HOLY CRAP!!!!

Check out the below video shot from a 20th floor apartment in Queens, NY, by YouTube member DTRAVELZ

The video is a bit shaky in places (he was in a freakin’ tornado!), but the camera clearly captures the sight of this storm approaching and absolutely engulfing the entire area. This thing passes directly over his building! Check out the intense power of the wind and the incredible amount of rain falling. The clacking sounds are likely hailstones bouncing off the glass window. Great work DTRAVELZ!

This guy is really lucky that his windows stayed intact — apparently some of the glass panes of the balcony below his were blown off.

Put this on full screen, and turn up the speakers!

YouTube – TORNADO in Queens, Highrise view

No, this is not about the beloved NYC rock-opera musical. It’s about the differences (and benefits) of access vs. ownership; and a look at just what will have value when so much is available for free.

Kevin Kelly over at KK.ORG has just posted a very interesting essay on this topic, called Better Than Owning: Access is better than ownership. Take a few minutes and read it. Here’s an excerpt:

Very likely, in the near future, I won’t “own” any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won’t buy – as in make a decision to own — any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won’t own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to “own” it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.

For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It’s not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.

In fact, take a few more minutes and read this piece posted by Kevin Kelly in January, 2008: Better Than Free. Here’s an excerpt:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it…

…Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can’t be copied?

And finally, if you’ve got 43 minutes to invest in getting a glimpse of the future of the Internet, watch this Kevin Kelly presentation at Web and Where 2.0+ in February 2008.
(The presentation is about ~23 min. and the Q&A, the other 20 min.)

Kevin Kelly’s “Web 3.0″
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J132shgIiuY[/youtube]

Whoa!

Can you believe this? I couldn’t! So I took a few pictures.

I actually bought gas for $1.89/gallon tonight in Fort Lee, NJ, on my way home from a client’s house. I’ve just become numb to the price of gasoline lately, and hadn’t really noticed the prices falling. I cannot remember the last time I saw gas for under two dollars per gallon.

I did a quick Internet search, and found that the highest price in my area of New York City was $4.41/gallon on 7/16/2008; that was only 4 months ago. (The highest price in the Fort Lee, NJ area was $4.01/gallon on 7/6/2008.)

Today I got 12.217 gallons for only $23.20, that would have cost about $50 four months ago.

The Fuel Gauge Report website has more information about gas prices, including this chart of the:

12 Month Average For Regular Unleaded

Has every state now gone blue?

No, there are still a few red states left. But what the above map does show, is the levels of flu activity in each state (as of today, November 11, 2008); lighter blue for minimal flu activity, and darker blue for raised levels of flu activity.

Google (that’s right, the search engine) has just launched a new service called Google Flu Trends. Google has observed that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” or “flu symptoms” is actually sick. But trends do develop amongst the millions of searches done each day. It makes sense when you think about it; people might do a search themselves before they actually end up at their doctor’s office where their case of the Flu gets reported.

By making flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza, and may enable public health officials to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics.

Learn more about Google Flu Trends here.

I happen to love maps. So of course, I love my new Google Maps Plugin for Wordpress.

You like maps too?

Awesome US, World & State Wall Maps:
Raven Maps & Images

And you like on-line weather maps too?

Giant National Radar Composite (it’s huge!):
National Mosaic Enhanced Radar Image

Do you know of any other great map resources? Do tell; leave a comment!

Blue has always been my favorite color. (Take look around this site!) So the news today that Pantone has selected BLUE IRIS as its color of the year for 2008 really caught my eye; and I like this color a lot.

According to their press release, Blue Iris is “a beautifully balanced blue-purple,” that combines the “stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple.” Additionally, “Blue Iris satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.”

Ahhh, that’s nice!

Matt Keating played next door at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Sunday night. The set featured songs from his upcoming release, QUIXOTIC. I took a few pictures, and above is a slide show of those shots. It’s built using the cool flickrSLiDR, and the images come from my new Flickr account. I’m totally new to Flickr, but loving it so far. I’m such a tech/photo-head that I can’t believe I never checked Flickr out before.

For anyone who does not yet know; Flickr is a place where you can host and share all your images online. But the really great part is that you can embed slideshows and galleries of your pix in your blog or website. All of the image are stored on Flickr, and just show up in your web page. Enjoy!

BTW: Matt Keating was great! You can hear samples (or even buy some) of his current and past records here.

Just over 10 years ago, on October 15, 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a several billion mile trip across the solar system to the planet Saturn.

About seven years later, on July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reduced its speed, and entered orbit around Saturn. The spacecraft is now more than half way through its four-year mission to explore the ringed planet.

The mission, called the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan also released a probe that landed on Saturn’s moon Titan on Dec. 25, 2004.

You can see the latest incredible images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan at the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) website.

The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary
Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (in slipcase with reading glass).

500,000 words, 290,000 main entries, 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and over 2,412,000 illustrative quotations in one book. Weighs in at 15.3 pounds.

A direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve inch page.

Painstakingly written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.

Published by Oxford University Press, USA. Available here.

(via cooltools)

News headlines, grouped by color-category in a Mondrian-like layout; sized and shaded to illustrate, at-a-glance, the quantity and freshness of a news story across thousands of media sources. Tabs across the top allow a country-by-country comparative view of the proportion of news/story coverage in different countries around the world.

You can see Newsmap in action here.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

“Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.” –Newsmap website