The Geekologie writer suggests that this mysterious object in the sky of a Google Street View image is the hole from which the “Four Unicornmen of the Apocalypse” will emerge. It’s from outside of Porto, a city in northern Portugal town in western Spain.
What do you think that it is?
Link via Geekologie
UPDATE: There is a city in northern Portugal called Porto and a town in western Spain called Porto. Which one is it? A ferocious debate rages in the comments.
If you just finished looking at the Google Street View of Stonehenge, it might be time to take a trip to the World Famous San Diego Zoo. All from your computer, of course. The paths can be a little difficult to navigate and some of the animals are hard to see from the street map distance, but it’s definitely awesome to be able to check out one of the best zoos in the world from your home. When you first load the site, it drops you right in the heart of the zoo’s newest exhibit, the Elephant Odyssey.
Stonehenge and other historic monuments in the UK are now available on Google Street View as a result of a joint venture between Google and the National Trust:
The pictures were taken late last summer using the ‘Google trike’ – a three wheeled bike with a Street View camera mounted on it, suited to collecting images in places not easily accessible by car.
Other locations include Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Lindisfarne Castle in Northumberland, Lyme Park in Cheshire and Ham House just outside Richmond-upon-Thames near London.
Link via J-Walk Blog
Nothing can escape the prying eyes of Google Street View, including Waldo from the Where’s Waldo? book series. He was seen at 76 Putney High St, Wandsworth, UK by a Google Street View camera car.
Nate Heagy, a musician from Saskatoon, Canada, decided that the best way to promote his career was to get pictured on Google Street View. So he followed a Street View picture-taking car around his town until he could predict its path and get his image captured. CBC News quotes Heagy:
“Promoting a band is hard. And all the while I’ve been working on the album I’ve been trying to think of how I can promote it — how I can get noticed.
“When Google announced that Street View was coming to Saskatoon, a light bulb went on,” he said. “I just thought Street View would allow anyone on any corner to be seen by any number of people anywhere.”
Hatching the plan was one thing, execution was another.
“I figured Saskatoon’s not that big, I could probably find the Google car if I really wanted to,” he said. “So I built a sign, and kept it in the trunk of my car.”
Heagy said he enlisted friends to keep an eye out for the vehicle and to call him if they spotted something with a large camera mounted on a tripod on the roof.
As it turned out, Heagy was having lunch one day and saw the Google car himself. He rushed to his own car to catch up to it and figure out where it would be going.
Link via Gizmodo | Musician’s Website | Image: CBC
Google in 1998 (notice the exclamation mark)
Sure, everybody knows that Google was created by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin who became gazillionaires. But did you know that Google's first storage device was cobbled together with LEGO? Or that Google's first investor wrote a $100,000 check even before the company officially existed? Or that it has its own "official" Google dog?
Neatorama presents the Top 10 Neat Facts About Google:
In
1996, graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on a research
project to understand the link structure of the World Wide Web. They're
particularly interested in determining the importance of a given web page
based on its backlinks or how many other web pages link to it (which later
became the concept behind Google's "PageRank" algorithm).
The project was named BackRub (yes, a play on the word "backlink"). You can see an archived page of BackRub in the Wayback Machine:
8) Your logo is upside down: Why is the light source obviously below the image? It looks quite unnatural...
The logo is simply a scan of my hand, from a flatbed scanner converted to black and white. The "back" in the picture is the scanner cover, and the shadows are from the scanner light.
Photo: Stanford
Infolab's Computer History Exhibits Photo
Larry and Sergey needed large amount of disk space to test their PageRank algo, but the largest hard disks available at the time were only 4 GB. So they assembled 10 of these drives together.
While he was an undergrad at Michigan University, Larry had built a programmable plotter out of LEGO, so it's only natural that he used the colorful bricks to create Google's first computer storage!
Sun
Microsystem co-founder Andy
Bechtolsheim knew a good thing when he saw it. After talking to Larry
and Sergey about Google for 30 minutes, he whipped out his checkbook and
wrote a check for $100,000, made out to "Google, Inc." Problem
was, Google, Inc. hasn't existed yet!
Oh, by the way, the Sun in Sun Microsystem stands for "Stanford University Network."
4.
Google GarageTalk about getting lucky tenants. In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented her garage to two Stanford students - you know who they are - for $1,700 a month to help out with the mortgage. That turned out to be a life-changing decision for Susan - it got her a key early job at Google which translated to a top executive position later on, introduced a future husband to her younger sister Anne, and created a mini cottage industry for the rest of her family. (Photo: Jack Gruber/USA Today)
In
2006, Google
bought the house which had become a tourist attraction (the busloads
of people who show up to take pictures were so annoying that Google decided
not to publish the address - though ironically, you can still Google
Map it.)
Despite the Internet's obsession with cats, dogs rule Google. In 1999, a Leonberger breed named Yoshka came to work with Google's first VP of Engineering Urs Hölzle and became the company's "first" dog. (Photo: Google Timeline)
If you must know, Leonbergers are big dogs with lionesque mane that look really majestic. They are, however, useless as guard dogs because they're much too kind and gentle.
A sign near the Googleville data center. Photo: ahockley
[Flickr]
The real Googleville.
Photo: Melanie Conner/NY Times
Good question. Nobody outside the company knows, and Google ain't talkin'. The company's famously secretive when it comes to its data centers (Heck, no one even knows for sure how many data centers the company has!)
For example, The Dalles or "Googleville" data center in a small
Washington Oregon town, was cloaked
in secrecy:
"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."
Recently, Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave a revealing talk on large-scale computing systems in which he discussed technical details of a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which is designed for up to 10 million servers. Skynet, anyone?
All those hardware must use a lot of electricity (indeed, Googleville data center is calculated to require about 103 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 82,000 homes or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington), but just how much energy do you use when you perform a Google search?
Google calculated that it uses about 1 kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average search query. It's so efficient that your PC will likely use more energy in the time it takes to do a Google search.
Photo: Google
Solar Panel Project
To offset its electricity consumption, Google even installed 1.6MW solar panels on the rooftops of the Googleplex. A total of 9,212 solar panels generate 4,475 kWh daily, the equivalent of about the amount of electricity used by 1,000 California homes.
I'm sure you're all familiar with Google Street View and the camera-topped Google Car, but what about all of the interesting places inaccessible to cars? Enter the Google Trike, which started as a project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team:
"I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world - ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts - aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with."
Previously on Neatorama: Google Car Pulled Over by the Cops - Now in Google Street View!
The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google's homepage takes you straight to the first web page result. Because it bypasses Google's own search result page, where users are shown ads, the button actually costs Google around $110 million a year.
Why keep it? Google Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marisa Mayer said:
You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people.
Image: Ben Rathbone
In 2005, Ben Rathbone (then at Google's Hardware Operations) gave us a glimpse of humanity's future. I, for one, welcome our new Googlebot overlord:
Then I pondered the question: what does Google do? The grossly simplified answer that I came up with is Google connects the world with the Internet.
It all snapped into place: the idea of a robot, connecting a world with the Internet, with wires, that connect to big cabinets of computers. It was not hard then to make the leap to representing the internet as a world, or globe, made up of pages.
If you look at his paintings, Bill Guffey may seem like the well-traveled artist. There are paintings of the landscape of Saint Martin la Plaine in France, houses in Anchorage, Alaska, and other far away places – but Bill have never set foot in any of them. Instead, he simply fired up his trusty Google Street View to find vistas to paint!
Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News Technology & Science has the story of how Google offered views of the world to a Kentucky artist:
To reach the closest Wal-Mart, Guffey said he needs at least 30 minutes in the car. But with 30 seconds on his computer, he can fly around the world with Google Street View and paint any place his cursor lands.
Not only does the mapping tool give Guffey and other users a street-level window to many places in the world, it lets them navigate 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical unbroken panoramas.
"I live in a very rural area," the 45-year-old said of the Burkesville, Ky. home he shares with his wife and two daughters. "Here, I can go out and I can paint cows all day, barns all day … With Street View, I can find things I normally wouldn’t see here."
Link to ABC News article | Bill’s Gallery of Google Street View Paintings | Bill’s Blog
Google’s Japan division released this stop motion film explaining (in a rather fanciful way) how Street View works. It features a cute little robot puttering around town, taking film photographs and painting over license plate numbers with a marker. The video is part of an effort to make the practice less appear less invasive of individuals’ privacy.
Via Boing Boing
When driving, always keep your eye on the road and NOT on the camera! Google Street View uploaded a scene near Pittsburgh of a bridge, then a closeup, then the camera goes wildly awry. The simplest explanation is that the Street View driver hit the concrete bridge. Gawker has a video of the process, recorded from Google Street View, plus a link to the original if you want to explore more. Link -via Unique Daily
Remember the story sent by Neatorama reader Chris Whiteoak about Google Street View Car in Bradford, England, that got pulled over by the police? Well, the street view has been released for UK, and Chris noticed that the entire drama was caught on the all-seeing Google’s cam!
Chris walking down the street just before he noticed the police car up the road (pan left to see it in the distance) | Police in pursuit, picking up a fellow policeman | Police pulling over the Google Street View Car
Thanks Chris!
Update 4/7/09 – Seems like this story went everywhere! Besides being featured on Digg’s front page, Chris told us that a few newspapers also picked it up. Here are the articles on The Sun, The Telegraph and Argus, Daily Mail, and Metro. Of course, none of these fine newspaper even mentioned Neatorama 
When Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett of Carnegie Mellon University found out that Google Street View is coming to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the duo arranged a more "interesting" view of the street: they staged a marathon, a parade, a mad-scientist laboratory, and even a sword fight!
National Geographic Magazine’s Intelligent Travel Blog has the story: Link [with embedded YouTube clip] | The Google Street View of Sampsonia Way – Thanks Marilyn!
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