These optical targets in the Arizona desert were built for calibrating the cameras of a spy satellite network called the Corona program. Similar to the huge bar codes found across the U.S. southwest, also used for testing high-altitude cameras, these targets are glyphs meant to be seen from the sky: fixed points of focus and orientation for classified machines soaring through space far above.
Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper recently proposed splitting California up into six distinct states. Draper’s plan is getting a good deal of ridicule in the press, despite the fact that it could actually make its way to California ballots in the next election. But it’s easy to forget that throughout history, political boundaries have indeed been redrawn to suit different needs.
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Those intrepid Googlers
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If you’ve ever secretly believed that you deserve a place named after you, then you have come to the right corner of the internet. This handy little app finds every street, river, garden, park, castle, or cave with your name already on it.
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If you’ve ever made a trans-Atlantic call—or, heck, used the internet—then you might like to know a few things about the ocean floor. Mighty but enigmatic underwater rivers flow along the ocean bed. And it’s telecommunications companies, who have to lay thick cables for transoceanic phone and internet connections, with perhaps the most to worry about when it comes to mapping those rivers.
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Believe it or not, we don’t know how deep large parts of the ocean off the British coast really are, and this is obviously not a good thing for the many sailors who cruise around those waters. A new project funded by the European Community is using technology to solve this problem—technology and lots of boats.
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If your economy isn’t doing so well, just jump into another time zone. This is the strategy pursued by Samoa, for example, which rather dramatically leapt across the International Date Line back in 2011 in order to align its work-week more closely with its Pacific neighbors; and a more local version of this might be the next step for Spain, according to a proposal being kicked around since September.
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Securing his place as one of the greatest teachers of our time, Michael Molina’s discussion of tectonic plates, continental drift, and how our world started out as one large land mass called Pangaea, is brought to life through this awesome educational pop-up book created by Yevgeniya Yeretskaya.
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With the explosion of exercise apps and fitness trackers, more people than ever are recording the routes they run during their workouts. Now, Nathan Yau from Flowing Data has mined some of that data to visualize some of the world’s most popular paths.
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Thanks to a tiny issue when it comes to parsing commas, YouTuber SpiderDice discovered that Google Now is convinced our planet is divided into over 189 quadrillion countries.
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