Anyway, if you don’t yet have Google Earth you can get it here. Once you have it, here is the interactive map which includes photos, videos and testimony.

Here’s how they describe it:

Witness the destruction for yourself. Using coordinates provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google acquired high-resolution imagery over the region of Darfur and Eastern Chad. Now you can witness the destruction in Darfur via Google Earth. Zoom down and see what a burned village looks like from above, the vast tent cities of people displaced from their homes, and photographs on the ground of refugees struggling to survive. Read eyewitness testimony of atrocities in attacked villages. Visualize what genocide looks like today in Darfur.

You can also see the full post over at the Holocaust Museum.

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Google Earth will allow you to plan trips, see the planet from a satelite view, and generally waste time. It is also required for some of the posts on my blog which offer a virtual tour of famous places.

Here are a few quick videos that demonstrate exactly why you should download and install this free software if you haven’t already!

Google Earth Flyover of New York

Critters

More Critters

Fires Raging on Earth

Big Things

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Let’s see, how can I describe it… well, it’s kind of like this video which I previously posted that shows how the size of our planets relate to other objects in the universe, except that the Universcale is interactive and also goes the other way all the way down to subatomic particles.

It really has to be seen to be understood, and it is well worth seeing.

Props to Webware for the find.

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The waterfall system consists of about 270 falls along 2.7 kilometres (1.67 miles) of the Iguazu River. Some of the individual falls are up to 82 metres (269 feet) in height, though the majority are about 64 metres (210 feet).

The Garganta del Diablo or Devil’s Throat (Garganta do Diabo in Portuguese), a U-shaped 150-metre-wide and 700-metre-long (490 by 2300 feet) cliff, is the most impressive of all, and marks the border between Argentina and Brazil.

Take a look at the video below, but also be sure to catch this amazing 360 degree Virtual Panorama

If you already have Google Earth installed, follow this link to explore the Iguazu Falls now. If you don’t yet have Google Earth, you can get the Free Google Pack here.

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If you have Google Earth installed follow this link to open and explore the Panama Canal. If you don’t have it yet get the Google Pack. It’s free and highly entertaining.

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Here is a demo video I created from the built in demonstration mode within Celestia. I highly recommend that everyone download and try out Celestia.

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Secondly is the Sunrise and Sunset tracker. This app doesn’t have quite the same sophistication, and fewer options, but I kind of perfer the simpler interface.

Have fun!

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If you don’t yet have it installed, use my Google Pack link to get it, then just follow this link to open Sultan in Google Earth.

Near Ystrad Mynach in south Wales, we find a fantastic 200 metre long earth-sculpture of Sultan the Pit Pony.

This is the UK’s largest figurative earth sculpture, and although I’m not sure there’s actually much competition for that particular title, Sultan sure is impressive. I particularly like the way his ear sticks right up in the air!

Sultan definitely looks a lot more like a Stallion than a Pit Pony, and as it turns out, this work (by landscape sculptor Mick Petts) was actually named Sultan by the locals – after a famous Pit Pony that used to work in the old colliery.

There’s more info on Sultan at the Caerphilly County Borough Council website.

This tip was courtesy of Google Sightseeing.

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Essentially, FBOWeb’s servers update the status of all the aircraft coming into the following airports (they are constantly adding new ones, so check their site if you’re reading this more than a few weeks after publishing):

• Los Angeles
• Chicago O’Hare
• Boston Logan
• Atlanta Hartsfield
• New York JFK
• Miami
• San Francisco
• Seattle / Tacoma
• Houston Hobby
• Houston Bush
• Denver

A couple of hints… If you start clicking on these and load them all into Google Earth at once you’ll bog down your machine quite bad. Instead, load them one at a time and before you view the next uncheck the current one in your Places sidebar to deactivate it.

Also, when you are viewing them, make sure and zoom in pretty close to the airport and then change your viewing angle so you are seeing the planes from a 3D vantage point as opposed to just looking straight down.

Have fun!

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The Austrian town of F***ing has erected theft-proof road signs embedded in concrete blocks.

Officials acted because they were fed up with English-speaking tourists stealing them as souvenirs.

After the last ‘Welcome to F***ing’ sign was stolen, Mayor Siegfried Hauppl ordered brand new theft-proof road signs.

They are bolted and welded to steel posts embedded in concrete in the ground and the mayor added: “It would take all night to steal one.”

F***ing always attracts a lot of attention in the summer months, with tourists driving up from nearby Salzburg to pose for pictures in front of the F***ing signs.

But Mayor Hauppl said that while the money tourists spent in the area was welcome, locals were fed up with having to replace the signs.

And yes, there is really a city of Fucking, Austria. If you’ve got Google Earth installed you can click here to see where it is. If you don’t yet have Google Earth, go here and get it first.

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Now, I toured the old Heineken brewery in Amsterdam last year which I would say was a slightly better tour and experience, but that was not a working factory, and you had to pay $10 Euros per person to do it. I’m not wishing to take anything away from this tour. The tour guide was extremely knowledgeable, they give you a lot of free beer and you get to see something you’ll probably only do once in a lifetime.

As always, there are a few little things to be aware of that the old travel books don’t exactly disclose.

• First, everyone quotes this as a 40 minute tour. Well, the actual tour probably only takes 40 minutes, but you should also know that you have to first park in a remote lot, board a shuttle, wait for the shuttle to fill up, then drive to the factory. This whole process will cost at least 15-20 minutes each way.
• Next, after arriving at the brewery, they hand out little beer bottle labels which signify the particular tour to which you’ve been assigned. When I was there, I was part of the third tour group to be sent while I was waiting. This cost at least another 20 minutes or so.
• Finally, after taking the tour you get to go to the “bar” where you get to sample several free beers. Depending on how long you personally want to stay here, this could conceivably take a while.

So, the 40 minutes they quote is a serious underestimation of this event which will doubtless take at a minimum 2 hours or more. Still, I’d say it was worth doing, and it is something that the entire family can do together. (They serve coke to people under 21). Learning how the beer is created from all of the natural ingredients is kind of a mini science lesson, and there is no more appropriate place to learn it.

After taking the brewery tour, I decided to check out the Red Rocks Amphitheater, less than 15 minutes away. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I was totally blown away by what I found!

I’m no geologist, but it doesn’t take one to know that this place is special. These are the largest, reddest rocks jutting out of the ground that I’ve seen anywhere. They were a breathtaking site to behold, and I highly recommend this short diversion to anyone.

Now, there were quite a few other things to do in and around Golden, but my time was running very short as I was on my way to the airport for a flight about 2 hours after I finished looking at Red Rocks. Also of note is Buffalo Bill’s grave and museum, the Colorado Railroad Museum and finally the downtown and surrounding areas of Golden.

Although I only spent part of one day exploring Golden, I spent the remainder of this long weekend in the Denver area. You can also read Weekend in Denver – Part 1, Part 2, or peruse the other places I visited during this extended weekend in the Denver area: Boulder Colorado, and Colorado Springs and Pike’s Peak.

While in Denver I stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Denver South Meridian. You can read my review.

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Select the following link to download the package:

The Google Pack will automatically install Picasa, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Google Pack Screensaver, and the Toolbar for Internet Explorer as well as the Firefox Web Browser. It also gives the option of installing some other 3rd party software.

Here is why you would want each of the things offered in the Google Pack:

• Picasa is one of the easiest programs you can use to manage your digital photo album. It gives even rank amateurs plenty of power to manipulate, edit and print images.
• Google Earth will allow you to plan trips, see the planet from a satellite view, and generally waste time. It is also required for some of the posts on my blog which offer a virtual tour of famous places.
• Google Desktop will allow you to have a nice sidebar that keeps all your favorite plugins up to date with things like weather, stocks, news, etc.
• Google Pack Screensaver will turn your photo collection into your screensaver.
• The Toolbar for Internet Explorer will add features including a Google search, form filler and pop-up blocking to your IE.
• The Firefox Web browser is a very useful secondary browser even if you want to keep using IE. If you encounter a site that isn’t working properly in Internet Explorer open up Firefox and see if it works. Many people prefer to use Firefox permanently because it seems to be more secure and offers many useful plugins.

And for your amusement, here is an example of what Google Earth can do. Find more videos like this here.

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