2010 December 22 | Mapsys.info Mapsys.info

Joseph on Better Listening

“If you’re going to help a man, you want to know something about him, don’t you?”

–Joseph to Clarence, Angel Second Class

from the film, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Sales questions…

The key to learning more about a prospect, customer, or colleague is asking more open-ended questions (questions that cannot be answered by a yes or no) and then listening – really listening – with complete attention.

No leading. No prompting. No interrupting. (You can do it.)

Get some more insight and a list of the top 30 open-ended questions from JustSell. Then, put together a small group and practice delivering the questions to one another (while also practicing your listening).

Lunar Eclipse Live

It’ll be a dark and stormy night on the moon. Well, dark anyway, because tonight is the only total lunar eclipse of 2010.

Visible to people in North America starting at about 9pm Pacific this evening, the Earth will pass between the sun and moon, blocking the sun’s light from reaching the moon’s surface.

We’ve launched a live telescope feed in Google Sky, and we’ll be broadcasting the whole event so that you can keep tabs on the event regardless of the local weather conditions.

To find the feed, which we created in partnership with slooh.com, fire up Google Earth and enter Sky Mode by clicking on the Planet Icon in the toolbar and selecting Sky.

Then, open up the Current Sky Events folder and click on the blue Slooh Space Camera link to open the feed balloon.

Be sure to check back after the eclipse too and follow along as we and Slooh broadcast more live images from their telescopes.

Posted by Noel Gorelick, Chief Extraterrestrial Observer

Use Ground-Level View to complete a 3D maze

GEB reader ‘Will from the UK’ has sent us another cool find — a 3D maze! The grounds of the Hampton Court Palace in London include a lot of greenery, and this maze is part of it.

This would have been pretty neat in any case, but it’s made much cooler by the new “Ground Level View” in Google Earth 6. You can give it a try by using this KML file. If you use a Space Navigator, try to fly through it. If not, then grab the Street View pegman from the navigation tools and put him in the maze. This will shift you to “Ground-Level View” mode, and then you can use the arrow keys to work your way through the maze.

The lack of collision detection in Google Earth means that you can go right through the shrubs, which makes it a bit difficult to work your way through. Still, it’s a pretty neat find! If you get stuck, Will created this simple KML file that shows the path to the center.

While you’re there, be sure to check out the Palace itself. It possibly has the most chimney stacks of any building in Google Earth — there are a ton of them!