San Francisco Before and After : 1853 to 2010

After my previous article where I was showing the growth of cities worldwide by superimposing old and new satellite pictures, I though about doing a similar thing with even older maps of cities from the 19th century. And what better city to start with than my own hometown of San Francisco, California? The view above shows a map of SF from 1869 and a satellite picture from 2010.   

Click and drag the green cursor to see the difference between the two maps. 

Technorati claim token PYM5X5Z4CZMB

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Wondering what this post is all about? Well, if you want people to know about your blog, you need to register it to Blog Directories web sites like Technorati or Best Of The Blog, where people go to look for blogs. In order for Technorati to verify that the blog you are registering really belongs to you, it sends you a code or Token and asks you to put it somewhere in a post. Just like I'm doing right now. It also asks you to turn on RSS feed on your blog and turn off any robot-blocking configuration so that their bots can automatically read your blog and find the token.

So now you know.

Satellite Pictures Show Growth of Cities Worldwide

CNN and NASA's Landsat department have released a series of amazing satellite pictures showing the dramatic growth of urban areas around the world in the past 30 years. The two superimposed images above show Las Vegas in 1984 and 2011. Click and drag the green cursor on the image to see the changes before and after. See how what used to be barren desert is now lush suburban lawns. Also note how Lake Mead has dramatically shrunk in the same period of time... Las Vegas grew from 520,000 people in 1986 to 1.9 million in 2011. 

NASA releases new details on next SLS rockets

NASA is fine-tuning its design for the new Space Launch System (SLS) that will send astronauts to the moon, asteroids and possibly Mars. Basically there will be three main types of rocket, the Block 1, Block 1A and Block 2. Block 1A and Block 2 will both have a crewed and a cargo variant, so that's a total of 5 models. The most important difference with what was announced last September is that the main core stage will now have four or five RS-25D/E Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) instead of three.

Black Rock City 2015

'Biohazard' city plan

With all the mess surrounding the ticket sales for this year's Burning Man (for those who don't know, demand largely outstripped supply, and the event sold out its 57,000 tickets, leaving tens of thousands of burners without tickets), I started working on ideas about how to enlarge Black Rock City to accommodate more people. The Burning Man Organization (BORG) is trying to get the Bureau of Land Management (BLM, the federal agency that regulates the public land where Burning Man takes place) to allow them to slowly increase the population from its current cap of 55,000 people to 70,000 in 2016. 

Cité de l'Espace

Ariane 5 rocket

During my last visit to France, I visited the Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse, space capital of Europe. The Cité de l'Espace (City of Space) is the european equivalent of the Kenedy Space Center's visitor complex. In addition to numerous interactive exhibits revolving around space exploration, they have a bunch of real space hardware on display, including a Soyuz spaceship and a mockup of the Russian Mir space station that was once used to train astronauts.

Ohm Sport XS750 Electric Bike Test Ride

Back in November I had the opportunity to try a Ohm Sport XS750 electric bicycle for a day, so I though I'd post a review about it. The day long test ride was graciously offered to me by The New Wheel, a cool electric bike retailer in North Beach. So on a sunny Sunday morning, I embarked upon a 30 mile long ride around San Francisco.