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Map the Fallen loaded in Google Earth

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

Each Memorial Day we honor the men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom we enjoy. Traditionally, this is the day many people visit cemeteries and memorials, especially the Arlington National Cemetery. But not all of us can do that. This year there's an alternative.

Sean Askay, a Google engineer, released on Sunday a Google Earth layer, called Map the Fallen, that contains detailed information of more than 5,700 service members who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This is an interactive tool that lets you see photos, learn about how each service member died, visit memorial Web sites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.

Askay has no military affiliation or background and developed the project on his personal time. He said on his Map the Fallen blog that he came up with the idea when he was still a student and ran across icasualties.org, a public database of soldiers who have died since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to Askay's blog, the Map the Fallen layer contains information collected from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, The Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com.

The layer requires Google Earth 5.0 or later. Once the software is installed, you just need to download the Map the Fallen layer layer and choose to open it. After a few seconds, the layer will be loaded and you can learn much about honorable men and women who you might otherwise not know about at all.

Personally, seeing the sheer number of human figures closely shown on the surface of the Earth is enough to leave me feeling somber and humbled.

What Askay did shows the true meaning of Memorial Day, and for a lot of us it offers an easy and convenient way to frequently remember and honor those we are often too distracted to do that for.

Yes, I am going for click bait with that title. And here's what "Sugarlumps" is all about (warning: some explicit language, but it's Flight of the Conchords, not hard-core rap). See it in HD on CNET TV proper.

If there's one thing that Google Earth taught us, it's that the stars never outgrow their mystery. For fans of the sky layer on Google Earth, there's Starmap, an educational iPhone app that, unlike your laptop or desktop, you can easily take with you on a cloudless night to a nearby hilltop.

Pocket astronomers will find a screen that shows a sky full of planets, visible stars, named stars, galaxies, and nebulae, and coordinates that you can access and search for from an unobtrusive ribbon of icons. Sensitivity to the accelerometer tips the view vertically and horizontally, and you can pinch and pull the screen to get a closer look at the arrangement of the points of light.

It's a fair and interesting start, if not a bit static, and the land-locked dreamer in me sees many more interactive possibilities as the tools and technology progress--like a real-time night mode that uses the camera as a telescope to automatically fix the star chart around you and a Wikipedia plug-in that spoon-feeds you information about what you're looking at. You know, the kinds of extras you'd expect from Google Earth.

(Credit: GPS Daily)

If the question "Where am I?" is a recurring issue for you, Ricoh has added a feature to its GPS-ready digital camera that you may want to check out.

The Ricoh 500SE GPS camera now includes something called an SE-3 GPS module, a three-axis compass developed by Honeywell that nails down the position and direction (azimuth), then displays it on the camera's LCD.

The data, in the form of point coordinates, is embedded into an image as it is captured.

This gives the user a 3D "cones-of-view" perspective, indicating the direction the camera was facing. It comes ready to use with mapping applications such as Google Earth and ESRI's ArcGIS (PDF.)

A laser rangefinder connected to the camera via Bluetooth also enables the user to enter accurate distances.

(Credit: Ricoh)

"Prior to the availability of the SE-3 module, images from the 500SE were simply points on a map with no indication of the direction the camera was facing," Ricoh manager Jeff Lengyel told GPS Daily. "Now we can provide an accurate visual reference of an image's azimuth, as well as the field-of-view the camera could see from that position."

Industries ranging from the military and disaster response to forestry and architecture currently use these features for both aerial and ground-based photography. Sounds like a must-have for any CSI unit.

Who would have believed Google's geographic Web services could actually get your adrenaline going?

Granted, these aren't real video games, but two Web sites are pushing what can be done with interactive interfaces to Google Maps and Google Earth.

The first, taking advantage of Google Maps' new ability to work with Flash applications, lets you drive a car, bus, or truck around Google Maps. It won't bat an eye if you drive through a building or into the ocean, but Katsuomi Kobayashi, the programmer from Osaka, Japan, who wrote it, was happy to note that the software can display images at 40 frames per second vs. 20 at best for JavaScript. And it uses less CPU power, too.

This rudimentary game lets people drive various vehicles around Google Maps. Here I'm taking a semi through Tokyo traffic.

(Credit: Geoquake)

Another novelty is a flight simulator for the browser plug-in version of Google Earth announced at Google I/O a week and a half ago. (This is different from the flight sim that works with the Google Earth standalone software.) It works with recent versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Flock, but on Windows only.

This basic flight simulator works with the Google Earth browser plug-in.

(Credit: Barnabu.co.uk)

Again, the software is crude by gaming standards, but it does illustrate what can be done these days inside a browser. I'm among those who are interested to watch Google Earth abilities gradually pop up in Google Maps and in the browser. It's easily conceivable to me that we'll soon be seeing all manner of games that run on the 3D models of the real world that Google and Microsoft are building. Lower network latencies, faster server responses, and higher network data capacity all point in that direction.

(Via Google Geo Developers Blog and Google Maps Mania.)

Google unveiled a browser version of its Google Sky application on Thursday for people who don't want to download the Google Earth software.

The browser version allows you to zoom in and out and pan around the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies and view the sky through infrared, x-ray, ultraviolet, and microwave views.

There are also galleries of some of the best shots from the Hubble telescope and others. You can also listen to podcasts and look at historical maps of the sky.

The backstory on the app is that it was done by staff engineers and Diego Gavinowich, from Buenos Aires, who was a finalist in Google's Latin America Code Jam and spent the past three months in an internship at the company, according to the official Google Blog.

Several weeks ago Microsoft demonstrated its own virtual telescope software called Worldwide Telescope that will be available for free this spring.

Last month, Google was sued by a former contractor who alleges that the idea for Google Sky was his.

Google Sky now comes in a browser version that lets you browse through various galleries of planets and galaxies and click on spots to get more information.

(Credit: Google)

This screenshot shows information about the planet Regulus in the constellation Leo, one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky.

(Credit: Google)

Excccccellent.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan)

Here's an oldie but a goodie if you're a Simpsons fan. It's an interactive map of Springfield, the fictional home of The Simpsons that has been painstakingly recreated based on various appearances throughout the show's 19 seasons.

The map was drawn using locations that were featured on the show, as long as they appeared more than once. Some of the spacing was determined using recent aerial shots (there's a listing here).

The map was started in 2001 by Jerry Lema and Terry Hogan. The current version is about four years old (so there are no marks from the dome featured in the recent film). In addition to a quadrant view, designer Adrian Noterdaem has put together a slick Flash-based version that lets you zoom in and out. There's also a PDF and printed version of the map residing in Harvard's map collection.

I'm still waiting for the Google Earth layer.

Related: 'The Simpsons' avatar creator: A marketing site done right.

New Google Earth layer is designed to shed light on the location of multimillion-dollar congressional pet projects.

Politicians are famous (infamous, some would say) for setting aside billions of federal taxpayer dollars each year to bankroll pet projects in their home districts. Now it's possible to map precisely where at least some of those funds may be headed.

The Sunlight Foundation on Tuesday released a downloadable Google Earth layer that plots what it says are some 1,500 earmarks attached to a proposed U.S. House of Representatives defense spending bill. The Washington-based group describes its mission as promoting political transparency through use of Internet technologies.

Once activated, each project shows up on the layer in the form of a yellow push pin. Click it, and you'll be taken to a Web site called EarmarkWatch.org, which keeps a database of who's responsible for the handout, how much is being proposed, and for what purpose.

This bill, not surprisingly, seems to be heavy on military tech-related projects. (We're talking things with names like "ubiquitous RFID chem/bio detection," "semi-autonomous robotic manipulation and sensing," and "remote explosive analysis and detection system.") Also unsurprising is that many of the points appear to be clustered around districts represented by influential politicians (for example, western Pennsylvania, home to Rep. John Murtha, the 37-year Marine Corps veteran and Pennsylvania Democrat who's chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Committee).

The bill's still wending its way through Congress, so the spending plans aren't quite final yet. According to the group Citizens Against Government Waste, which also tracks so-called pork barrel spending, the proposed bill contained nearly $8 billion worth of earmarks as of late May.

Check out the map to decide for yourself whether the politicians have wise plans for your tax dollars--or whether it's just a load of pork.

This morning's addition of a YouTube layer to Google Earth added a whole new dimension of utility to the popular mapping application, but if you're looking to take advantage of some of that geo-tagged video goodness without installing anything, there's Mappeo. This Portugual-based site offers up nearly the same thing as Google Earth, with the addition of a search tool that lets you limit the videos to a specific area by keyword. Admittedly the service falls a little flat when you compare it to the catalog of video clips you're getting with Google Earth. There's simply not as many.

The service works in a similar fashion to the Google Earth layer. You can watch a video in a tiny embed on the map, or click on it to jump right to the video's page on YouTube. You can also skip to the next or previous video around it using keyboard shortcuts.

Expect YouTube to come up with something similar shortly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they've already got a more filled out version that matches the quantity seen in Google Earth cooking somewhere in their labs.

Search for YouTube videos on a Google Map using third party mashup Mappeo.

(Credit: CNET Networks)