VelociPeek

Song of The Day: The Middle - Artist: Jimmy Eat World

Google recently launched Google Mars based upon Google Maps; for an amateur astronomer I have to say it has a certain coolness factor. Remember all the news hype in 2003 during the Mars Opposition? Well, I was one of those folks with a Meade 10″ SCT telescope gazing at the object under a planetarium-type, beautiful sky at the Outer Banks, NC on Labor Day Weekend. The smaller picture you see to the left is a composite of a few pictures I took that night. You can identify Sinus Meridiani and Mare Erythraeum, near where Opportunity landed. However, with Google Mars you can zoom in and out on Sinus Meridiani, along with many other views of plains, carters, and mountains. Furthermore, one can switch between elevation, visible, and infrared maps. If one searches for Sinus Meridiani, literally Meridian Bay…

…with the elevation view, a greenish-yellow map renders with an elevation of 0 to -3 km, below sea level, along with a pop-up of the type (i.e., Albedo, which means distinguished with reflected light), location, and the time it was named (i.e., 1958 for this particular feature).

With this new edition to the Google Maps collection and with Google Moon’s previous launch in the summer of 2005, it appears that Google wants to map the universe. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more planets, suns, and other celestial objects in the future. However, for earth-based driving directions I’m still a faithful MapQuest user :).

Song of The Day: My Own Worst Enemy - Artist: Lit

Okay. Again, I deviate from the norm and introduce another fun game concept that I cooked up about 10 years ago: The Guillotine of Draccus.

You can play the game online here (Requires: Shockwave Plug-in; Rating: PG-13).

Attention (Intel Mac Users): Last I checked you’ll have to run the browser in Rosetta Emulation mode before installing and running the Shockwave plug-in (i.e., until Shockwave is ported).

The concept was implemented in Macromedia Director; however, the Shockwave .dcr files didn’t work anymore due to compression changes, so I had to use a trial version of Director MX 2004 to get the game up and running again. Sorry about this, but it will have to suffice until I find a current copy or come up with $1000 for the new version! The game is basically hangman with a few morbid bells and whistles.

The src for the graphics, sounds, and Director files are here (12M zip file).