Shame that NASA doesn't have any real work to do.
NASA stitches 3.2 gigapixel 'Global Selfie' mosaic
NASA has released a 3.2 gigapixel "Global Selfie", comprising 36,422 individual images stitched into a mosaic representation of the Earth. NASA's Global Selfie The agency explains: "On Earth Day this year (22 April), NASA asked people all around the world a simple question – 'Where are you on Earth Right Now?'" We asked …
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Friday 23rd May 2014 16:48 GMT VeganVegan
Re: The location of the selfies ...
That would be way more cool if the photos were placed by their actual locations.
Also, just 36422 photos used?!
That works out to be 1 photo for 5406 square MILES of Earth's surface.
At 5 megapixel per photo, each pixel represents 3350 square yards, roughly 39% of a soccer field per pixel.
Shirley someone can do better?
Maybe we need to start a project to convert Google map to geo-tagged selfies?
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Friday 23rd May 2014 19:32 GMT VinceH
Re: The location of the selfies ...
"That would be way more cool if the photos were placed by their actual locations."
The problem is that if you insist on the photos being used in the mosaic based on where they were taken, and you want a higher resolution, you're going to have a little trouble getting enough pictures for some areas - the poles, deserts and oceans spring to mind.
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Saturday 24th May 2014 00:04 GMT Don Jefe
Re: The location of the selfies ...
It won't be any trouble at all. Once the insurance companies have fitted everyone with 'Rate Rewards' devices and shared that info with Google you'll be able to pull up where you were, as well as what you last ate, where you shat and most importantly, what you bought shortly after.
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Saturday 24th May 2014 00:24 GMT VeganVegan
Re: The location of the selfies ...
But that's the beauty of it:
The easy places will be filled up in no time.
The tough places, middle of the Southern Indian Ocean, deep in Siberia, etc. etc., will be the haunt of a new breed of adventurers, to fill in the all these empty parts of the World map.
It is the dawn of a new age of exploration!
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Friday 23rd May 2014 15:37 GMT Mike Flugennock
I was sick of these long ago
The first couple of times I saw these large mosaics made of thousands of small images, I thought they were pretty cool. Now, the goddamn' things are everywhere, and I'm sick to death of them -- like time-lapse clips. Everybody and their cat is doing those now, and they just aren't interesting anymore.
What bugs me even more is that some of the images in the mosaic are those annoying-assed fotos of people holding up little signs scrawled with a Sharpie. Those were cool for about five minutes, tops. Now, they're just banal and annoying. God, I want to smack the shit out of those people -- just line 'em up, like the Three Stooges, and slap 'em all at once.
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Friday 23rd May 2014 22:41 GMT Anomalous Cowshed
Re: Well that explains the budget cuts
Oh Bollocks of dog! You see this in completely the wrong way.
Like Britain entering the post-industrial age, NASA is entering the 'post-rocketry' age.
Now that so many countries can fire rockets into space, it's no longer cool or interesting to try to do so any more. Nobody really cares, and there's a lot of Engineering involved, which is expensive and...mostly boring. Management, PR, social networking, outreach, are more the in-thing nowadays, and NASA's genius lies in how it is able to combine 'space' which, let's face it, is only of interest to a minority [of mostly weirdos], and cool PR / social networking, which has a far broader appeal. No other space agency comes close to NASA now in terms of media and PR, except perhaps the British Space Agency, which has always been the one to follow in this respect.
The benefit is lower costs, so everyone's a winner.
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Saturday 24th May 2014 01:19 GMT Don Jefe
Re: Well that explains the budget cuts
I bet a few managers and PR types will get promotions after this. One of the most common errors I see people make in business is not understanding where the money in a company or organization actually comes from.
In all but the smallest commercial business people think customers provide the money, that's wrong. Banks and investors provide the money, customers just give you money to pay the banks and investors back with.
In a State sponsored organization like NASA the same misunderstanding abounds. People often think NASA gets their money from Congress, but that's wrong. NASA gets it's money from the taxpayers, Congress just gives NASA the money to meet taxpayer demands.
So if NASA wants money, who should they target in order to get the funds? They should target the voting taxpayer and that's exactly what they've done here. They got (x) number of people to engage in an activity which required the participants to perform several physical acts to qualify, and they'll tell their friends as well as check back to try and find themselves or friends in the image.
Younger people and young adults will tell their family and friends and some of the really young participants will form lifelong bonds with NASA. Voters write their Congresspeople letting them know how much NASA means to them and next year everybody gets more money. It's cool like that.
What's especially great about that, is that so few voters actually write their Representatives to begin with and if they do it's to bitch and moan. So when somebody writes them with something positive that isn't politically charged dogmatic idiocy they tend to act on that to keep the voter happy. It's a nice system, you should try. Fortunately, because messages from the idiots all get ignored anyway the fact a few naysayers don't get it is 100% irrelevant.
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