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Google Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa
cavehobbit writes "Google Earth leads to an archeology find, according to a Nature article. From the article: 'Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river ...' What's buried in your back yard?"
WMD's in Iraq found!
...to find my remote control. Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma,
Is this the same Luca Mori that runs the www.ItalianSatellitePorn.com web site? I love that site!
At least he found something scientific for once!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Aw come on. You never mentioned "All your base" or a "beowulf cluster". What type of slashdotter are you? ;)
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In case you don't want to learn Italian
linkage
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
It can't find you a date!
ZING!
Thank you, I'll be here all night folks...try the salmon!
I feel like I'm taking CRAZY pills!
dog sh!t, and an old running shoe, next question.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
.. So long as he doesn't kill himself geocaching
at that site his find might be worthwhile!
deadbodies.
My ex-wife.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The Roman's didn't have internet back then, but that's not what we're talking about, is it? An Italian used Google Earth to locate something that was already there. And just because an ancient civilization ceased to exist a long time ago, that doesn't mean that they took their ruins with them. Sheesh.
1992 called, they want YOU to check your facts.
--
Trolling all trolls since 2001.
that they've finally found the WMD in Iraq, using Google Earth.
I just had 20 tons of stamped concrete poured into my backyard - I'm kinda curious to see if that shows up on the next satellite pass. Right now, the Boulder, Colorado footage comes from the summer of 2002 (easy to tell because we had a major drought) - sure would be nice if they date stamped the imagery.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Googe Earth can find where I left my damn keys
Perhaps google maps can find your sense of humour?
If I told you what was buried in my back yard, I'd be visited by the DEA, so you'll have to remain in the dark.
So much for the idea that the entire planet earth has been explored.
And what does it say about the sheer volume of data on Google Maps that this had been missed until now?
What's buried in your back yard?
Those meddling kids and their dopey great dane
I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.
fsh
I had loaned six foot aluminum parabolic dish to a church group a number of years back so that they could try to pick up some satellite broadcasts. They never did use it and I forgot all about it.
Along comes Google Earth with six inch resolution in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, lo and behold, there the thing is sitting upside down on their roof, next to the upright dish (which is casting a shadow) that they are currently using.
To see it, go to:
42d 22' 34.0" N 71d 07' 34.4" W
and zoom in to about 50 feet.
of course
Not much to be found here. The Romans didn't find their way here, nor the Greeks, nor the Vikings. No populations with higher technology than the boomerang, spear and woomera (that's the spear throwing tool, rather than the rocket range) here until the 18th century, and those pre-european people weren't much into building buildings of the sort that leave a trace. Even our own civilisation's ruins top out at 200 odd years old, and around where I live only to about 80 years old.
...and noticing some new Layers from National Geographic Magazine. Nowhere near Italy (I see the additions mostly in Africa), but I think they're worth looking at if you like finding random stuff with something Google... ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
this guy is doing archaeology.
"Italian computer programmer"
Sheesh, imagine the spaghetti code!
This reminds me of when I was living in India back in 1996. In an effort to find good sites for village resevoirs for irrigation, India used its new space satellites to find appropriate spots. Low and behold, many of the best sites held actual remains of previous resevoirs, which had been abandoned centuries before!
Building a healthy future; Connecting communities
probably the remains of some folks that were flourishing in the area before the "genocide phase" of the American Experiment took place.
when you mod me down as a troll, i'll consider it your conscience speaking.
My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.
I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.
I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.
...in my neck of the woods. It's not nearly as cool as the find in the article, but it was cool to me. Being a trail-runner and ultra-marathoner, I'm always on the lookout for new trails. There are some good trails not far from my home that I like to run. I always wished that I could just run to the trail, but the roads between home and trail were simply not safe for running. I had tried to use my GPS to map out the trail and some of the woods near my house that I knew should be the closest point near the trail, but the density of the trees (even in winter) rendered my GPS useless. Using Google Earth a while back, I was able to get a nice birds eye view of the entire area near my home including some old access roads that I didn't know existed. Now, I can leave my house, run to the back of my subdivision, down a dirt log-road and through about 100M of woods where I pick up the "top" of the main trail that I run. I even printed it out in tiles on 8.5x11 paper which I scotch-taped together into a poor-mans map. Again, it's not a big deal to most, but to me it was priceless.
...and teach some kids how entertaining x^2** can be when combined with x^2+y^2=1.
**Feature Request: Wikipedia-like math expression pictures on Slashdot. It would help with Math stories...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I think this link should show the villa:
3 &spn=0.007150,0.007532&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.881446,10.42151
A little unrelated, but any one else notice there is now a basic road map for Japan? Don't remember seeing this on slashdot (seeing how slashdot posts everything google related)...
How do you miss something 500m long? Granted, the world is a big place, but I thought that SOMETHING would have found a great big 500m long object by now.
Yeah, right. FYI this is the link to the exact location.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
New /. insult.
Your Mama, She's so fat, I typed her name in on google and saw a satellite photo of her!!
Here in the United States, we're well into an era where road maps frequently don't have train stations indicated on them, and the Caltrains web pages don't see fit to give you a street address suitable for looking up an on-line map. But with Google's satellite imagery, I was able to scan along the train tracks looking for the station buildings.
And I bet it's just as useful for pedestrians to see if it's actually possible to walk along a particular road.
God bless America...
The problem is that slashdot has become the exact opposite of what the open source movement is supposed to be. The editors here are a stovepipe for information. Of course you'll have people screaming all the time "information wants to be free", however that doesn't happen on slashdot. So I for one will keep going to Digg because it is a better site.
/.'er red with rage. It goes to show how blind some of the people here are to good news and community run news sites.
The real reason people will keep coming back to slashdot is that it had an early start in the technology news market and has built a brandname for itself. I find amusing parallels between Microsoft and slashdot that would make the most militant
Just remember, swarms of people can move faster than bureaucratic structures like slashdot.
I just fired up google earth, I typed in "Sorba, Italy" and after it zoomed in (I view google maps at 1024X768 - full screen)
I looked around Sorba, and after the full image loaded I could see what is very likely it - (Northwest- Up and left of Sorba). You can see it in a farmers field in the "brown" image stands out from the rest of green pictures.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
"©2005 Google"
It's HUGE. How did I not notice that before?
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
"Given enough eyes (in the sky), all bogs are shallow."
You misspelled Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Stanford University as America.
Then again, seeing this Google Earth thingumebob, I guess you misspelled Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Stanford University as God too... ;)
Bus, subway, and road maps are a double-edged sword. They are clearer because they distort and omit some of the actual geography, but because of that, we (I, at least) don't always know if we're there yet.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Well, me and my friends just used a beowulf cluster of computers running Google Earth to find all your base... They're now belong to us. As well as your statue of Natalie Portman. Yes, the naked and petrified one with the hot grits.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Oh God. The collective slapping sounds of all the Google / Slashbots masturbating right now is deafening!
At least that's all that Google Maps/Earth show where my house is... I wish they'd get some new aerial photos on a clear day. I wonder if they've thought about getting some IR/near-IR photography done too. That might be interesting for research purposes.
I just was on Google Maps where I noticed that in Rouses Point, NY, where I noticed that, even after a half-century, one can still see the old legendary Rutland Railroad right-of-way, and follow it through the Lake Champlain Islands as it made it's way down to Burlington, VT.
A fellow used google maps to discover some ruins in his own back yard. while digging up the ruins, he comes across some cable, and tells his his neighbour "well there you have it, this proves that our ancient ancestors had internet".
His neighbor replies "that's nothing, yesterday I used google to find some ruins in *my* backyard. When I dug them up, I didn't find ANY cable at all. That proves that our ancient ancestors had wireless".
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
My pr0n time capsule. I show probably throw in an external floppy disk drive, just in case...
Favorite quote: "
i just read this "story" and want to exchange some remarks with the world about it:
d ex.php
GIS (geographical information systems) are using satellite pictures now for decades to monitor and work with them. from farming (how much water is in my soil), geology, archeology and so on, people already use this technologies in daily use.
for example see here:
http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/remote_sensing/in
also wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis
the great thing google provides is that everybody - no matter if professor in geology or not - can now have a look at the data and do something with it. a region that never was of much interest to experts can become of interest by the people living there and doing the first step of discovery they themselves.
google did not re-invent gis and its application. but what google did was to offer parts of the data satellites collect daily to the "people" with a simple user interface.
everybody can have a look at our planet from space and do something with the data.
Yes, what do you want?
I made up a quick-n-dirty keyhole file of the place:
o t-09-16-05.kmz
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jgaynor/random/slashd
For the paranoid, feel free to save it and then open it up from within Google Earth. For the rest of us just launch it directly.
Got to agree with this.
At least Slashdot could put a link to Digg.com on the main page so I can quickly switch to a faster news source.
Absolutely nothing, because if I zoom in to the point where I SHOULD be able to see the damn city I live NEAR (not the dinky ass town I live IN) all I get is a blurry as crap vague-street-and-building picture. But I shall now try to use this program to hunt around the globe for funnies to laugh at.
--"Hm. It seems the waffle couldn't handle it."
the last person that said, 'just google for it'
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I was able to find a lost baseball in my back yard using Google Earth.
-pyrrho
shit, shit, shit! it's just a fucking word. how the hell did we evolve to be at the top of the brain size pile and think that spelling words slightly differently absolves of some absurd sin? weird.
What idiot mod mods the second comment of a story Redundant?
Thank god for meta-moderation. Idiots that do that won't have mod points ever again.
If all these images are being archived, future archeologists will have a lot of interesting stuff to see. Any place that you want to know more about, just look up the images from the right year.
Another thing that will be awesome is to take imagery of a particular city, for example, and animate it over time to watch sprawl, decay, renewal, etc.
Not a homeowner, so don't mind my impertinent question... but:
... walk on that?
I usually think of a deck as something that's raised up off of the ground and/or covered. Yours seems to be just a near-level with the grass surface to stand on. Why not simply grow grass and
I guess a pain to maintain? The grass under the table/etc would not grow/do-well because it's shaded, then you have to move everything when you want to mow, etc etc.
(Very cool big-ass shade thingie btw!)
Jimmy Hoffa...
One of the most interesting things I found nearby with Google Maps satellite images was an ancient asteroid impact site. I was reading about craters on Earth, and found out that there was an ancient weathered crater in the area (WI). I found maps of it that were based on geological data from the ground, and wanted to find out what it might look like from a satellite photo--both to see it and to get a better idea of where it was.
It was fascinating to me--when I looked at the satellite image, it was very clear where the crater was--there was a big circle imprint on the ground that was completely visible in a variety of ways.
What was even more interesting was that the ground -based data seemed to put the crater at a slightly different location from where it was in the satellite image. In the ground-based map, the crater is shifted slightly (if I recall correctly, to the southeast) from where it is in the satellite image. I came to the conclusion that conclusions about the location of the crater based on the ground data (based on e.g., mineral deposits) must have been off a bit.
Then again, I'm not a geologist, so I don't really know. But in the satellite image, it was absolutely clear where the crater was.
Here is my Neighborhood Notice the nice high resolution area across the river
Here is the area around where I work. Notice the high resolution areas on either side.
Hopefully that will get updated someday.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Sex and Beer!
Wish I had modpoints for you, Mr. Coward
When they find Jimmy Hoffa.
Ok, I've been to Italy before, but why is it that we have high resolution images of this area, but yet, a simple Southern Ontario location (2 hours west of Toronto, yet alone most of Ontario) http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=43.886140,-81.31093 0&spn=0.043135,0.081050&t=k&hl=en still doesn't have an equivalent zoom level? Is it that we're just cannucks or what?
they all washed away...
Wow. That's just eerily similar to David Brin's The Loom of Thessaly.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I use it to find terrorists. Try it, zoom in on an area, type 'terrorists', and take stock of where the danger lies.
The authorities should seriously consider using this...
I agree in general that a lot of our information won't last, but information to stone buildings is not a fair comparison. Papyrus to paperback is closer.
Still, although lots of data will be lost, anything that continues to interest people will be preserved. Think about this: the commercial value of satellite maps from 2005 may go up or down in coming years, depending on what it's needed for. But the cost of storing that info will certainly go down as drives get larger. (That's why I can easily keep all my files from older computers in a subdirectory on my current one.) As long as anyone cares about it, why can't it be maintained? (Barring Armageddon, of course.)
Also, think about how MUCH information we now have. Our society produces more text about itself in a day than the Romans probably did in their whole history. Even if a small fraction survives, it will be a lot.
*answers phone*
I assume the "big-ass shade thingie" refers to the patio umbrellas - yea, my wife did good on these. What's really cool is that I buried a pipe into the flowerpot concrete so that it is at the level of the dirt ... but with another "pipe sleeve" that drops into that, I can then place the umbrella there ... i.e. no bases to drag around. Check back in a few weeks to see that - some semi-clever engineering went into this as it is not as trivial as you might think at first glance.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
how about these apples? They're called the Cahokia Mounds.
5 8119,-90.061004&spn=0.007561,0.016165&t=h&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=cahokia,+IL&ll=38.6
You have to use Google Earth to get the nice six inch resolution which allows you to see the dish.
For neat GIS stuff see www.esri.com (GIS Software and links to sites) www.geodata.gov (GIS of USA)
(Having said that, the entire settlement is believed to be hundreds - if not thousands - of times larger than the area actually examined by archaeologists. Add in nearby standing stones and round barrows, and the area in need of study is maybe hundreds of thousands of times larger than what they've studied. Makes you wonder what they haven't found!)
You can't expect a good pair of eyes (and a brain) to exist in every town or village that has ancient remains. On the other hand, with something like Google Maps, all it really requires is someone anywhere taking the time to look through the images.
Well, if they're sophisticated enough, all they really need to do is write a good image processing algorithm that detects definite artifacts in the image (straight lines, circles, etc) that do NOT correspond to anything that is a definite surface structure. All the person need do then is search through the candidate images, not the entire database, which would be a much more practical task to do.
Ideally, you'd use several layers of image processing, to whittle down the pool of images to highly probable cases, then subtract out known archaeological sites from a database.
Really, really ideally, you'd program the individual layers as BOING components and run the computation part of it as a gigantic @Home venture, as this would be massively parallelizable and sufficiently CPU intensive for most academics who would be interested in such work to not be able to afford a computer (or cluster) that could actually carry out the work in a reasonable timeframe.
Hmmmm. It's a pity Google don't cover enough of the UK in enough depth to be able to do good work there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wow, the miracles of orbital cameras... Now I know how God must feel when looking down upon His creation.
F(u)ck linux
Use the below .kml file with Google Earth, or just paste the following line into the search box and then zoom in:
a rk>c on=0x317</styleUrl>, 0</coordinates>
42d 22' 34.0" N, 71d 07' 34.4" W
.kml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
<Placem
<name>Once was lost, but now is found.</name>
<LookAt>
<longitude>-71.12622070312499</longitude>
<latitude>42.37611007690431</latitude>
<range>13.45464104141381</range>
<tilt>2.462932646186065e-009</tilt>
<heading>-2.7879963396615e-014</heading>
</LookAt>
<styleUrl>root://styleMaps#default+nicon=0x307+hi
<Point>
<coordinates>-71.12622070312499,42.37611007690431
</Point>
</Placemark>
</kml>
I'm also a little bitter because the satellite maps around where I live
are pretty lousy quality - and just a screen to the southwest, the resolution picks up again. Phooey.The other thing annoys me is that they don't pixelate the image when you zoom in, they just cut it off. Check around here, for instance. It would be nice to have the general diffuse pixellated background anyway, if only to get a rough idea of the terrain when you're in Overlay mode. Notice also that if you zoom out even one step you can't get the little side streets anymore. No-fun at all!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You have to check "Post Anonymously" before you press submit.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Yeah, just about every story I've seen on /. in the past few months, I've seen on digg days beforehand.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
Well, duh.. stop reading digg.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
The family cat. Shhh... don't tell the kids Fifi died. :(
Look everyone it's a fat German!
Don't chase me I'm full of nazi chocolate!
Fatty Fatty Fat Fat German. Go burn some jews.
like the neibours dog.
The joy of /. is not the timely news (even anandtech.com one ups /. frequently). The fun is in the funny and occasionally insightful comments.
Even the occasional "In Soviet Russia, AYBABTU..."
Building a healthy future; Connecting communities
...in Soviet Russia, Google Earth finds YOU.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
They obviously got someone else to use Google Earth for them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
There allready is a ton of grass in the backyard (and yes, I mow it myself
Kill it and replace it with fake grass.
1) Good fake grass is indistinguishable from the real thing unless you get down and stick your face within inches of it. Your bare feet will never know the difference.
2) Fake grass is better for the environment because it requires no water nor chemicals like weed killer, bug killer or fertilizer.
3) You never have to mow it again.
4) It always looks perfect, no browning, etc.
And, in case you were wondering, if a dog takes a crap on it, the crap will weather away like on real grass, you can scoop it off and the next rain will probably wash away the remains.
PS, the trendy name is 'lanai' from the Hawaiian for 'patio.'
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
She was that fat? In Soviet Russia, Google Maps finds YOU!
you can leave the "d" in and put a comma between the latitude part and the longitude part.
I wonder where these rules came from?
and the Caltrains web pages don't see fit to give you a street address suitable for looking up an on-line map.
Huh?
http://caltrain.org/caltrain_stations.html
Found it in 2 clicks. Click on the station links for location on an online map.
My ex-wife.
Am I only one having this eery uncomfortable feeling that this guy isn't joking?
I used Google Maps to locate the trench lines for the Siege of Vicksburg. You can see the streets that run along the trenches. Namely, Confederate Avenue and Union Avenue.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you ...
Or you could choose NOT to be a tree hugging hippy and buy real grass and waste all our precious water. That would be my choice, and by the looks of his "estate" it would be his choice as well. However, he lives in Boulder, so he may be a hippy after all.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Ever since I've moved out here five years ago I've had a yearly ritual to find out how long it would take to drive back home from Boston. Long story short, while doing this last month with Google Earth it appeared that my mother had drained our pool, and finally finished putting up that old porch roof I had started years ago. I gave her a call and yup, the pool had been drained about 6 months back and the roof (a big white rectangle) was finished by a friend.
37d 23' 55.50 N, 121d 59' 31.63" W
You can even see that the backyard has had most of the grass removed, though the patch of the garden she has fixed up nicely is underneath a shadow.
It also turns out that my local school, which closed it's doors years ago, has re-opened as a school... They've re-painted the 4-square and tetherball courts.
Personally I can't wait for google 3D maps. Nothing cures heartache like a VRML walkthrough. Hopefully they will add avatar and family chat options as well. Of course, I would love to have Google Earth connected to Google Chat, so that you could click on someone's physical location to open a chat session with them... I'd love to chat with old friends by going to their house.
The ______ Agenda
That's probably why he was modded funny. Misogyny plays well around here.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
so you find an ancient Roman villa... but does it run linux? :-D
Oops! You were not supposed to see this... ok, I admit that we in Italy are producing a lot of WMDs against the evil Free America.
But, please, don't tell it to your president! :-)
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Doesn't grass turn CO2 into O?
I like oxygen. A lot.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Oh no, Officer. You're not going to get me like that.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
NASA World Wind helps solve 3,000 year old mystery of ancient Ithaca, the island home of Homer's Odysseus http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/odysseus.html
Do or do not, there is no try.
I was suspicious about a place of Spain, and I visited the SIG OLEICOLA (that area is not covered by Google Earth). I saw squares in the terrain.
I don't want to tell you the place, or the thieves are going to destroy that place, and anyway there are so many places like that in my country... I believe there are other 4 or 5 romans farms like that in an area of 3 kilometers. I mean, that is not a incredible archeological finding.
But I believe this is a good idea for a webpage, people trying to find new ruins with aerial photography, but NOT TELLING the place, just the Country.
The ex-wife.
Wait! This is anonymous, right?
Too all those who claim they can't see it, I think we have to give alot of props to this guy for spotting it. You'll notice if you zoom out, the surrounding areas havelower resolution. I think the high-res photo was only taken since perhaps the archeology began.
Yet. Maybe they put the Shire in?
I realize we're getting further off-topic, but what I'm trying to say is, the media doesn't have to last, as long as the data is worth something to somebody - and that criteria will get easier to meet as storage space gets cheaper.
Google, for example, is putting the content of tons of books into a database. Fifty years from now, you might be able to download the whole thing onto a disk in a few seconds. Each time disk formats change, lots of individuals and instituations will say, "Let's see, well, we've got the entire canon of English literature on the old computers; let's migrate those to new ones. After all, it's only a few hojillion gigabytes."
Ancient libraries couldn't be distributed all over the world; ours can. In Rome, you could burn one library and lose irreplacable documents. For us, if anything is *almost* lost, and one individual copy is found, bingo, copies all over the world again.
I don't see why this couldn't continue indefinitely.
And if EVERY computer archive is destroyed by nuclear war, there won't be any archeologists in the future anyway.
I decided to try out google earth and the first thing I do is look up my house an the church about a mile down the road where I got married - and the pictures there were slightly better than what can be seen on google maps, so not terribly impressive.
Then I tried to look at pictures of my alma mater. And got... nothing. Some indistinct mottled red and green.
It's not as though Northfield, MN is really all that rural; I kind of expected bad results when searching for some really rural place in wisconsin, but I got nothing better when looking at a town that is, essentially, a far-flung suburb of Minneapolis.
And what's with the entire state of Indiana being provided in a different color from surrounding states?
...to see the date when the image was taken.
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
Or you could choose NOT to be a tree hugging hippy and buy real grass and waste all our precious water.
If you are using fake grass, at most that would make you a fake-tree hugging hippy.
Sounds to me like you are just a redneck who needs to justify his supercharged rider-mower.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
USAPhotoMaps is excellent for downloading and viewing USGS topo maps. The interface is terrible and clunky to use but once you figure it out, it's awesome. It also has a database of USGS landmarks that you can use. I use it when planning hiking trips.
I know we hate Microsoft here but VirtualEarth has much higher resolution pictures of many areas. In general, I've found that once you're outside the major metropolitan areas MSNs maps are much better than Google's.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I'm not sure that satellite imagery will help with this one, but last night, I discovered a new gopher-hole in my back yard. Determined to flood them out, I stuck my hose down the hole and turned it on. In the past, they usually fill-up in about 30 seconds, and often, the gopher will come out, being pushed by the water, and head off into the bushes.
This time, the hole didn't fill up. I kept running the hose. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. Where the fuck is all this water going. 15 minutes. I stopped. I didn't see anywhere else where the water might have been draining downhill through other channels. But at a rate of about 10 gallons per minute, I wasted about 150 gallons down that gopher hole, which is far beyond what a normal gopher hole should hold. Unless there's a connection to a void, or an underground city of mole-people. (I usually leave moles alone, because they don't do much damage. Not like those damn gophers).
Tomorrow, I'm going to get my shovel out, and find the answer.
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What's fake grass made of? Plastic uses oil. How's it made? Manufacturing most things uses energy, usually electricity or oil. Why the fuck do you want to use fertiliser on it or bug spray? If it needs pepping up, go find a stable and get some horse manure. And that bug spray? Not clinical clean enough for you? Bugs are good for the environment, leave them be. Finally you can use water butts to collect rain water and use that to water the grass in dry periods.
That whole post seems to highlight the throw away culture of the US. You do something which is bad, but just not as bad as something else which is also bad, but is done because you can't be arsed to do things properly.
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Perhaps you missed the part about water. Watering lawns is a significant source of water wastage. Additionally, horse manure, just because it is "natural" doesn't mean that its use is riskfree and void of any dangerous consequences. As for bug killer, use of that has nothing to do with being "clinically clean" -- fungicide and insecticide are commonly used to protect the grass from parasites.
For a tree-hugging hippy, you sure don't know shit about just how bad for the environment lawns are. The environmental impact of manufacturing fake grass is a drop in the bucket compared to the environmental costs of maintaining a typical american lawn.
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In general, fake grass is not better for the environment by any stretch of the imagination.
1. Made from plastic, from oil.
2. Plants make oxygen.
3. Grass doesn't require fertilizer, and watering usually doesn't hurt.
To clarify: use plants appropriate to your climate. If you live in a desert, using real OR fake grass is bad for the environment.
If you live somewhere it actually rains, most of the time moderate watering grass ISN'T bad for the environment, because that water goes back into the environment - largely as immediate humidity. And you only need moderate watering if you use the right plants.
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thought you guys might like this.. http://verti.orcon.net.nz/live_cloudmap_2048.kmz
Thanks. I figured if I whined about that someone would prove me wrong. All I can tell you is the last time I looked I kept coming up with a list of train stations with the name of the town, but no address. The trick is to find the right two clicks.
I wouldn't have been so snarky if I'd noticed you had a 5-digit slashdot ID. The caltrain site must have been upgraded since you last checked, old-timer. :-)
That was kind of snarky too, wasn't it. Sorry.
Add perhaps you missed the bit about the water butts (barrels, tanks whatever). A lot of the US gets a lot of rain at certain times. When it rains you collect the water which means you're not wasting water. I agree about lawns in the desert, but in Colorado you should have some rain.
Add perhaps you missed the bit about the water butts (barrels, tanks whatever)
Don't think I missed at all, I don't see you say shit about that in your previous post.
A lot of the US gets a lot of rain at certain times. When it rains you collect the water which means you're not wasting water.
Just what kind of drugs are you on? How many suburban homes even have the potential, never mind the capacity or motivation to do that?
Not only are you a tree-hugging hippie, you are clearly a frog-licker too.
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