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.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard Improvements

For those wondering what that mess is all about on Cesar Chavez Boulevard in San Francisco, here is the lowdown: They are in the process of replacing a giant 8 feet diameter sewer pipe that runs under the whole length of Cesar Chavez Blvd, from Guerrero Street to the 101 freeway, and also under Valencia Street between Chavez and Mission St (where the Burger King is) as well as under several adjacent streets. So what we see right now around Harrison Street is just the beginning! Once they are done with the underground work, Cesar Chavez blvd will be redesigned, with an addition of bike lanes and a median, plus trees on both sides. 

Chinese complete their first space docking manoeuvre

After successfully sending their first man in space in 2003 with Shenzhou-5, and executing their first EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) in 2008 with Shenzhou-7, this week the unmanned Chinese spacecraft Shenzhou-8 successfully docked with the TianGong-1 space module, a first for the Chinese Space Program.

NASA's Next Manned Mission to an Asteroid

Now that the Space Launch System program is officially on its tracks, lets take a look at what NASA plans to do with the giant rocket. After the first couple of test flights (including a manned fly-by around the moon somewhere between 2017 and 2021), the first big objective is to send 4 astronauts to a 6 month trip to a Near Earth Object (NEO). The mission would be called 'Plymouth Rock'.

NASA Officially Announces the Space Launch System

Last Wednesday NASA officials publicly unveiled the Space Launch System, the new heavy lift rocket that will send astronauts beyond earth orbit, to asteroids, the moon and possibly some day to Mars. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the design has been known for a few months now, but for various political reasons, the project hadn't been officially announced yet.

Kepler telescope finds planet Tatooine!

NASA engineers operating the Kepler Space telescope have announced this morning that they have discovered the first planet to orbit a twin-star system. The planet is a gas giant about the size of Jupiter, and its temperature is about -70 C, so it's not really habitable. What is important about this discovery is that it proves that planets can be formed on binary star systems. Before today, it had been speculated but never proven.

The newly discovered planet is officially designated as Kepler 16b, but NASA officials have proposed that it should be named Tatooine, after the twin-sun planet in Star-Wars, barring any licensing issues with Lucasfilm...

The Kepler 16 star system is about 200 light-years from earth.

[kepler.nasa.gov]

Trulia.com Crime Map

Trulia.com, the real estate web-site, has unveiled a new web site that shows a great interactive crime map for most US cities, including San Francisco. This is not the first online crime map out there, but this one has by far the best interface. It looks really good, is well designed, and it is very fast and responsive. You can zoom in from National level all the way to street level and get all kinds of detailed information about every single crime reported. You can also see trends by hour or day.

[Trulia.com/crime via gizmodo]

Battlefield 3 Trailer

Check out the amazing full lenght trailer for the upcoming first person shooter Battlefield 3. This is actual gameplay footage, the realism is impressive! You've got destructible environment, immersive sound effects, photo-realistic lighting and rendering. You hear all kinds of sounds, people talking, dogs barking, you see sun rays through the smoke and partial lighting on people, see the reflections of your surroundings on your scope, flags floating in the wind, tracer bullets and sparks flying, debris blown up in the air everywhere.

Endeavour's Last Flight

The Space Shuttle Endeavour launched for the last time this morning at 8:56am EDT, carrying 6 astronauts and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), as well as the new STORRM navigation and docking system to the International Space Station. This is the second-to-last flight of the Space Shuttle fleet, the last flight will be Atlantis' STS-135 mission, scheduled for July 12, 2011.

Ah, crap! We're running out of Neodymium, too...

We already knew that we were running out of oil, and in recent years experts have started to worry that we are running out of Uranium to power the world's Nuclear power plants. But now, new reports show that we are also running out of Neodymium and Dysprosium, two rare metals used in the manufacturing of the powerful permanent magnets found in electric car engines and wind turbines.

HTC Thunderbolt gets 26 Mbits/second!

Yep, 26 Mbits/s. That's the amazing download speed I was able to get on my friend's HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. We were at Rosamunde in San Francisco's Mission district, with four out of four bars of signal strength. The upload speed was 5 Mbits/s.

The RoboEarth Project and The Rise Of The Machines

The field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence seems to have been making significant progress these last couple of years. A few months ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer was able to beat the two best human players at Jeopardy. It is capable of understanding questions formulated in normal English language on a variety of fields like science, history or popular culture, and come up with an answer in less than a second.

The Skylon Spaceplane

British Aerospace company Reaction Engines Ltd is working on a design for a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) Spaceplane called Skylon that will take off and land horizontally from a runway, just like a normal plane. This concept has been studied several times already in the past, with projects such as the U.S.'s National Aerospace Plane (see my previous post) or the British HOTOL, but all encountered technological problems that they could not solve. 

SFPark iPhone app shows Real-Time Parking Availability in San Francisco

As you may or may not know, San Francisco's SFPark Project has been installing state-of-the-art park-meters and sensors on the ground that can tell if a car is parked in the spot. This information is transmitted wirelessly to their central server. Now this information is available to everybody on-line on the sfpark.org website, or with the SFPark iPhone app. It displays a map showing each street block color-coded depending on the approximate number of spots available.