It might not be so funny if the kid looked hurt, but assuming he’s ok, this is the funniest Google StreetView find I’ve seen…

Having grown up in Pittsburgh, I was tranfixed for some time today by this site which catalogues paper maos over years of development in Pittsburgh.  Fairly crude html layout, but beautiful content from early maps of Fort Pitt through satellite and tourist maps of the 90’s.  It’s such a powerful thing to watch how our cities change over time, and sites like this can really assist in visualizing it.

Just got a fat new work machine and was shocked to find out that despite documentation to the contrary, you are required to use a registry hack on License Manager before running the ArcGIS key on a Vista box.  Service Pack 4 makes no difference and even with the hack, my license crashed several times in a few hours.   I gave up and am running LM Tools on a nearby networked XP machine, which seems to solve the problem.  I considered XP for the machine, but it seems to be getting to the point where it’s best to suck up the new tech.  

A quick bit of time this morning with Google Earth 4.3 and it looks like more than an incremental release.  My likes are listed below, with my only real dislike being the clunky new navigation tools.  Call it a learning curve, but after a half hour of playing around I have yet to master the new wheels and slider navigation.  Luckily actions have not changed from the mouse/click wheel angle .

• Photo Realistic Buildings:  A step in Virtual Earth’s direction, this works well and adds a nice dimension to the small, but ever growing list of 3D cities.
• Street View Implementation: Finally, there is access to all of this great imagery from Earth, and it ends up being a much smoother implementation than the clunky "bubble window in window in window" of Google Maps.  You click on an icon at the address you’re interested in and it takes you into a bubble which becomes full screen StreetView. 
• Time of Day Slider: Sun simulation lets you look at your surroundings at different sun angles.  If you’re positioned right with the correct graphics card you can even see the sun in the sky and the stars at night.  Not sure how useful this would be, though with realistic sunset colors, it makes for nice visualization.
• Dates of Image: Though I have not seen this in the documentation, I noticed that for many areas, when you zoom into a specific aerial photo you get a date the photo was flown on the status bar.  This is a huge feature, and signifies a change in attitude.  My biggest problem with Virtual Globes (Worldwind excepted) is the lack of metadata available for the photos and basedata.  By referring to what are largely aerial photos as "Satellite" and not giving any date, many basic users are mislead into thinking that the images are live or near live.  A quick scan found photos dated as old as ‘99. So I give the Google Earth team props for fessing up to the dates of acquired photos and providing a more useful tool for planning and analysis. 

Overall, I’m excited about the release, and though I do not have confirmation, it appears that a few memory bugs I had on my previous work machine installation have been cleared up. 

A nice video of the new features from the Google Earth Blog:

WebUrbanist presents some pretty  gorgeous visions of sustainable urban agricultural towers.  In an increasingly urban world with troubling energy concerns, the idea of fitting food production into the spaces where we live and work is inspiring.  By some accounts, feeding 10 million people in a city requires shipment of 6000 tons of food into the city per day, an amount that requires a huge carbon load. Slowly offsetting this with the benefits of spending our days in green environments is hard to argue against. 

That said, the upfront cost and maintenance requirements for buildings of this type must be daunting.  It’s hard to imagine that building a even a tower on high-priced urban real estate with heavy infrastructure, then staffing such buildings with "urban farmers" being an economically efficient way to produce agricultural products.  I’d be curious to see a study on lifecycle costs for growing, say, a turnip in this environment and how it might compare to more conventional farming.

Despite the science fiction fantasy-looking designs, it’s an intriguing idea that deserves some place in how we designate and prioritize our urban building models.