Did you know that San Francisco is in the midst of a crime spree? Someone keeps burning porta-potties to the ground. 22 so far. "All the plastic was melted down to the floor, and it smelled horrible, horrible, horrible." Here's a Google Map showing the color-coded locations.

I am pleased to get to use both my poop and maps tags at the same time.

Dear Google,

My most hated Google Maps misfeature: I'm zoomed in and I want to find a restaurant near the corner I'm looking at. Or, in this case, I'm looking at the restaurant's building on Street View but they don't have a sign and I don't remember what it's called.

You can't get there from here.

The phone version (PalmOS, at least) realizes that you want to see things near here, but the web page doesn't. No matter what you search for, it zooms you out to "city view" (if you're lucky: sometimes you get the whole continent.)

How much more context could I possibly give than the area I am already looking at? Why does it zoom out all the time! Gaah!

WTF, Google.

This reminds me of the "censorship" pixelization code in The Sims that prevents you from ever seeing their little 1×2-pixel SimRogenous zones. (Don Hopkins once told me a long story about how hard that was to implement...)

There are also now Wikipedia links in the maps (checkbox on the "More" tab). There aren't very many of them, though. Anyone know what triggers their presence?

I think it's hilarious that this orange truck — CA license plate 4Y84599^* — is going to be parked in front of Google's notional DNA Lounge for (possibly) years, based on how infrequently they update the satellite imagery!

See also:

• Robot Exclusion Protocol;
• Starbucks To Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' Of Operation.

"Here we have a hyperbolic display of blogs using both the WWE and the ICWSM 2007 data sets.

Green links are one way; blue links are reciprocal. LJ is over the eastern horizon, DailyKos is in the middle, Boing Boing is northeast, and porn is in Japan.

This is amazingly good! Instead of a web page using JavaScript tricks, it's a native app, so you can scroll around and all the magic popups and stuff work. And it doesn't require you to install half a gigabyte of Java VM first.

Neat flash animation of who has controlled the middle east throughout history.

GE Maps censored by French Court

A French court has ordered Greenpeace France to remove a webpage featuring a Google Map showing the location of commercial GE maize fields in France -- despite an EU law which says the government should make the information available to the public.

So today we have responded by carving a giant 'X' crop circle into one of the GE maize fields in question, marking the spot of the GE maize field that is now censored from Greenpeace Frances' webpage.

"As we are now forbidden to publish these maps of GE maize on our webpage, we have gone into the fields and marked the field for real," said Arnaud Apoteker, of Greenpeace France.

Also, Cursor Kite.

Ruling Antarctica

On first coming to Argentina, I was amused to find that every map of the country included a little pie-slice of Antarctica. Whether it was the bus map, the television weather forecast, or the Aerolineas Argentinas in-flight magazine, no map of Argentina was complete without the two dots of the Falklands Islas Malvinas and a little inset in the corner showing a blank wedge of Antarctica, much in the way American maps will sometimes show Alaska. [...]

We've been conditioned by National Geographic and the Discovery channel to speak of Antarctica in hushed superlatives and treat it as an awesome spectacle of God's Creation. But it is worth pointing out that Antarctica is an armpit. By any objective standard, the place is cold, sterile, windy, dry, and has no night life to speak of. The nearest land mass is remote and windy Tierra del Fuego, which nevertheless comes out looking like Las Vegas by comparison. The only people genuinely excited about Antarctica are climatologists, who inevitably go there just to make dire discoveries that bring everybody else down, and astronomers, who resent human settlement and the atmosphere and are overjoyed to find a place with very little of either. Exobiologists get very excited about Antarctica as a laboratory for what life might look like in more exotic environments, like Mars or the moons of Jupiter, but this just serves as a useful reminder that life on earth has decided to take a pass on Antarctica. In a world where entire species of ants specialize in X-treme environments like 130 degree Nubian sands, the largest land species to choose Antarctica is a midge. This is not prime real estate, no matter how nice that wedge looks on the map.

Has Google Sightseeing found map errors...
or something far more sinister?

Google Sightseeing is a blog where a few folks have been posting links to aerial shots of famous things on Google Maps: St. Louis Arch, Stargate Command, Niagra Falls, Airplane Graveyard, etc. Syndicated on LJ as gmaps_sights.

If you haven't seen Google Maps yet, check it out: it's pretty impressive! If, like me, you're too lazy to read the source to figure out how they accomplished it, that's fine, because this guy has posted an analysis. Short version: lots of transparent PNG overlays, and communication with the server by treating a hidden IFRAME as a socket.

PBS used to have this Map-a-Blast page where you could type in your address and select a megatonnage and get a customized map of the destroyed areas. It was pretty sweet, but it's gone (replaced by static text.) There's another site that has interactive blast maps, but only for paltry 10 kiloton blasts.

But my question today for you, the lazyweb, is this: how badly would San Francisco fare against a Pacific tsunami? Surely someone has done simulations of this, but it's un-googleable due to the large number of things named "tsunami" that have nothing to do with tsunamis.

I'm wondering whether Twin Peaks would deflect it at all, or whether the waves would roll right on through to Oakland.