links for 2009-06-08
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WSJ article: "Chasing After Crude in China? Just Log On" and use Google Earth to track refining capacity
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ConnoteaReverse geocode in iPhoto '09 using AppleScript
Adam Burt writes in with some news that will be of interest to Mac users who like to script their workflows:
I guess you might have seen this, with this week's update of iPhoto to 8.0.3? Apple have added latitude, longitude, altitude and reverse geocode capabilities within the photo properties of the scripting dictionary of iPhoto.
I've cooked up a couple of scripts you can try out using iPhoto and Google Earth. All you have to do is select a photo that has a location associated with it, be it a GPS related date or one you have chosen from within iPhoto, then run the script.
This script shows you where the photo was taken...
This script will link to the selected photo within your iPhoto library and display it along with its location as well within Google Earth...
To reverse geocode an image without Lat & Long data:tell application "iPhoto"To reverse geocode an image with Lat & Long data:
set myImage to the selection
tell myImage
set altitude of item 1 of myImage to 23 -- In meters.
set longitude of item 1 of myImage to 0.003976
set latitude of item 1 of myImage to 51.397592
reverse geocode of item 1 of myImage
end tell
end telltell application "iPhoto"Cheers,
set myImage to the selection
tell myImage to reverse geocode of item 1 of myImage
end tell
Adam
In search of Britain's newly discovered 6000 year-old tombs
Via Vincent Brown's always-relevant archaeological Twitter alerts I learned about what is being termed one of Britain's most exciting archaeological find in years: Two 6000 year-old tombs have been discovered not far from Stonehenge, near the village of Damerham.
So far, only the local media has the scoop. From the June 4 article in the Southern Daily Echo we learn that:
The tombs were discovered after staff from English Heritage studied aerial photographs of farmland in the Damerham area and saw signs of buried archaeological sites.
There's even more info in the June 5 article:
The tombs, thought to be among the oldest ever found in the UK, are already helping to reveal how we may have worked the land – more than a thousand years before even Stonehenge was heaved into place.
If aerial photos helped flag the plot for further research, what might Google Earth show? Is there enough information online to find the exact location of the tombs? It proved to be a challenge impossible to resist.
Googling "Damerham" led me to the village's wikipedia page (!), which in turn led me to the Damerham Archaeology Project website, which turns out to be the very same project being reported on in the Southern Daily Echo.
The project website seems to have been last updated during the 2008 summer season, before the import of the find became clear. But it does sport the aerial imagery that first alerted the archaeologists to the location, so it was just a matter of matching the view in the image with that in Google Earth.
It didn't take long. Damerham is a small village, and field shapes in the area are distinctive, so finding the exact location was easy. I've marked the spots in this KML file.
Aerial shot (from the Damerham Archaeology Project):
Google Earth view:
It is interesting to compare the aerial photos on the website to those in Google Earth. Clearly, the aerial photo was taken in a season when the fields show off the cropmarks at their fullest. The current Google Earth view shows off one circle pretty clearly, and hints at the oblong mound flanked by two ditches referred to on the website.
But turn on the historical timeline, and you get more imagery of the fields. Strangely, the current view in Google Earth of the fields is not the most recent — it's from 2002, or even 2000 (as those two years clearly use the same source imagery). But move to the imagery taken during 2005 and you'll find a much clearer view: The mound and ditches are clearly there, and there is another circular cropmark visible near the big one, as this false-color version makes clear (lower right):
The other features, however, are fully hidden by the crops. Clearly, there is an advantage to commissioning your own aerial imagery intead of relying on Google Earth:-)
links for 2009-06-06
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Bing Maps update tour: Full screen option very nice, UI less so (try pressing the play triangle) And can I have metadata?
links for 2009-06-02
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Atlas of True Borders: Google map of de facto independent states and sovereign bases
links for 2009-06-01
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Video of Sweden's C3 Technologies demoing their automated 3D mapping technology at Where 2.0
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GigaOm: Google's Kokkevis "raised the possibility that Google might port Sketchup and Google Earth into O3D"
North Korea's 2009 nuclear test: A geospatial roundup
On May 25, 2009, North Korea performed a second underground test of a nuclear explosive. The first test had taken place on October 9, 2006, and resulted in several KML files pinpointing the suspected location of the test. What follows is round-up of the public geospatial intelligence gathered this time around. Where relevant, I've collected the information into this KMZ file. All content is attributed to its original sources.
CTBTO
The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-test-ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) has posted the results of its remote sensing analysis regarding where precisely the test was conducted. In addition to its best guess for 2006 (the "2006 Reviewed Event Bulletin" (REB) ellipse), we are also given the first and second automated guesses (SEL1 and SEL2) as well as the organization's latest best guess (the red "2009 REB Event" ellipse). The CTBTO is confident the 2009 test was conducted somewhere inside the red ellipse.
Unfortunately, the ellipses aren't available as KML, so I've overlaid the JPG of the CTBTO's conclusions on Google Earth. (As you zoom in, be sure to turn off this layer if you want to see the region at the highest possible resolution.)
IMINT & Analysis
Over on IMINT & Analysis, Sean O'Connor has a long and detailed post looking at the imagery in the region, wherein he identifies two additional potential specific sites at which the test may have been conducted in addition to the northernmost site, which is usually the one mooted as the most likely candidate.
Sean hasn't put these placemarks online (as far as I can tell), so I've annotated the three sites in the KMZ file.
ISIS
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) published a PDF report on May 27 that contains a satellite image of the likely test site taken on May 14, 2009, just 11 days before the test itself.
The above KMZ file contains the image in the PDF, overlaid on top of the base imagery in Google Earth, which was taken on February 15, 2005. An additional overlay of the same location, commissioned by GlobalSecurity.org and taken a few days after the 2006 test, is added to the file. (I found it in the exhaustive (and now well-known) KMZ layer by North Korea Uncovered.)
Finally, for reference, I added POIs of the region annotated by ArmsControlWonk.com in 2006, based on a New York Times article of July 25, 2005 that cited US intelligence and brought the area to the wider public's attention for the first time.
When living in Africa or Europe or the Americas, what North Korea does can at times look bizarre but distant and abstract. Now that I live in Shanghai, a mere 800km away, the implications are a lot more tangible, and it appears that this time around, China's leadership too has been shaken out of its complacency. To be continued, of course.
links for 2009-05-27
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The Earth just got flatter, thanks to Google Map Maker. But what about Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and the West Bank?
links for 2009-05-26
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@arabist reports: Google Maps adds Arabic street names
links for 2009-05-25
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Is India's Bhuvan satellite maps site being rolled out this week?
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