“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
–Anne Frank (1929–1945)
Dutch diarist
“Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.”
Studs Terkel (1912–2008)
American writer, journalist, broadcaster
Pulitzer Prize winner
Everything begins with our attitude toward our work – to how we contribute. We should be sure to guard and nurture that attitude.
Terkel’s bestselling book Working was published 37 years ago as an oral history of “people talking about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do”.
Have you ever dreamed of setting sail across the Bermuda Triangle? Well, now you can follow the recent MBARI Sargasso Sea Expedition virtually by reading a series of posts from the cruise in Google Earth. To follow this sea expedition, download the complete log kml or visit the Earth Gallery.
MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) researchers and scientists from the University of Hawaii, University of Miami and Stanford University sailed 940 miles (1500 km) from Bermuda to the Bahamas across the North Atlantic Ocean through the Sargasso Sea. Their goal was to better understand this unique ocean habitat which is named for the free-floating brown algae Sargassum (also called “gulf weed”) and its associated community of marine life. Under the direction of Chief Scientist Ken Smith, the expedition team measured biodiversity and the impacts of climate change and carbon cycling to this ecosystem. They also learned more about deep ocean animals.
See a school of eels swarming around bait anchored to the sea floor.
The mission is the second voyage for the Schmidt Ocean Institute ship, Lone Ranger, whose Facebook page you can follow here, a former ocean tug that has been retrofitted for cutting-edge science investigations.
I just picked up my Motorola Xoom last week, and I’ve gotta say that I’m very impressed so far. It’s running Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” and it’s a very worthy competitor to the iPad. You can read my full thoughts on the Xoom here, but I’m going to take this time to talk about Google Earth specifically.
While Google hasn’t released a Honeycomb-specific version of Google Earth yet, the phone version scales up very nicely. This is largely due to how Honeycomb deals with phone-based apps. On the iPad, it simply doubles the size of the iPhone app, which made it quite blurry. On Honeycomb, they actually scale the app properly so it stays sharp.
This works very well for many apps, but not so good for other. For example, the Facebook app looks kind of funny with a few little icons in the middle, and status updates rolling along the full width of the 10.1″ screen. However, for Google Earth it works great!
While the icons are a bit small on the big screen, the quality of the imagery takes excellent advantage of the 1280×800 screen and it looks amazing. The dual-core processor and 1GB of memory help it to be as smooth as silk, too. Check out the video below for a quick review.
Even if you fly down to terrain-heavy areas such as the Grand Canyon, the app doesn’t even stutter a bit. This is certainly a very powerful device.
Google has yet to announce anything related to Google Earth on Honeycomb, but I have to think they’re working on a new version for it. The power in this tablet might mean we’ll finally see some 3D buildings in the app, too! Even better, I hope we see more of the features that Frank suggested in this post earlier this month.
Do you have a Xoom yet? Are you holding out to see what the iPad 2 has to offer? Or just not sure you need/want a tablet at all?
