Christmas Lights and Google Maps

Anonymous Coward writes "SantaStars.com uses the Google Maps API to show the locations of some great Christmas light displays. Everyone is encouraged to post a picture of their Christmas lights and you can vote for your favorites. Some of the houses are quite elaborate like this house in British Columbia that has 87,625 computer controlled lights synchronized to an FM radio station."

Comments

A day late and a dollar short?

[XorNand]

It's Christmas Eve and there's only 37 houses listed? It would have made more sense to post this three weeks ago in order to get the word out.

But not to scrooge anyone's Christmas fun, Here's a display put together by an electrical engineer in Ohio that's worth checking out (link goes to a .wmv. Also a Snopes article with more details).

warning

[Anonymous Coward]

87,625 computer controlled lights synchronized to an FM radio station.

Not for epileptics.

New year's resolution

[El_Muerte_TDS]

[ ] Quit smoking
[ ] Help the poor
[ ] Feed the hungry
[x] Buy more christmas lights

Probably can be seen from space

[craXORjack]

like this house in British Columbia that has 87,625 computer controlled lights synchronized to an FM radio station.

Holy cow! Even if the average power consumption of each light was only 1/2 watt, that's still about 44KW. This guys power meter must by zinging around like a table saw.

Re:Probably can be seen from space

[castoridae]

He should arrange some of the lights into an electronic billboard to help cover costs. :-)

xmas light geeks

[Alien54]

well, while there are plenty of houses out there, that guy in Ohio hit the Today show right after Thanksgiving (warning, IE required), and he had to turn things off because of the traffic going into his cul-de-sac created problems. That said, his work was the best coordinated of many shows out there. Compared to others on Google Video, his work is much better.

The real geeks of this sort of thing hang out at Planet Christmas

Google maps lights?

[Council]

What we need is a christmas lights display that's visible on the zoomed-out Google Maps (hybrid or satellite) simply by virtue of brightness.

More Re:xmas light geeks

[Alien54]

There's a higher resolution version which is part of a Miller's Lite beer commercial

have mercy on neighbours

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the unfortunate side effects of a big Xmas light display in the neighbourhood is the extra traffic. All kinds of people slow down in front of my house to see the lights next door. This is disturbing enough given the number of car engines rolling up and idling then roaring off. They also use my driveway to turn their vehicles around. This is annoying because (a) the sound of a car/truck roaring into drive; (b) headlights blasting through my windows as I am sitting/sleeping there; (c) tires compressing snow into ice on my drive -- these people drive over fresh snow and even any snow berm at the end of the drive left when the grader goes by.

Please use some courtesy when you go to see lights!

And if you are someone who puts lights on, please use some courtesy as well. My house is blasted by the huge number of lights across the street and we get all that extra traffic and annoyance. Please show some common sense and do NOT advertise it widely and do NOT run the lights week after week at all hours.

Re:have mercy on neighbours

[MillionthMonkey]

There used to be one on our street like that (in NJ). Its opening was announced every year in the newspapers and in the churches, and people would come from miles away to parallel park in front of our driveways. We called it "The Monstrosity". This guy had an entire "winter wonderland" in his backyard with a lighted path that you would walk around in. Everything was there- primitive animatronics, blinking colored lights of all sorts, and hundreds of hand-painted plywood cutouts of elves and Snow White and the seven dwarves and Bambi and various other Disney characters (recycled from school plays at the local Catholic schoool I think). There was a life size talking Santa at the beginning of the lighted path telling people to enjoy themselves and stay on the path as they went through, and at the end of the path there was a GIFT SHOP in his basement to defray his electric bill I guess since they weren't charging admission.

I don't live in that neighborhood anymore but my parents say it stopped in recent years since the guy was starting to get too old for it. (Either that, or Disney's lawyers got wind of his plywood cutouts.) You could walk by and see them starting to erect all this crap in September, and after Christmas they were in their back yard taking it all down until well into March! It was a half-year operation every year. Something about Christmas makes people lose their minds.

Advertisements on Slashdot

[rincebrain]

The contact of the "Anonymous Coward" who submitted the story is workshop@santastars.com.

Hmm...

Re:Disgusting

[MillionthMonkey]

It's ok, Alberta still has 4.7 billion barrells of oil left to power our retarded Christmas lights.

The U.S. uses 21.93 million barrels of oil per day, of which 13.21 million barrels is imported.

4.7 billion barrels / (13.21 million barrels / day) = 355 days

If we imported all our oil from Alberta we would run out 10 days before Christmas.

Re:Disgusting

[WrongDecision]

to quote: http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/102spring2002_Web_proj ects/M.Sexton/ Although tar sands occur in more than 70 countries, the two largest are Canada and Venezuela, with the bulk being found in four different regions of Alberta, Canada: areas of Athabasca, Wabasha, Cold Lake and Peace River. The sum of these covers an area of nearly 77,000 km2. In fact, the reserve that is deemed to be technologically retrievable today is estimated at 280-300Gb (billion barrels). This is larger than the Saudi Arabia oil reserves, which are estimated at 240Gb. The total reserves for Alberta, including oil not recoverable using current technology, are estimated at 1,700- 2,500Gb. 290Gb / 0.1321Gb = 21,958 days or 60 years plus we (US) have approximately 1-TRILLION recoverable barrels in the Green River basin... do the math

Re:Disgusting

[mark-t]

Except this is in Richmond, BC.

Which gets its electric power from BC Hydro.

Which, it may interest you to know, does not burn oil to generate electricity.

No fossil fuel is being wasted here.

Easy one.

[jd]

Just invent "anti-lights" - christmas lights 180' out of phase with everyone else's christmas lights. The light will cancel out, and the homes will be saved. You'll make a fortune selling them, not to mention going on talk shows. Your only concern will be the rabid scientists with uzis coming after you for breaking the laws of physics. (You're not supposed to be able to set up interference patterns with essentially random non-coherent light sources.)