Giant Insect Invades Germany

Noryungi writes, "It seems the alien invasion of the Earth has just started! A 50-meter insect has been spotted roaming the German countryside! Let the 'I, for one, welcome our new giant insectoid overlords' joke contest begin!" A moderator at a Keyhole forum IDs the bug as a thrip, about 1mm long, squished under a glass plate during scanning.

Comments

I checked the photo and

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't look anything like Germany.

Re:I checked the photo and

[doti]

Zoom out, put in map mode, and you'll se it's in the same country as Berlin, so it's Germany.

Works great in Google Earth too

[jessohyes]

Just paste in 48.857699 ,10.205451

Jess

Re:Other OB

[Anonymous Coward]

A real German would say:

Wir heissen unsere Insektenüberlordschaften willkommen! :)

Man, your German is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

... Willkommen unsere neuen Insekt overlords

Das korrekte Wort ist Überlords !!

Re:No...

[diablomonic]

lets see, chemical to kinetic, hmmm.. battery efficiency: maybe 90% on each of charge and discharge, lets say 80% overall. electric motor efficiency, good ones are >90%. total efficiency: >70%. thousands of times more than this: 70,000% efficiency..... LISA! in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Re:Other OB

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct translation (as literal as possible, as interpreting as necessary) is:
"Ich zumindest heisse unsere neuen Insektenoberherrscher willkommen!"

I = Ich
for one = zumindest (in this context)
welcome = heisse ... willkommen
our = unsere
new = neuen
insect over-lords = Insekten-ober-herrscher

Re:The Yukon/Alaska Black Box

[Osty]

If you tell us what this is hiding, will they have to kill you?

As far as I can tell, it's hiding nothing. Does that mean I have to die now?

Re:during "scanning"??

[Cid Highwind]

Most of the high-resolution imagery on Google Earth is from aerial photograpy not satellites, and even in 2006 the vast majority of that is still shot on positive-color film. Satellites are sexy and high-tech, but not the most cost-effective way to get very high reolution true-color images.

Now the fuzzy, false-color "aww, they don't have good pics of this area" imagery *is* from a satellite (Landsat 7, IIRC).

Re:Other OB

[JayAEU]

Wir heißen unsere neuen Insektenüberlordschaften willkommen!

Gotta match the numerus on that adjective with the subject there... I like the sharp-s though. :)

Google Sightseeing

[Anonymous Cumshot]

Google Sightseeing (the site from which the submitter likely found the giant bug) has lots of similar mishaps chronicled...

Including boobies!

Re:Satellites have scanners?

[DerekLyons]

Someone enlighten me. I was under the impression that these images were coming directly from Satellite images. Maybe I was misled by the fact that the button on the map that says what mode it is in says "Satellite".

You are correct - Google has misled you by implying that all the photographs came from satellite imagery, when in fact much of it came from aerial photography.
 
 

Am I to believe that there are people physically getting these images on paper, putting them in a scanner and scanning each square of Google's whole database of images from earth's surface!?

Google buys its input from a wide variety of companies - most of whom do the digitization themselves and then sell the digital files to Google. I suspect the companies do the digitizing themselves for their own purposes and later resell the data to Google. So, yes - there are a bunch of people taking a stack of paper and scanning it, but it's a distributed project across a bunch of companies across a bunch of years. (Google recently added 'new' [to Google] high res imagery of my area - imagery that's actually nearly five years old.)
 
 

why would these images ever be in physical form?

Because not everything is done direct to digital. High resolution large format negative are (for this purpose) still better than their digital equivalents.