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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Lichtenstein hauria participat

A whole new world of Street View


Google Earth has always enabled you virtually fly around the world from the comfort of your home, but there are a lot of great places to explore on the ground as well. So when we sat down to enhance the Street View experience for version 6, we focused on improving not only how you fly around but also how you land and explore the world at street level. Although Street View is technically a big collection of photos, we want you to feel like you’re actually walking down the street instead of jumping from photo to photo. Today, we’re proud to show off this concept in the new version of Street View in Google Earth 6.


To do this, we took the ideas that were developed for Smart Navigation in Google Maps and pushed them even further. Using the panoramic images and 3D depth data from our Street View vehicles, we built 3D street scenes and integrated them into Google Earth. As you move along the street, we blend together different panoramas to create the illusion of one continuous 3D scene.

To help you navigate, we’ve also added new controls for ground-level viewing: use the scroll-wheel to move forward and backward, double-click to move towards a point, and click-and-drag to look around. Since we don’t have images for every viewpoint in the world, moving away from the spot where a photo was taken can look weird at times. So using the double-click and scroll wheel features will navigate you to the clearest view. For the more adventurous, the keyboard arrows also enable you move freely through the environment but with some distortion.

Because Street View is now fully integrated into Google Earth, your place in Street View matches your location in 3D. This means that you can easily see 3D buildings, terrain, and now 3D trees by toggling from Street View to ground-level view — simply click on the building icon in the navigation controls. Take a look at these two different images of the same location, one in Street View and one in ground-level view.


The easiest way to enter the new Street View experience is by grabbing the Pegman from the navigation controls, and dropping him wherever there is a blue highlighted road. You can also enter Street View by zooming in close to the ground. And of course, you can exit at any time by clicking on the “Exit” button.

So head out and explore the world from the streets! Here’s a tutorial video to demonstrate how to use the new Street View in Google Earth 6:



Posted by Greg Coombe, Google Earth Engineer

Video: How To Hotpot

[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community Blog]

As you know, we recently announced the launch of Hotpot, our new local recommendation engine for Google Places, powered by you and your friends. In the following video, Mat Balez, a Google product manager, talks more about how to find the places you'll love using Hotpot.



Posted by Vanessa Schneider, Hotpot Team

HTML5 Games, Jammed

(Updated 10 Dec 2010 -- corrected link to 3rd Place Hilversum developer Kornel Lesinski's Twitter page.)

Last month, more than 50 developers assembled in Hilversum, Netherlands, and San Francisco, California for an HTML5 game jam.

The idea of HTML5 gaming may seem unusual, but if the results from this event are anything to go by, there will be plenty more HTML5 games in the future. In just over 24 hours of coding, attendees were able to produce the seeds of great games, powered by standard web technologies. The games we saw were novel, visually appealing, and in many cases, already very playable.

HTML5 is making it easy to develop games for standard web browsers, and it also provides a way for developers to reach mobiles and tablets with a single code base. Watch for other initiatives, like Mozilla's current HTML5 gaming competition, to take HTML5 gaming to the next level.

Here’s a look at the winners from both venues. You can see a detailed list of all the entries here.

First Place, San Francisco: Ninja Leap

A novel 8-bit style game where you “leap” over the bad guys. A good demo of the Canvas element and a complete game with levels and scoring. Congratulations David Ganzhorn and Mike Rotondo on winning the HTML5 Game Jam in the USA.


First Place, Hilversum: Monkey Fortress

A puzzle game where you build a fortress to protect the monkey, demonstrating a physics engine in Canvas. Congratulations Tom Hastjarjanto on winning the HTML5 Game Jam in Europe.


Second Place, San Francisco: Shell Shock

A platform shooter involving turtle-like creatures on wheels, using Canvas. By Wolff Dobson, Charles Lee, Nicolas Coderre, Dan Fessler, Sara Asher. (No online demo at present.)


Second Place, Hilversum: Snakes

A refresh on the classic “Snake” game, demonstrating multiplayer powered by NodeJS and WebSocket, and 3D transforms of the canvas element. By David Durman & Ales Sturala. (No online demo at present, but code repository available.)


Third Place, San Francisco: Fruit Link

A casual puzzle game by Bruno Garcia, where you link up adjacent matching fruit.


Third Place, Hilversum: Enterprise

A stunning 3D game inspired by the classic Syndicate series showcasing just how far we’ve come with Canvas-based graphics. Observe the collision detection and be sure to hit the “Flying Carpet” button as well as the space bar to fire! This game was also shown in the “Web or Native for Mobile Development?” session at the recent Google Developer Days conferences in Europe. Created by Kornel Lesinski, Peter van der Zee, and Edwin Martin.


A few other readily playable games you might enjoy are:

We were also honoured to have keynotes by two pioneers of web-based gaming. In Hilversum, the speaker was Tino Zijdel, creator of DHTML Lemmings back in 2004. Tino, coincidentally a Hilversum local, explained the tricks he used to make the game playable on the browsers of the day. He has subsequently written his account of the Game Jam. It’s in Dutch, so here’s an English translation. There were additional presentations from from Yu Jianrong, who covered ten tips for HTML5 Game Development and Paul Irish on HTML5.


The San Francisco keynote was given by Marcin Wichary, who gave a keynote on games and HTML5. Marcin is the creator of the Pac-Man doodle and also the first version of the popular HTML5Rocks slides. Marcin talked about his experiences in recreating Pac-Man and the timeless aspects of videogaming in modern age, shared some behind-the-scenes trivia, and shared the technology used to write the doodle and debug it.

We thank SPIL Games for hosting and co-organising the Netherlands event, and we also thank Samsung for contributing a Galaxy Tab for the Game Jam at that venue. Developers working on touch apps were able to use the Tab for testing, and we later gave the device away as a prize. Congratulations all who took part!

You can find more details about the event, including links to code repositories and further demos, at HTML5GameJam.com.

Learn about the human side of climate change with Kofi Annan

[Cross-posted on the Google.org and Official Google Blog]

Climate change is too often misunderstood to be simply an environmental issue, rather than a human issue. For our children and grandchildren, climate change is an issue of public health, economics, global security and social equity. This human side of climate change is explained in a new Google Earth tour narrated by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Within these stories, you’ll find data and tools to explore this topic in more depth, and meet some of the people who are actively working on managing the risks of climate variability and change. We encourage you to take the tour to learn more about these human issues and the inspiring work of groups like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that are helping farmers cope with climate change. We hope this video will serve as a useful tool as educators help students around the world understand the complexity of this issue.



This is the latest in our series of climate change tours that we’re releasing leading up to the global U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16) talks in Cancun, Mexico this week.

As part of the Google Earth for Educators Community, we’ve also created a special Climate Change Educators Resources page that teachers can use in their classrooms. Here, teachers can find the tools they need to create lesson plans about climate change, including all the individual Google Earth KML layers available for download. Teachers and students can overlay multiple data layers that help illustrate climate change, and discuss and analyze them as part of K-12 and higher education curriculum. We’re also looking for lessons plans for any school grade that use this narrated tour or these Google Earth KML layers, so if you’re a teacher or instructor, please submit your lesson plan for review now.


Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html or the Climate Change Educators Resources page to learn more about climate change today.

Discovery Channel comic books article in today's Examiner

It's this article -

Nowhere boy (id., 2010)di Sam Taylor Wood

POSTATO SU
Io l'ho capito alla fine cos'è che mi infastidisce così tanto dei biopic. E' che per loro stessa natura rispondono ad un'idea deterministica di mondo: tutto è scritto e nella vita dell'artista o del grande uomo si scorgono sempre i germi di quello che sarà o quello che farà. Tutto è in nuce, sempre, e il destino opera con mano certa. Forse è per questo che tra tutti preferisco quelli più strani come Dragon.

Nowhere boy racconta l'adolescenza di John Lennon. In maniera poco usuale per un film biografico si svolge in un arco temporale molto breve, circa due anni, nei quali forzatamente vengono fatti coincidere eventi che, stando a Wikipedia, non si sono svolti secondo quell'ordine.
Si tratta del periodo intorno ai 18 anni, quando John perde definitivamente la madre in un incidente d'auto e comincia ad appassionarsi al rock 'n' roll (in quest'ordine per Wikipedia, contemporaneamente secondo il film).

La cosa che viene quindi da chiedersi subito è quale sia il senso di un film così concepito. Se non si racconta la storia della vita di John Lennon, se non se ne raccontano le opere e se non se ne racconta il pensiero (a giudicare dal film è cambiato molto negli anni) che si racconta? Di un ragazzo inglese degli anni '50 che si appassiona alla musica? Di come un grandissimo personaggio dell'arte popolare del novecento abbia tratto ispirazione dal fatto che non ha avuto una madre e contemporaneamente ne ha avute due (la vera, ad intermittenza, e la zia che lo ha seguito sul serio)?
La speranza, mentre si vede Nowhere boy, è che qualcosa emerga a prescindere dagli interrogativi, ma sarà ovviamente tradita. Il racconto di un ragazzo che non riceve che delusioni affettive melodrammatiche e che, come molti, scopre il rock 'n' roll come perturbatore dell'ordine e della compostezza borghese, non è molto diverso da ciò che conosciamo e che abbiamo visto reso con molta più abilità in An education.

L'unico vero, grande momento di cinema lo regala l'attacco del film, che con lungimiranza e conoscenza utilizza il famoso accordo iniziale di A Hard Day's Night per introdurre una sequenza onirica molto molto bella e significativa, specie per la posizione che occupa nel racconto. Il resto è noia.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Mapplets to transition out of Google Maps

[Cross-posted from the Google Geo Developers Blog]

Earlier this year we announced the deprecation of Google Mapplets. As part of the deprecation plan for Mapplets we will shortly be switching from rendering Mapplets within Google Maps, to rendering them on a dedicated Mapplets page:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mapplets?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/geoscratchpad.xml

In conjunction with this transition the Google Maps Directory will be closed, and links to Mapplets will be removed from the My Maps tab in Google Maps.

Bookmarks for existing Mapplets will continue to work. They will be automatically redirected to the new Mapplets page for the relevant Mapplet. The Mapplets page also has the minimum necessary UI elements so that it is better suited to embedding in third party sites using an iframe.

However because the Mapplets page is not part of the Google Maps application, Mapplets will no longer have access to Google Maps user profiles, which means that User Preferences will no longer be stored between sessions. Users accessing Mapplets will now always see the default behaviour when the Mapplet first loads.

The above changes will be made on or shortly after Wednesday December 8th 2010. If your web site recommends one or more Mapplets by linking to the Directory we recommend that you update your site to link directly to the Mapplets page, or embed the relevant Mapplets page in your site, as soon as possible.

Denys Wortman in DC (sort of)

James Sturm's been working on rediscovering Denys Wortman, an early 20th century cartoonist, and is doing a book on him with Drawn & Quarterly. A few articles have been appearing about the exhibit on Wortman that's in New York-

Cartoonist's Depression-Era NYC Drawings Featured in East Harlem Exhibit; The works of cartoonist Denys Wortman will be on display at the Museum of the City of New York through March 20.
By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer, November 19, 2010

Gotham Chronicle: Sharp Eye, and Pencil
By CAROL KINO
New York Times November 21, 2010

-and Allen Holtz put a nice early article online -

All N.Y. Poses For Wortman's Cartoons
Straphangers in the Subway and Flappers at Soda Fountains Are Unsuspecting
Models for New York World Artist Who Blends Comedy With Grim Reality in
"Metropolitan Movies" for N.Y. World
by John F. Roche (E&P, 3/23/29)

-tonight I was on the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art site and put in Wortman's name - and they have a collection of his papers (note the untranscribed interview)-

Wortman, Denys, b. 1887 d. 1958
Cartoonist
New York, N.Y., Mass.
Cartoonist, New York, New York. Born in Saugerties, New York, Wortman studied engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology and at Rutgers College. From 1906-1909, he studied at the Chase School of Art in New York City with Kenneth Hayes Miller and classmates George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent. Beginning as a landscape painter from the "Gloucester School," Wortman's career changed when his drawings of life as a sailor in World War I were published in the New York Tribune. From 1924-1954, his daily cartoons "Metropolitan Movies" and "Mopey Dick and the Duke" mirrored New York life in the New York World-Tribune.

Denys Wortman papers, 1887-1980
2.0 linear ft. (partially microfilmed on 1 reel)
Reel(s): 3014

Biographical material, letters, business records, notes, writings, art work, photographs, printed material; and an untranscribed interview.

REEL 3014: Thirty-five letters to Wortman from friends and colleagues (1910-1957), including Gifford Beal, James Cagney, Stuart Davis, Guy Pene Du Bois, Juliet and Pier Hamilton, Edward and Jo Hopper, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Herbert Satterlee, John Sloan, Austin Strong, Frank Sullivan, William Sulzer, Gluyas Williams, and Mahonri Young.

UNMICROFILMED: Biographical accounts and a certificate of marriage between Wortman and his first wife Aimée Kempe (1913); letters to Wortman (1911-1958) and to his second wife Hilda (1958-1980), some illustrated, from his mother, his brother Elbert, newspaper publishers, and colleagues including Peggy Bacon, Roy Baker, George G. Barnard, Gifford Beal, Ruth Benedict, Isabel Bishop, Charlton Bolles, Arthur Brown, E. Button, Stuart Campbell, Edward C. Caswell, Thomas Cole, Nathaniel Collier, Worth Colwell, Fred Cooper, Raymond M. Crosby, Benjamin Dale, Bob Davis, John Dawson, Ed De Cossey, Steven Dohanos, Max and Eliena Eastman, Pat Enright, W. D. Faulkner, Robert Fawcett, Max Fleischer, Juliana Force, Lora B. Fox, Fred Freeman, James Freeman, Alfred Frueh, Murray Harris, Jim Herbert, R. John Holmgren, Ellison Hoover, Will B. Johnstone, H. J. Kauffer, J. Graham Kaye, Clarence B. Kelland,Walter Klett, Gene Lockhart, Arthur Mann, Frank J. Marshall, Jim McKenna,Helen Miller, Gladys Mock, Feg Murray, Frank Netter, William Oberhardt, Lloyd Parsons, Audrey Parsons, Garrett and Florence Price, Raymond Prohaska, George Raab, Samuel Raab, Jack Ratcliff, Norman Rothschild, Harry Salpeter, Albert Sterner,
Jack Van Ryder, Leroy Ward, Mahonri Young, Carl Zigrosser, William Zorach, and Thomas Benton's wife Rita; legal material, including contracts with newspapers and publishers (1925-1938), client lists (1935-1954), and a lease (1924); financial records, including check stubs (1921-1922), an expense book (1923), and receipts (1923-1952); notes and writings, including membership lists for the Dexter Fellows Tent Circus Saints and Sinners Club of America and the Artists and Writers Golf Association; word puzzles and mathematical formulae; scripts "I Know What I Like" by Arthur William Brown and Phil Broughton and "Taxi,-Lady?" by William and Vivian Place, a notebook (1927), and a diary (1918) of Aimée Kempe Wortman; interviews, including a transcript of Wortman, Charles I. Stewart, and Johanna Harris discussing "Art Under a Democracy," and an untranscribed interview of Wortman conducted by Thomas Craven, ca. 1952; and art work, including 25 drawings and a a print by Wortman (undated and 1919), and drawings by Francis Hackett and William Zorach.

Also included are clippings (1903-1978), exhibition catalogs (1935-1953), programs (1938-1951), and printed material concerning The Players (1938) and the Society of Illustrators (1901-1939); photographs (1887-1956) of Wortman, his family, and colleagues, including Harry Beckhoff, Alexander Brook, Clarence Brown, Glenn O. Coleman, Fred Cooper, Thomas Craven, Rudy Dirks, Steven Dohanos, Max and Eliena Eastman, Duncan Ferguson, Stefan Hirsch, Will B. Johnstone, Frank Kidder, Richard Lahey, Robert Laurent, Joseph Lilly, Esther Merrill, Wallace Morgan, Willard Mullin, Garrett and Florence Price, Otto Soglow, Marguerite Zorach, and Thomas Hart Benton, sports cartoonist Feg Murray (3) with film celebrities Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and Jean Harlow, works of art, stage productions by members of the Society of American Illustrators and a gathering at the Grand Central Galleries of modern artists including Peggy Bacon, Dorothy Varian, Max Weber, and William Zorach.

Location of Originals: Reel 3014: Originals returned to the lender, Hilda R. Wortman, after microfilming.

Material on reel 3014 lent from microfilming by Hilda Wortman, Wortman's widow. She donated the unmicrofilmed material 1979-1983. Craven interview tape donated 1981 by Denys Wortman Jr.

Greg McElhatton's Read About Comics recent reviews

Greg continues to crank through a variety of comics for review including CLAMP manga, old Marvel Fantastic Four reprints , French multicreator Donjon issues (drawn by a Spaniard in this case), Emitown a formerly online and now print diary comic, Charles Burns' take on Tintin.... for more just go check out Read About Comics.

Richard Thompson on his USN&WR days

Complete with a Bill Clinton caricature for old times sake - Your Old Caricature from USN&WR for Today, November 28, 2010

R.C. Harvey reviews 'Barney and Clyde'

R.C. Harvey reviews 'Barney and Clyde' at TCJ.com.

Carry the article to the end to see Rob Tornoe's take on Bucky the cat assailing Cul de Sac's Alice.

Comics Reporter interviews Rina Ayuyang, seen locally in Party Crashers exhibit

Spurgeon, Tom. 2010.
CR Sunday Interview: Rina Ayuyang.
Comics Reporter (November 28): http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_sunday_interview_rina_ayuyang/

Google’s sample OpenID relying party site

More and more websites are enhancing their login systems to include buttons for identity providers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc. Users generally prefer this approach because it makes it easier for them to sign up for a new site that they visit. However if a user already has an account at a website, and they are used to logging in with their email and password, then it is hard to get them to switch to using an identity provider.

Google has recently released a sample site that shows how a website can migrate users away from password based logins, and instead have them leverage an identity provider. This sample site incorporates many of the ideas of the Internet Identity community, as well as feedback from numerous websites who have been on the cutting edge of applying these techniques. The following video provides highlights of some elements of the user experience.

The sample site is at openidsamplestore.com, but we suggest first reading this FAQ which describes the site and has links to additional videos of some of the features. We hope website developers will use these techniques to reduce the need for passwords on their site.

3D Trees in Google Earth 6


We strive to provide as much realism as possible in Google Earth, but until now, trees have largely been missing from the landscape of our product. Trees have been modeled individually in a handful of locations, such as Disney World and the Eiffel Tower, and we’ve learned from those instances to make sure we could represent trees in a realistic way that could scale to places where trees exist en masse, like urban parks and large forests.

Over time we’ve developed a way to produce highly detailed, photo-textured versions of specific tree species and reproduce them at large scale. In the new release of Google Earth 6, people in several cities will now be able to browse 3D trees in some of their favorite parks, and maybe even pick out a spot for their next picnic! Our urban tree coverage includes San Francisco (downtown and Golden Gate Park), Chicago (Grant, Millennium and Lincoln Parks), New York City (Prospect and Riverside Parks), Athens (Thiseio Park, the National Gardens, Lykavittos Hill and around the Acropolis), Berlin (Tiergarten Park) and Tokyo (Yoyogi Park, Shinjuku Gyoen and the Akasaka Imperial Grounds). Prospective students can even scope out the beautiful greenery on campus at the University of California, Davis.

With 3D trees in Google Earth, we’ve brought characteristic trees to life, from the palm trees that dot San Francisco's bayfront Embarcadero Street, to the olive trees that cling to the Acropolis in Athens, to the flowering dogwoods found in Tokyo’s parks. All told, there are around 50 different tree species to explore in Google Earth and counting!



Of course trees also grow and flourish outside of cities. In fact, urban trees only make up a very small percentage of the estimated more than 400 billion trees on our planet. In order to tell the greater story of trees on our planet, we worked with several environmental organizations to model reforestation projects and protected forests in Google Earth. Working with Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, we modeled five tree replanting sites in Kenya. These sites represent just a small part of the Green Belt Movement’s work planting more than 40 million trees to restore the environment and improve the lives of people who are linked to the land.

We also worked with the Surui people, an indigenous group in the Amazon who are working to protect their rainforest from illegal logging. The Surui and one of their partners, the Amazon Conservation Team, selected some of their most culturally significant trees, including the acai palm and the cashew tree, to be modeled for this project. The resulting 3D visualization enables Google Earth users from all over the world to experience the magic of the Amazon rainforest.

Our third partner, CONABIO, supports and protects Mexico’s biodiversity through an ambitious forest monitoring project that tracks changes in forest health and cover over time. This project has helped define priority forests that need urgent attention and protection, like the two mangrove forest areas that we’ve modeled in Google Earth. These forests that hug the Mexican coastline provide unique habitats for wildlife animals like crocodiles and jaguars that depend on these sensitive ecosystems to survive.

This first release of 3D trees in Google Earth includes more than 80 million trees to study and explore. But we’re not content to rest on our virtual laurels, so look out for trees in more cities and forests soon!

To start exploring 3D trees in Google Earth, first download Google Earth 6. Then explore our tree showcase, where you will find links to tours of trees in San Francisco, Tokyo, Athens, the Surui forest, and more.

A view of the 3D trees in Chicago's Lincoln Park

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Program Manager, Google Earth

New comics on THURSDAY this week

No, I don't know why.

Un uomo, un film


Mario Monicelli (1915 - 2010) - La Grande Guerra

Kalman at Library of Congress article

Proud to be an American: Maira Kalman's Twelve Visual Essays at the Library of Congress
By Fiona Zublin
Express November 29, 2010
http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2010/11/maira-kalman-12-visual-essays-library-congress.php

Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Today we’re introducing the latest version of Google Earth, our interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools.

In Google Earth 6, we’re taking realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We’ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery. Over the next several days, we’ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite.



Integrated Street View
When Google Earth was first introduced, people were wowed by the ability to virtually fly from outer space right down to the roof of their house. While flying over rooftops gives you a super-human view of our world, the ground level is where we experience our daily lives. We took our first baby steps toward bringing the Google Earth experience to street level with our implementation of Street View in Google Earth in 2008, which enabled flying into Street View panoramas. In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight.

Now, you’ll notice that Pegman is docked right alongside the navigation controls—an ever-present travel companion ready whenever you want to get your feet on the street and take a virtual walk around. Just pick up Pegman and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road to fly right down to the ground. Once there, you can use the navigation controls or your mouse to look around. And unlike our earlier Street View layer, you can now move seamlessly from one location to another as if you’re walking down the street by using the scroll-wheel on your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to visit somewhere farther away, simply click the “exit” button and you’ll immediately return to an aerial view where you can easily fly to your next destination.

Drag and drop Pegman to enter Street View. The blue lines indicate where Street View imagery is available.

3D trees
I think we can all agree that our planet without trees would be a pretty desolate place. Besides the ever-important task of providing us with the oxygen we breathe, trees are an integral part of the landscape around us. In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by. All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree. While we’ve just gotten started planting trees in Google Earth, we already have more than 80 million trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through our Google Earth Outreach program, we’ve also been working with organizations including the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and CONABIO in Mexico to model our planet’s threatened forests.

To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel. As a starting point, try a search for “Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.” Once you arrive at your destination, click the zoom slider. You’ll then be taken down to the ground where you can use our new ground-level navigation to walk among the trees.

3D trees in San Francisco, California

Easy-to-use historical imagery
One of the features people told us they liked best in Google Earth 5 was the availability of historical imagery, which enables you to visually go back in time to see such things as Warsaw in 1935, London in 1945, and Port-au-Prince Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. But it wasn’t always obvious when historical imagery was available for a particular place, making this feature one of Google Earth’s lesser-known gems.

So with this new version, we’ve made it very easy to discover historical imagery. When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period. You can then browse through all the historical imagery available for that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view.

The site of Google's Mountain View campus in 1948

To download Google Earth 6, or to see videos of our newest features, visit http://earth.google.com.

Nov 30: Maira Kalman at Library of Congress

 

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-254.html

 

November 9, 2010

Renowned Writer and Artist Maira Kalman to Discuss New Book, "And the Pursuit of Happiness"

Event Is First Co-Sponsored by Library of Congress and Hirshhorn Museum

Noted writer, illustrator and designer Maira Kalman's year-long investigation of democracy and how it works has resulted in her newest book, "And the Pursuit of Happiness" (Penguin, 2010), which is also the name of her popular blog at NYTimes.com.

Kalman will discuss and sign her book on Tuesday, Nov. 30, at noon in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. This Books & Beyond event, co-sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. The two institutions are planning additional co-sponsored programs.

"And the Pursuit of Happiness" combines words and pictures in an illustrated essay that is both probing and lighthearted. Beginning in 2008, Kalman traveled to Washington, D.C., launching a national tour that would take her from a town hall meeting in Newfane, Vt., to the inner chambers of the Supreme Court. She imagines making a home for herself in the center of the Lincoln Memorial, ponders Alexis de Tocqueville's America, witnesses the inner workings of a Bronx middle-school student council, takes a high-speed lesson in great American women in the National Portrait Gallery and considers the cost of war to the brave American service families of Fort Campbell, Ky.

Kalman is widely renowned for her contributions to The New York Times, The New Yorker and other major publications. Her book is also the subject of a discussion on Facebook. The new Books & Beyond Book Club is available at www.facebook.com/booksandbeyond/. Here readers can discuss books, the authors of which have appeared or will appear in this series. The site also offers links to webcasts of these events and asks readers to talk about what they have seen and heard.

Since its creation by Congress in 1977 to "stimulate public interest in books and reading," the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (www.Read.gov/cfb/) has become a major national force for reading and literacy promotion. A public-private partnership, it sponsors educational programs that reach readers of all ages, nationally and internationally. The center provides leadership for 52 affiliated state centers for the book (including the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and nonprofit reading-promotion partners and plays a key role in the Library's annual National Book Festival. It also oversees the Library's Read.gov website and administers the Library's Young Readers Center.

# # #

PR 10-254
11/09/10
ISSN 0731-3527

 

 


EL TRASPÀS



- Mas?

- Hombreeeeeeee, Joseeeeee!! Digui, digui!! Em truques per felicitar-me?

- Nnn...no exactament.

- Quin mal gust!

- Vull dir: sí, truco per felicitar-te.

- Doncs felicita’m, Montilla! Felicita’m! Vull escoltar-ho de la teva boqueta de pitiminí!

- D’acord. Un, dos, tres, ehem. No hay dolor, no hay dolor: Que molt bé per vosaltres, no?

- Així està bé? Un triomf històric i sols em diu això? Quin mal perdre! Yo quiero Mas y Mas, yo quiero Mas y Mas, siiií! Movimiento electoraaaaaaaal! Mas, president! Mas president! Els escoltes? T’arriba el soroll de la victòria? Perceps l’olor a glòria?

- Au, vinga, que no estic d’humor! Et truco bàsicament perquè hem de fer el traspàs de poders.

- Masss, traspàsss, Masss, traspàsss... Sona bé.

- Sí, ja. Et va bé dimarts?

- Dimarts? I ocupar l’espai en els mitjans de la gloriosa victòria del Barça sobre el Madrid?

- I si perd?

- D’acord. El futbol no pot malbaratar l’agenda política. Responsabilitat, seny. Yo quiero Masss y Masss, siiiií!

- Sense humiliar, eh? Sense humiliar... Una cosa, Mas...

- Digui!

- Que diu el Zetapé que tenim moltes coses de què parlar...

- No fotis, Montilla. Volem l’Estatut! Volem l’Estatut! No! Millor! Volem el Concert!

- Però tu no t’havies fet independentista?

- Res-pon-sa-bi-li-tat, Montilla. Primer l’un i després l’un i mig.

- Au, ja t’ho faràs amb Laporta i la Sánchez-Camacho. Ens riurem bona cosa.

- Mira qui parla! El del tripartit! Festival de l’humooooorrrrr!

- O et comportes o li dic a Rubalcaba que et tragui tots els palaus i pretòries pendents.

- Responsabilitat, Montilla! Fem front a l’enemic comú!

- Sí, sí... Sociovergència o mort!

- No t’emprenyis, Jose, tenim per davant un futur il·lusionant! Per cert: encara és el tres per cent?

- No sé de què m’estàs parlant...

- Pesta de xarnegos! Contra Maragall vivíem millor. Millet, amnistia! Millet amnistia!

- He de penjar. L’executiva em reclama per demanar la meua di... per avaluar els resultats. No beguis molt. I recorda que encara no es pot circular a més de 80.

- A la teva salut! Illa, illa, illa, Montilla fet papilla!

- No em fotis o no et deixo en el despatx ni un miserable document!

- Per mi com si vols botar-los foc. No necessitem papers! A nosaltres ens aneu a ensenyar a governar! Nosaltres som Catalunya! Artur és Déu i Pujol el seu profeta!

- Au, bona nit! Que et rebenti l’úlcera de la felicitat. Fins dimarts!

- Però encara és el tres per cent o l’heu ajustat a l’IPC? T’ho dic perquè açò de la campanya ens ha sortit la torta un pam.

- A tu t’ho vaig a dir.

Tre all'improvviso (Life as we know it, 2010)di Greg Berlanti

POSTATO SU
L'idea di Tre all'improvviso è insolitamente audace: cercare di dare freschezza alla classica commedia sul conflitto dei sessi attraverso una storia dall'organizzazione non usuale. Un ragazzo e una ragazza che apparentemente non sono fatti per stare insieme (cosa di cui sono convinti), sono obbligati a convivere dall'esigenza di prendersi cura della bambina lasciata orfana dall'improvvisa morte dei loro migliori amici. La parte inconsueta è che questo evento fondamentale non è il presupposto del film ma qualcosa che avviene a metà.

Il risultato di una simile organizzazione narrativa è che c'è una prima, lunga, parte unicamente conoscitiva, in cui esploriamo le vite e il rapporto tra i due protagonisti (e quello che stringono con la coppia di genitori che poi ci lascerà), e una seconda più compressa in cui si svolgono i canonici tre atti e trovano attuazione tutte le consuetudini del genere (equilibrio, rottura dell'equilibrio e sua restaurazione finale).
Lo spunto anche regala motivi di fascino superiori alla media del genere. L'idea dell'unione forzata e della convivenza per formare un nucleo familiare senza che ce ne siano le basi non è certo una novità ma regala più di un momento intrigante.

Continua così la carriera di Katherine Heigl, sempre più specialista di questo tipo di cinema e sempre più incarnazione dei sogni plausibili della donna media (bella ma in maniera sobria e raggiungibile, sempre in difficoltà ma anche risoluta). Dopo James Marsden e Gerard Butler questa volta si trova nel mezzo di un turbine sentimentale con un altro bellissimo (e lui si impossibile) come Josh Duhamel, che ovviamente sposerà.

Un uomo, un ruolo


Leslie Nielsen aka ten. Frank Drebin della squadra speciale (1926 - 2010)

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Glen Weldon attempts comic book schooling...

...the fool!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: We Give Thanks, Try Comics, And Debate Happiness
by Linda Holmes
National Public Radio's Monkey See blog November 26, 2010
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/11/26/131609227/pop-culture-happy-hour-we-give-thanks-try-comics-and-debate-happiness or

http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/blog/2010/11/20101126_blog_pchh.mp3

George Will on comic book censorship

Our puritanical progressives
By George F. Will
Washington Post November 28, 2010

Ooooh, the 90 comments are vicious.

PR: Sun, Dec 5-Capicons Show

Capicons Comic Book & Pop Culture Con
Sun, Dec. 5, 2010

10 am - 3 pm

Dunn Loring Volunteer Fire Hall, 

2148 Gallows Rd, Dunn Loring, Virginia

Admission $3 - Kids FREE!

Open to the public from 10 am - 3 pm. Buy, sell & trade: Gold, Silver, Bronze Age comics; Indie & Modern comics, Publishers & Creators, TV & Movie Collectibles. Non-sport cards; Videos & DVDs; Horror/Sci-Fi; figures, toys; Star Wars & Star Trek memorabilia; original artwork, posters and other comic-related collectibles.

FEATURING:
John Gallagher of Sky-Dog Comics (Buzzboy, Roboy Red)


Steve Conley (Star Trek, Astounding Space Thrills, Bloop, Kid Knight)


Andre Campbell and Tyran Eades of Heritage Comics HSQ


Dan Nokes, 21st Century Sandshark


Chris Flick, Capes & Babes


Rob Anderson, Panda Dog Press


Tim Dzon

Directions to DLVFRD: 
Take I-495 (DC/Capital Beltway) to Exit 47A (Rt. 7 West). Go 1/2 Mile, Left on Gallows Rd. 1 mile to 2148 Gallows Rd

PR: Spider Man - The Musical - A First Look on 60 Minutes

Tomorrow night, 60 Minutes will have a segment on the upcoming Spider-Man musical. I must say I'm somewhat interested in whether or not the producers pull this off.

Their press release follows. Note there's additional content on the web.



 

November 23, 2010

 

U2'S BONO AND THE EDGE SAY WORKING ON

"SPIDER-MAN" WAS THE SOME OF MOST FUN

THEY'VE EVER HAD  – "60 MINUTES" SUNDAY

 

Lesley Stahl Gets the First Look at "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark"and its Aerial Effects and Also Talks to Director Julie Taymor as She Works to Complete the Most Expensive Musical Ever

 

          U2 band-mates Bono and The Edge have been having fun helping to create what will be the most ambitious and expensive musical ever staged on Broadway.  Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras have been following the production for more than a year and a half and will offer the first look at the much vaunted aerial effects and the U2 stars' music sessions on 60 MINUTES, Sunday, Nov. 28 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. 

 

            "It has been one of the funest (sic), more joyful rides of our artistic life, for sure," says Bono. "We've moved out of the rock 'n' roll idiom in places, into some very new territory for us," he tells Stahl. "There's big show tunes and dance songs."    The Edge said working with Julie Taymor was "like being a student in a master class of musical theater and opera."  Watch a clip.

 

            "Julie Taymor is definitely a magician. I think that's what you call a person, who, even though they put the rabbit in the hat, is really surprised when it comes out," Bono tells Stahl. 

 

            The show's first preview is scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 28, after delays due to money woes, the complicated staging and flying effects that injured two actors. The show cost more than $60 million to make, and critics wondered if it would ever open.   But Taymor, with a string of stage and film successes, tells Lesley Stahl danger and risk make for a creative success.  "I love it when people say 'What a horrible, lousy idea.' I think that's great," Taymor says with a laugh. "I hate the comfort zone…I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk," says the two-time Tony winner, whose spectacular staging of "Lion King" is still playing in theaters after 13 years. 

 

            On Sunday, 60MinutesOvertime.com will feature a special, in-depth look at how Bono and The Edge collaborated with Taymor to write and play the music that defines the show's villains and heroes and drives its stunning special effects.

 

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