There's an app for that

Via the Atlantic's James Fallows comes this new app for Google Maps by Paul Rademacher which allows you get a sense for the size of the Gulf oil spill. You know, in case "the entire Gulf of Mexico" doesn't quite let you understand the scale of the devastation.

Perhaps if it were compared to the size of San Francisco...


Or the DC/Baltimore metro area...

And the spill is growing larger by the hour. So... yeah. At least it isn't happening on land though. That would be worse... marginally worse.

Picture of the day

Via Popular Science and the Google with the maps comes this look at the world's largest airplane graveyard... from space. And they still didn't get every plane in the shot.

5,000 aerospace vehicles; B-52s, B-1s and F-111s F-14 Tomcats, F-15s, F-16s, C-130s, KC-135 refueling tankers, A-10sF-4 Phantoms, Century Series jets, and numerous paper airplanes made out of notebook and corrasable bond typing paper.

Just think of how many IRS offices we could teach a lesson. How dare they audit me!
/Steve Kingin'

Click to embiggen.

Your new Google ad

Goliath vs. an even bigger Goliath

I think we all remember the biblical story of Goliath and Goliath. Where two massive entities come to work together in order to increase their quarterly earnings reports and stranglehold on the information its subjects can view? I think Jesus was in it and there was something about a scorpion riding on the back of a frog in a river or something.

Anyway, such was the pairing of China and Google. But now that partnership is cracking under the weight of obvious conclusions that should have been eminently foreseeable for all. I don't want to alarm any of you, but it seems that China is an intensely oppressive communist regime that likes to control every shred of news or information its citizens try to access. I know that's shocking to you, but it seems that Google didn't know this information either. That's why it was shocked, shocked, to see that China was using all of the information controls and censoring blocks that Google put into its Google China search engine were used to spy on dissidents and businesses. That seems so unlike China. So Google offered an ultimatum: stop censoring information or we'll shut down Google China. Yeah, China's cool with that.

China made clear today that it will ignore an ultimatum from Google to relax internet censorship and reminded all companies that they must abide by state controls of the country’s cyberspace.

The authorities published a half-page statement in the People’s Daily, official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, signalling that Beijing has already decided that its 360 million internet users will have to manage without the world’s most popular search engine.
...
Google plans to stand by its pledge to close its Chinese Google.cn service if the censorship is not lifted.

Who could have foreseen? How was Google supposed to know that all the information it was censoring, websites it was blocking, and monitoring and tracking information it was providing to China was going to be used for nefarious purposes? Censoring the internet for money usually carries with it such humanitarian goals. Who knew that China would try to overstep its already ridiculous internet censorship into trying to find out who was trying to access contraband information and suing that to persecute them? How could the brilliant plan of joint corporate and government censorship all have gone wrong?

C'est la vie. It looks like Chinese citizens won't have a nice user interface to go along with their government approved searches. Plus Google is really going to get some good PR. Because what's better than pulling out of China for ethical and free speech reasons? Not thinking about the ethical and free speech reasons Google went into China and set up a high tech censorship network for, that's what. It's a shame, I had high hopes for a Google China Nexus One phone that not only had a lot of cool apps, but also recorded all your phone calls. Oh well.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 01.11

Why Is the Whistleblower Who Exposed the Massive UBS Tax Evasion Scheme the Only One Heading to Prison?
When a massive international bank helps thousands upon thousands of people evade taxes and hide money to flagrantly that it has to pay almost a billion dollars in fines, who goes to jail? If you answered "One guy, the one who blew the life off the scandal in the first place" then you... must have read the headline above. Democracy Now conducts and extensive interview with the executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center to show just exactly how banks, the US justice system, and the US government endeared themselves to you again.

Chinese Coal Formed During Earth’s Greatest Extinction Is Still Deadly
You have to hand it to the Chinese. Not only are the set to drag ass on climate change in such an epic manner that it would make the US stand back in awe, they've apparently found and are burning the deadliest and most polluting coal known to man. Not only does this coal, formed 250 million years ago during a massive extinction (I wonder...), pollute just as effectively as the regular stuff, but it come with a cancer chaser that's 20 times greater than normal. See, the Chinese even pollute and poison their populace more effectively than us. We just can't win.

ABC News embraces the nonsense
Let's say you were a TV news director and you were doing a piece on the fact that 28 doctors who have spent their lives studying autism, conducted an exhaustive study that found no correlation between GI disorders, diets and causing autism or diets in improving autism cases. Who is the first person you'd rush to interview for the story? If you said "a Playboy model/vaccine denier", you get to run ABC's news division for the next month. The Bad Astronomy blog takes a look at autism, ABC, Jenny McCarthy, vaccine gainsayers, and the difference between news and "news" and science and "science".

Abortion Foe Defies Party on Health Care Bill
Question. What do you call someone who would kill an attempt to make sure that 45,000 people a year don't die due to lack of access to health care as well as better the lives of millions, because he doesn't think he's getting enough control over women's bodies? That's a serious question, because I don't think "pro-life" quite covers it. The NYT covers Bob Stupak's bitching and moaning over the fact that people don't agree with him.

Google Earth helps find El Dorado
According to some wags on the internet, they've used Google Earth to find the fabled "lost city of gold." Sounds all well and good, but this better not be like the time some jagoffs said the found the lost city of Atlantis on Google Earth or those people who said they found the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This time their treasure better not be knowledge. The lost city of gold better contain some gold. This time I better see some archeologist in a fedora hauling 24 karat bricks of of the Bolivian brush and whipping some fascists in the face.

Vatican takes aim at 'Avatar'
id you ever want to see movie criticism from a leading religious body that not only accurately described the flaws in a movie but also unknowingly provided a meta criticism about itself and the way it runs said religion? Well, God bless the Catholic Church. It's the pot shooting the kettle in the kneecap.

Weekend video/Pandemic scare mongering

Via Wired Science and the sciencey sounding paper “Reconstructing the initial global spread of a human influenza pandemic: A Bayesian spatial-temporal model for the global spread of H1N1pdm” by Andrew Rambaut, Philippe Lemey and Marc Suchard, comes this look at how the global Mexican pig cabals spread their H1N1 Captain Trips-esque superflu. The videos could use some ominous music, perhaps the Imperial March, Flight of the Valkyries or something from the Omen. Still, this does teach us two important things. One: We're all going to die. Two: We need to stop pigs from purchasing airplane tickets.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.08

U.S. Tried to Soften Treaty on Detainees
Part 367,892 in the series: I Can't Believe the Bush Administration Tried To Do That! In this episode our boy wonders decided that it was time to soften the language and legal requirements behind state sanctioned kidnappings. In the end they weren't able to soften the language because it had to suffer the scrutiny and support of over 81 countries also signed on to the treaty, several of whom expressed concerns over stuff like kidnappings. Ah well, maybe Cheney can get it done when he wins in 2012.

Job outlook hits worst-ever level
Job seekers, hang yourselves on my mark.........now. That's right, the Employment Outlook Survey has reached its lowest level since 1962. All in all -3% of employers (seriously) plan on doing additional hiring this quarter and eight sectors have shown a negative hiring outlook. I don't know what that means, so I'll just add it to the list I have marked 'Horrible Sounding Shit' and be done with it.

President Says His Critics Lack Health-Care Answer
You know Barry, a month from now when health care is either defeated or some milquetoast, no public option, expensive private sector giveaway, that is unpopular with America at large is passed and Republicans are able to sit back, laugh, and realize they got all this with about one Republican voting for it and by acting like insane people, I'm not sure the first thing they'll say to themselves is "But we didn't have the answer." They'll just be figuring out how to duplicate the process on the next big legislative fight.

Election monitors cry foul as Karzai vote hits 54 per cent
Don't you just love it when our buddy in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, takes a look at the election fraud in Iran and says to himself "That looks like a great idea, but I'm on a budget, so I'll have to rig my election on the cheap and in more blatantly obvious ways"? It's always great when the UN's Electoral Complaints Commission says things like "clear and convincing evidence of fraud". I'm sure this will cause us to rethink our position of support for Karzai and the war in Afghanistan. Just kidding. The correct response is "Who cares?"

Google Trends: Sep 8, 2009
What's that, Google Trends? You say popular searches include melanie oudin boyfriend and caroline wozniacki breasts? I think I smell Women's US Open tennis fever taking hold in America's groins hearts. You know what's surprisingly not on the list? "US statutory rape laws."

Who could have foreseen?

Sorry to break some bad news to you. But it turns out that our lawless system of rendition and torture may have had a few kinks in it's execution. I'm as surprised as you. But the important thing is that we acknowledge the problems, so that we may better correct them for the next time we decide all of this is a good idea. First problem to fix? Make sure the guys you hire to run your torture program are actual experts, just not two weekend masochists who low bid the project, had "no relevant scholarship", and who had to Google "brutal tactics" and "Chinese communists" and then took notes on what came up.

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

On the bright side, I'm sure these two will be in for a harsh rebuke when the Justice Department decides to only look at low level operatives in the upcoming "comprehensive torture probe". Still this is yet another crushing blow to the belief that the Bush Administration was an evil bunch of Machiavellian plotters, unleashing their brilliantly diabolical plans onto an unsuspecting nation. It turns out they were just cheapskate sadists on a tight time schedule and they proceeded with their colossally reckless notions in the laziest and ham-handed way possible. They were allowed to succeed because of the general lazy cowardice and general incompetence of their supposed overseers in Congress.

Ouch, I'm going to need to sit down. It's always hard to come to grips with the fact that what you thought was a higher class of evil, turns out to be dime store evil mixed in with garden variety stupidity. Talk amongst yourselves.

Pride (In the Name of Love)

As Sean was kind enough to point out to me earlier today, America's own pride and joy, These Bastards, shows up at #1 on Google when you search for "glenn beck aardvark". This is but the first step towards our blogosphere domination/campaign to get Glenn Beck arrested for bestiality. Phase 2 is actually getting someone to use the search term "glenn beck aardvark". Baby steps, though. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Picture of the day

Via Animal New York comes this example of a time where maybe Google should have built a couple of better filters into its ad program. Sure the AP video in question is ostensibly about Iran, women, and using the internet for communication, but you weren't supposed to jumble them all up together into a plea for horny guys with an oppression fetish. Sure I've heard of targeted marketing, but I didn't think "men who watch AP news footage of revolutions and are single" was a key demo. Still at least the rioting scenes didn't cause ads for surplus rubble or discounted Korans to come up. Better luck next time.

New, improved guilt

We Catholics severely lapsed Catholics get off on this shit. Ever find yourself sitting in a brightly lit home after having just loaded the dishwasher, tooling around on the internet and waiting on a load of laundry to dry so you can go fire up that giant new state-of-the-art dildo with its own theme song when you wonder: why is my electricity bill always so high? Looks like today is your lucky day.

Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage.

Enjoy, sinners.

h/t kottke

Change comes to Google Maps

Cheney lives here

Biden lives here

Want to know how far Dick Cheney's secretive grasp extended? All the way to Google Maps aerial photos of the Naval Observatory where he lived. During the Bush Administration you could see the White House, Pentagon, Area 51, and various landmarks that looked like penises from space, but you couldn't see Dick's pad. Not until the week he moved out, whereupon you were deemed to have high enough security clearance to see what the roof of the place looked like. Did he want the homeless furnaces hidden, didn't want NASA to see him sunbathe nude, or didn't want people learning his secret Masonic grass patterns? Or was Dick Cheney such an incredibly hypocritical shit that he had Google blur out his house while he was rifling through your underwear drawer? I think it was the homeless furnace thing.

Google's official position is that it was just an incredible coincidence that somehow also sounds exactly like something Cheney would pull, but I think the spokespeople know better to speak out on Cheney lest they be transported to his ranch to be hunted for sport. So there you are, life has provided you with the thousandth visual metaphor representing the changeover from Bush to Obama. They really are gone for good.