Mastering above and beyond the level of Chinese offered in class
- 3) Pushing out a new blog layout and level of blog innovation (soon)
- 4) Achieving 72,000+ yearly income from blog advertising
- 5) Spending time with my girlfriend