Each month, we look back on the best of the month’s Best of the Blogs.
Driverless cars may soon be facing a very Australian problem: kangaroos. The unusual behaviour of the national symbol is throwing off computer vision algorithms, which have not been able to judge the distance of the animals as they become airborne. Luckily, some smart researchers have an idea how to overcome the problem. [ABC News]
Last year, experimental cartographer Andrew Woodruff created a stunning and very surprising map showing which country you would be facing if you looked across the sea. Who would have thought, for example, that you could be facing India all the way from the Pacific coast of Mexico? Now, Woodfruff has brought his creation to life, making it interactive. By clicking on any coastline on the map, you can see the view you would have if you could look all the way across the ocean perpendicular from your position. [Andy Woodruff]
Around 8 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans every single year. The Ocean Cleanup organisation believes that between 1.15 and 2.41 million metric tons of that plastic in the oceans originates from the world’s river systems. To help explain how and where plastic ends up in the world’s oceans the Ocean Cleanup has released an interactive map, River Plastic Emissions to the World’s Oceans. Similarly, Sailing Seas of Plastic, is an interactive mapped visualisation of the concentration of plastic in the world’s oceans. According to the map there are 5,250 billion pieces of plastic adrift on the seas of the world. [Maps Mania]
Gordon-Michael Scallion was a futurist, teacher of consciousness studies and metaphysics, and a spiritual visionary. In the 1980’s he claims to have had a spiritual awakening that helped him create very detailed maps of future world, all stemming from a cataclysmic pole shift. The result, while not based on any science, nonetheless provides a vivid and compelling picture of an Earth ravaged by flooding. See how he expects the world to soon look, including Australia and New Zealand above. [Forbes]
Over the course of one year, NOAA and NASA’s DSCOVR satellite has been taking a snapshot of Earth. NASA put together more than 3,000 of these images and created this amazing time-lapse that show a year in the life of our planet. [Geoawesomeness]
