Coffee Klatch

If you haven’t heard about Google Earth, now’s the time to check it out. It is INCREDIBLY cool! Visit http://earth.google.com/ to see what all the fuss is about. In a nutshell, it’s a 3-D mapping program that works as a client program, streaming images in as it operates. Starting at The Globe, you can zoom in as detailed as you want. Not only from above, but from an angle, and rotating to whatever view you like. You can also choose to display or hide things like street names, schools, gas stations, coffee houses, and tons of other things. It’s quite customizable! Select major cities around the U.S. have even got 3-D views of the buildings. And the program even tells you how high up you’re “viewing” things from, as well as the latitude, longitude, and elevation of whatever point your mouse is over.

One cool novelty is that when you change views, the image “flies” to the new location, zooming out as it moves and zooming back in on the new spot. It really helps you get a better picture of how places relate to each other on a global perspective. That has to be one of the best features, because you can zoom in and out while you’re moving around geographically, resembling a globe that you would turn with your hands, only you can zoom in close enough to identify the models of vehicles in parking lots.

Google has really outdone themselves with this and I’m excited to see if the 3-D development continues outside the U.S. cities they’ve selected. You can even get driving directions in the same view, but only city-to-city right now, not down to the specific street address. Still, it’s VERY cool!

For a while, the page said that downloading had been “temporarily disabled,” but it’s back. I just downloaded it today (for free, of course), and have found it incredible! Be sure to visit http://earth.google.com/ and grab the free download while it’s available.

Another sign of the continuing decay of modern society:

School officials in Victoria, Australia, say it’s too hard for students to calculate equations using the constant 9.8 meters/second/second — the acceleration of gravity at Earth’s surface–so it’s changing the Year 12 physics exam for the Victorian Certificate of Education to use a rounded-off figure of 10 m/s/s. Close enough? No: “The difference could cause a parachutist or bungie jumper to plummet into the ground, or the launching of a rocket to fail,” say people who actually understand physics. After hearing the criticism the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority announced that it would not penalize students who used the correct figure. (Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia)

Current music: Gladiator, Soundtrack from the Motion Picture

The biggest factor in describing whether we’re in a situation of peace or war, in my opinion, is our lifestyle. More particularly, the precautions that we take in our day-to-day lives.

After hearing about the tragedy in London today, I began thinking about all the security precautions that they were already taking, as well as those that our own country has been taking. I remembered the era before all this happened, and we lived in a time of relative peace. Sure we had the cold war, but that, if anything happened, was going to be large scale, country vs. country, not attacks on local communities. We didn’t worry about our physical safety as much as we do around the world today. Daily life did not consist of stressful security checks at airports or subways. At most you walked through a metal detector. Life was more relaxed and people went where they wanted and did what they liked when they wanted to.

Now the world has a mentality of looking over its shoulder, of suspecting strangers (especially with bulky coats) and intensive security. We wonder when and where the next attack will hit. That’s a war mentality. A victim mentality. A way of life that indicates a desperate struggle to regain the control over our lives that has been taken away. And while this mentality lasts, we must accept a temporary diminishing of our own personal freedoms. We can’t just go get on a plane or take a bus through town without at least a little concern for personal safety. We must also deal with more widespread and more thorough security checks. It’s a war mentality, quite opposite to the way we thought about life just 10-15 years ago. And this mentality, this way of life, will continue as long as terrorists accomplish even only one successful attack a year.

When it comes down to assessing our quality of life and the level of safety we have, the security checks we set up and the precautions that we take as a community are a better indicator of the status of peace or war than any announcement by the media or political officials.

Current music: Fresh Aire 2, by Mannheim Steamroller