Corn mazes, garden mazes and more via Google Earth

by Jamie Rhein on

Once a person has seen a video of Sarah Palin’s face in a corn maze, it’s hard to imagine what might top it. This Google Earth video “Amazed” has a response. These mazes aren’t all corn related, however. Some, like the Hampton Court Maze in London, are hedge mazes found in formal gardens.

Where ever these mazes are, Google Earth unfolds them in a kaleidoscope trip to various parts of the world–mostly the United Kingdom.

As a note about corn mazes: They change from year to year. For example, this year The Corn Maze at the Butterfly House in Whitehouse, Ohio is of Toledo Walleye Hockey instead of Sarah Palin.

For the list of where each of the mazes featured in the Google Earth video are located, keep reading. The Butterfly House is not one of them.

This list is found, along with the latidudes and longitudes of each maze on the You Tube video page. Click on “more info.” You’ll also find links to the Web sites for most of them.

1. Dole Plantation Maze; Oahu, Hawaii

2. Spider Web; HeeHaws Fun Farm, Layton, Utah

3. McCall’s Pumpkin Patch; New Mexico

4. “HELP” Maze; Greenwood Village, Colorado

5. Fritzler Maze; LaSalle, Colorado

6. Land of Lincoln Corn Maze; Illinois

7. Peace Maze; Castlewellan, Northern Ireland

8. Hazlehead Park; Aberdeen, Scotland

9. Thoresby Mega Maze; Thoresby Home Farm, Perlethorpe, England

10. Wonderland Pleasure Park Hedge Maze; Nottinghamshire, England

11. Hatfield House Maze; Hertfordshire, England

12. Somerleyton Hall Maze; Suffolk, England

13. de Uithof, Den Haag, The Netherlands

14. Amstelpark, Amsterdam

15. Labyrinth & Tree of Life; Milton Keynes, UK

16. Capel Manor College; Enfield, England

17. Alice in Wonderland Park; Christchurch, Dorset, UK

18. Barton Manor; Isle of Wight

19. Amazing Cornish Maize Maze; Smeaton Farm, Pillaton, Saltash, Cornwall

20. Longleat House; Warminster, Wiltshire, England

21. Foot Maze; Conhold House, Wiltshire, England

22. Crystal Palace Park Hedge Maze; Bromley, South London, England

23. Hampton Court Maze; London, England

24. virtual hedge maze you can walk through; Ruurlo, Netherlands

25. Maze Tree; Emsbüren, Germany

26. Herrenhäuser Gärten; Hanover, Germany

27. Guyancourt, le quartier des Saules; Paris, France

28. Lempdes, Puy-de-Dôme, France

29. Labyrinthe de Bouguenais – France

Inspired by Google Earth – teenager paints 60ft penis on his roof

by Scott Carmichael on

Easily offended readers move along – this story involves juvenile humor and a massive painting of a penis.

When 18 year old Roy McInnes watched a TV show about Google Earth, he decided to play a little prank on the photo snapping satellites.

See, these camera satellites pass overhead, and take shots of your area. They don’t care what they see, unless it is something deemed classified, in which case it is blurred.

Roy was hoping that anything he’d paint on his roof, would be captured by Google, and become viewable to the world.

He climbed on the roof of his parents house, and armed with a can of white paint, he drew a massive phallus.

Picture after the jump, may not be suitable for work, children or anyone who is offended by a penis.
None of this would be terribly impressive, but it took over a year for anyone to notice the “artwork” on the roof. A passing helicopter pilot saw the penis, and the first thing he did was to contact the national tabloid, The Sun (I guess that is where the real money is nowadays).

The Sun then contacted the home owner, who initially thought it was an early April Fools prank. When he started interrogating his kids, he discovered the truth – his 18 year old son admitted he was behind the work of art.

Luckily for him, he’s on a year long travel around the world, so won’t be anywhere near the house to receive his punishment any time soon.

GeoEye-1 satellite takes its first photos for Google

by Scott Carmichael on

The photo you see above, is the first shot taken by the new GeoEye-1 satellite. The image is of the university campus in Kutztown, PA. The reason this is so interesting? GeoEye has sold all the rights of their commercial images taken on this new satellite, to Google.

Google laid down some serious cash to get sole access to these images, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing the results of this contract pretty soon in Google Maps and Earth.

The satellite can photograph objects in a resolution higher than anything available to civilian users, and the photographs will be so clear that you’ll be able to identify objects as small as 41 centimeters across.

I’ve always found satellite image sites to be a fantastic way of seeing the world from above, but as these things get closer and closer, I’m sure we’ll think twice before stepping out on the balcony for some naked sunbathing.

Create high resolution maps of all your trips with Flightmap

by Scott Carmichael on

It’s raining outside, so this morning was the perfect opportunity to sit down, browse through all my boarding pass stubs and enter them in a new application I’m testing.

Flightmap is a flight logging program that keeps track of every flight you have taken. You can log the flight number, aircraft type, airline and geeky things like the aircraft registration number and your seat number. Frequent fliers can even keep track of their award and status miles.

The application has an internal database that calculates the distance between all airports in the world, and naturally, it can also convert airport names into airport codes.

Once you have entered all your flights, you can view a summary that displays your most frequently flown routes, the longest and shortest flights you’ve ever taken as well as your most popular airline.

The best part of Flightmap is the ability to generate high resolution maps of your flights. In fact, Flightmap can generate stunning maps up to 32 megapixels large, which is great if you want to print them as a poster. If the built in map colors don’t interest you, then you can even export your flight history as a Google “KML” file, which can be imported into Google Earth (which is totally useless, but oh so cool looking).

Once you have created a map, it is fairly easy to save the image file and set it as your new desktop background so you can show all your colleagues what a well traveled individual you are.

Flightmap is a very slick, easy to use application and the interface is nice and clean. You can view a guided tour of Flightmap here. The application costs 19.90 EUR ($30) but a try before you buy version is available on their site, albeit with several limitations; maps are “defaced” and you can only export your first 10 flights.

All in all, it’s been great to finally have a nice place to save my flights. There are some other services with similar features, but this is the first one I’ve come across that is not web-based (which means it’s easy to take along with you). Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got some more flights to enter!

Why pay to travel when you have Google Earth?

by Jerry Guo on

A quirky media dust-up this week brought a lot of attention to one mom ‘n pop website: Google Sightseeing. Their motto is “why bother seeing the world for real?”. What they’ve done is managed to collect a huge database of sights that you can actually see from Google Earth.

But one sight you won’t be seeing (or at least in anything more than a super blurry blob) is the world’s largest palm tree, whose discovery was announced this week. The scientists had claimed it “can even be seen in Google Earth.” That turns out to be a bit of a stretch.

There are, however, plenty of things you can see from Google Earth. You can, for instance, be a virtual tourist and zip around Easter Island, the abandoned city of San Zhi, and the site of the world’s largest fingerprint.