From TFA:To investigate this idea, the international team of researchers glued the insects to small copper hooks in completely uniform white surroundings, a kind of visual sensory deprivation tank. These flies could still beat their wings and attempt to turn.
Assuming for the moment what this group is trying to measure is reasonable, how do we know "completely uniform white surrdoundings" would be uninteresting to a fruit fly? Isn't this a bit anthropocentric? What are their sensory modes and ranges? Perhaps the glue or copper had an interesting smell or burned them -- or the "white" walls appeared like a intricate visual field of some kind. What was the temperature? How isolated was the air (could the flys smell the tech's lunch)? What was the control group? I'd like to assume the researchers picked this environment for good reasons...but without a personal understanding of fruit fly physiology it isn't clear to me at a glance they have isolated the variables of interest.
Although it is a PR debacle for the Digg moderators, this event is basically a sign the Digg system itself is working exactly as it is supposed to. The users revolted, using the system, and were able to instigate change on a short time scale (in spite of moderator tampering). While I personally like slashdot more than Digg, slashdot's success hinges on a "benevolent oligarchy" approach to article submissions. Sure, we on slashdot can submit articles and occasionally mod existing articles when we have the points (and post weird stuff to our journals). But if the/. editors wanted to censor something (e.g. didn't want to have something like the HD-DVD codes on the front page), we wouldn't ever know about it unless we read the rants of the submitters' journal or their modded-down trollings on other articles. Some have pointed out (bragged?) that stuff like the HD-DVD code now appears as a user-instigated tag on slashdot. This is true, but only after the article was accepted...
I believe the orginal Donkey Kong had a screen resolution of 224 x 256 pixels. I don't think the art quite matches that resolution (with a 3" x 3" post-it covering 4 floors, you would need 16-foot floors to obtain the same effective vertical resolution). To be fair, they condensed the first level a bit on the top (the girl used to be on a raised platform, no?), so they are looking at fewer vertical pixels in the game -- and those do look like pretty tall floors...
[sigh] I'm saddened that I even bothered to think about this...
Using LASER cooling to bring a macroscopic object o 0.8K is pretty darn neat. But cooling big things in general to sub-Kelvin temperatures is not that unusual (the article only gives a nod to this idea). For example, in our bolometry experiment, we cool 40 kg of TeO2 crystals down to just 10 milliKelvin using an ancient Oxford (brand) dilution refrigerator.
As far as I can tell, big corporations have almost always historically "bought the zeitgeist." Perhaps it is "uncool," but why should they care? They aren't teenagers, they are businesses. They are quite frequently unchilled all the way to the bank, which is their ultimate goal anyway.
Here are a couple actual user comments from site that posted the original article.
1) They have the nerve to call this science!! Give me a total break. This is transmutation and is a crime against humanity. Who are these criminals. Arrest them now!!!
2) I think we may be repeating history. We probably had great technology and did it thousands of years ago and destroyed ourselves almost completely. Few humans survived and started over. That is why there are these myths of all these half human half animals.
WTF? Transmutation=crime against humanity? Repeating history? First, I occasionally need to be reminded that slashdot posters, while frequently irritating, self important, and ill-informed, are still many orders of magnitude brighter and more articulate than typical internet users. Second, I do believe the aforementioned sheep actually have more human cells in them than these folks. I guess it is just wishful thinking that they haven't bred yet (the posters, not the sheep). I'm hoping someone here at slashdot posted those comments as a joke, but somehow I don't think it is the case...
And because radioactive things emit light only when they run into phosphor - like the coating on the inner surface of a TV tube - you don't really need to worry.
Although I'm all for reducing public fears of radiation (its everywhere!), the message of Myth 3: "Everything is Illuminated: The Myth of Radioactivity" is somewhat flippant; as other posters have said -- radioactivity can be dangerous. But also, radioactivity CAN cause things to glow in weird, unexpected ways -- which is downright creepy. For example, the water shielding this reactor gives off a Pretty Blue Glow from Cherenkov radiation (radiation emitted when a charged particle is going faster than the speed of light in a particular medium -- sort of a luminal "Mach cone" effect). I had a lot of water between me and the hard radiation, so could take the photo in reasonable safety. If the effect occurs in your eyeball fluid, that's probably something to worry about.
Had I been helping you, I would have brought out a tester power supply to verify that it was your PSU that was broken. However, I wouldn't take the time to fix the broken PSU, I would have sold you a new one. 20 minutes and about $60 and you'd be on your way with a bootable PC.
Your approach is exactly the kind of service I hoped to get based on the Geek Squad web site and talking to the guy on the phone. Perhaps I just hit a group of uninspired and non-proactive agents at my local precinct.
What work did the agent in question do to your PC if he couldn't get it to boot? The diagnostic cannot be performed unless the PC is bootable and can at least function a bit (boot from a CD and run diagnostic software). You should have gotten your money back because no work WAS done.
I got mixed messages on this one and in the end, I really don't know. They originally told me they couldn't boot it, so couldn't perform the diagnoistic, which is why I wanted my money back. But they gradually changed their story during our real time "discussion", implying they did "some kind of test" that told me they didn't have the means to fix it. I was ready to pay upwards of a couple hundred for a new PSU -- or even a new cheapass motherboard, if that was the problem -- just to get it going again and figured that the original diagnoistic was just one point along a line of proactive repair efforts.
Anyway, thanks for putting up with my anti-Geek Squad rant. I may have just had a few bad apples. Next time I'll go to a small town and ask for Geek Squad employees that read Slashdot. I understand that the guys and gals down in the trenches have to put up with a lot of customer crap, so perhaps their behavior is forgivable. While I was annoyed with the Geek Squad employees, I was much more disturbed by Geek Squad/Buy's corporate stance after my letter, which was orthogonal to the apparent promises made on the website.
I used to enjoy shopping at Best Buy because at least they had stuff I generally wanted and needed. Also, the stores were pretty ubiquitous and the prices were basically competitive. The customer service was all over the place, sometimes right on, sometimes not, but usually nothing special. But then I tried interacting with the morons at Geek Squad. They make some pretty heavy promises (which Best Buy sponsors) on the web site like "Geek Squad® Agents fix any PC problem anytime, anywhere" and "Service guarantee -- If you're not completely satisfied with our service, the problem is remedied fast and free". So I bring a computer into the store and tell the agent "My computer won't boot and I think its a problem with the power chain, the hard drive isn't getting any power. It may need a new power supply -- but probably its just a broken connection." In other words, I told them the problem and what to fix -- or at least a good starting point. I didn't have the time to deal with it myself, so since they can "fix anything" (their agent on the hotline told me it would be "no problem" to debug the power chain) I figured I had nothing to loose (and if they couldn't fix it, I could bank on the service guarantee). So the guy at the store tells me, "great, we'll do a $70 diagnostic and get back to you." A week later they call me to say "we tried to do a diagnostic, but the computer won't boot, so you need to take it to the manufacturer." Fix any computer problem indeed. So when I went to pick up the computer I told the "agent" I wasn't satisfied with the service and wanted my 70 bucks back. Why should I be satisfied? I spent money and waited a week for them to tell me what was written right on the trouble ticket in my own words. Needless to say, this sparked a little "philosophical" discussion between me, the "agent", and his manager about what "service guarantee" means and why it's on their website if they won't honor it. In the end, they openly accused me of trying to get something for nothing. They kept telling me that since they had already done the work "someone had to pay." I pointed out that their "service guarantee" implies that, as a customer, I can, after service is performed, assess my own degree of satisfaction based on my own (presumably reasonable) standards. If I am not, then I get my money back. Case closed. This is called "customer service." My (fairly reasonable) basis for dissatisfaction was their claim to be able to "fix any computer problem" but yet charging me $70 just to tell me my computer wouldn't boot -- the very reason I brought it in to begin with. So I wrote a nice letter to Best Buy Corporate and ccd Geek Squad. Not an email, an actual formal, professional letter. I received a formal, professional response letter back from Best Buy "customer service" about two weeks later stating simply (in goofy corporate jargon) that, while they valued me as a customer, they were not in the business of reimbursing dissatisfied customers for work already performed on computers. Never mind the "service guarantee" paradox that "satisfaction", by definition, must be assessed after the work was performed.
Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of Best Buy, so am glad someone is calling them publicly on this intranet pricing thing (potential scam).
These professors are simply holding students to the same standards the academic community (and the planet) holds the professors to. In submitting an academic article or tenure packet, you certainly wouldn't be allowed to cite Wikipedia as a publication or as a reference. If you contributed to Wikipedia, you would be nuts to claim Wikipedia contributions as part of your CV. You'd be laughed out of your department (unless you were doing a study of Wikipedia as part of your work). I personally love Wikipedia for a "zeroth order" pass on a subject (especially obscure ones), but the lack of accountability makes it an abysmal reference for serious work. That said, the good articles on Wikipedia have lists of real references which can actually jump start a new research topic.
Some beautiful and amazing shots compiled for our viewing pleasure, Phil. Thanks for sharing. Number 5, the phenomenal short exposure shot of the sun with Atlantis and ISS silhouette, seems to have some other dark patches near 2 o'clock and 8:30 near the edge. Sunspots or something else caught in silhouette (or me hallucinating)?
Four drinks in one day is fairly unremarkable for an average adult male (for example, this might be 2 glasses of wine with lunch and 2 with dinner, which is essentially nothing but flavor). And don't get me wrong, I'm all for responsible drinking. But strangely, 4 drinks for a man in one day is technically regarded in some social science circles in the US as one drink shy of binge drinking: "According to the 5/4 definition, a binge drinker is a man who consumes five or more alcoholic drinks on an occasion of unspecified duration and is a woman who consumes four or more drinks on an occasion of unspecified length." Obviously the idea of "a binge" is meant to evoke the image of 5 wanton shots of whisky in 10 minutes on the hour every hour all day. However, for research purposes, it seems crazy to call 5 drinks over an "unspecified time" a "binge", yet these are the kind of statistics used in the US to highlight college and high school drinking epidemics in recent years.
Statistically generated photojournalism can be intriguing on a large scale. Who would have imagined, even 15 years ago, having a spontaneous tragedy, like the first plane hitting the North Tower, filmed by chance? An average joe capturing something random like the Kennedy Assassination or even Rodney King beating, back in the 60s and even 90s, was mind-blowing. Although the technology was different, between 1960 and 1991, the probability someone happened to have a camera in hand to record an event was probably about equal -- and it wasn't particularly high. Now, cameras of every sort are so ubiquitous and the processing is instantaneous, if events are NOT captured at random by someone (and not on YouTube in hours from different angles) it is somewhat surprising. You mean NO ONE had the presence of mind to film tragic/important event X and share it with us?! With 9/11, even before seeing the footage of the first plane, I assumed that someone probably caught it on video.
Obviously the price to pay for this is in the currency of entropy. You get a lot of interesting stuff at random, but there is mostly crap. The theory of large number will continue to work. I'm guessing, we'll end up celebrating banality and mediocrity more frequently, but we'll also get a finite number of macabre or surreal 6 to 15 sigma events recorded too, which will ultimately drive people-based, rather than profession-based, photojournalism.
I have no doubt such conversion problems occur from time-to-time, and my general experience with customer service across virtually all telecom compaines has been awful. Nevertheless, I honestly have to wonder if the recorded "Verizon conversation" linked to YouTube for this article is just a staged/scripted performed by pranksters. It has all the classic pacing of a well-done Chris Guest mocumentary and sounds nothing like an actual customer service call (in my experience). Or perhaps my satire threshold has been lowered to the point where real life and staged comedy start looking the same...
100k attacks per month for Microsoft seems low to me. That is about 1 attack every 30 seconds. I'm not saying that this is a low number on an absolute scale, but it seems low for MS. I might have just assumed they were continuously under multiple attacks.
IAAP. As another posted stated: Those forces described are ultimately related to the electrons in the materials of the bullet and gel interacting, via electromagnetic forces, in very, very complex ways. Solving real macroscopic dynamics problems from that point of view isn't generally practical. Obviously, it is easier (and tractable) to think in terms of "effective forces" ("Gel on Bullet", "A on B", etc.) or kinematically (momentum transfers, etc.), as you stated.
The wake is, strictly speaking, large scale lattice vibrations due to molecular bond stretching. But PHYSICALLY, it is basically purely electromagnetic (and probably something even more fundamental at some deep level). One might argue there is some Pauli-Exculsion going on, but that's not strictly a force of nature, although it can act like one.
Statistically generated photojournalism can be intriguing on a large scale. Who would have imagined, even 15 years ago, having a spontaneous tragedy, like the first plane hitting the North Tower, filmed by chance? An average joe capturing something random like the Kennedy Assassination or even Rodney King beating, back in the 60s and even 90s, was mind-blowing. Although the technology was different, between 1960 and 1991, the probability someone happened to have a camera in hand to record an event was probably about equal -- and it wasn't particularly high. Now, cameras of every sort are so ubiquitous and the processing is instantaneous, if events are NOT captured at random by someone (and not on YouTube in hours from different angles) it is somewhat surprising. You mean NO ONE had the presence of mind to film tragic/important event X and share it with us?! With 9/11, even before seeing the footage of the first plane, I assumed that someone probably caught it on video.
Obviously the price to pay for this is in the currency of entropy. You get a lot of interesting stuff at random, but there is mostly crap. The theory of large number will continue to work. I'm guessing, we'll end up celebrating banality and mediocrity more frequently, but we'll also get a finite number of macabre or surreal 6 to 15 sigma events recorded too, which will ultimately drive people-based photojournalism.
You may recall in David Brin's book Earth, set in 2038 or so, the middle-aged and "old fogies" (i.e. us today in 30 years) have an unhealthy, obsessive, paranoid preoccupation with documentary surveillance (using the equivalent of cell phone cameras, but mounted in UV-protective glasses, I believe). The younger generation of the 2030s find it amusing and annoying. Seems like we are taking yet another path to living up to Brin's prescient vision of the future (sans voracious Black Hole and semi-sentient planet).
Initially, I thought that their exercise was futile because Google Earth doesn't not have real time images and it is impossible (at a glance, although sometimes you can tell with some detective work) to know when various pictures were taken (e.g. see the Google Earth FAQ). But, it turns out that the group working in the Amazon actively makes requests to Google to update certain images faster so they can legitimately monitor various regions. e.g. from TFA: ""When Google Earth updated these images earlier this year with higher resolution versions, we could find nearly all the disturbances in the forest....We offered the Google Earth team a list of coordinates where it would be helpful to have sharper images. We also discussed the possibility of finding ways to include the Indians' nonproprietary data, as a layer with Indian names, on Google Earth."
While I appreciate the twisted aspect of this article and the depressing message it contains, I do think the term "visible from space" is being a bit abused here. Visible to whom under what conditions? Certainly not to space shuttle astronauts with the naked eye (even The Great Wall, which is REALLY big, isn't visible in that way -- nor is the CITY of New York during the day!). And certainly to Them (whomever They may be), the old KFC sign on the corner down the street was ALREADY visible from space using Some Technology....
From the TFA: Harley, who is associate professor of social sciences at the New College of Florida in Sarasota, says that both studies tested dolphins at Disney's Epcot Center in Florida.
I guess since Batman is owned by Warner Bros. can we expect the WB v. Disney lawsuit any day now? Or perhaps since the "song" is from the TV series, Fox will sue Disney for using their Batman meme ("Batmaaaaan" -- not even the whole song).
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming for the moment what this group is trying to measure is reasonable, how do we know "completely uniform white surrdoundings" would be uninteresting to a fruit fly? Isn't this a bit anthropocentric? What are their sensory modes and ranges? Perhaps the glue or copper had an interesting smell or burned them -- or the "white" walls appeared like a intricate visual field of some kind. What was the temperature? How isolated was the air (could the flys smell the tech's lunch)? What was the control group? I'd like to assume the researchers picked this environment for good reasons...but without a personal understanding of fruit fly physiology it isn't clear to me at a glance they have isolated the variables of interest.
Although it is a PR debacle for the Digg moderators, this event is basically a sign the Digg system itself is working exactly as it is supposed to. The users revolted, using the system, and were able to instigate change on a short time scale (in spite of moderator tampering). While I personally like slashdot more than Digg, slashdot's success hinges on a "benevolent oligarchy" approach to article submissions. Sure, we on slashdot can submit articles and occasionally mod existing articles when we have the points (and post weird stuff to our journals). But if the /. editors wanted to censor something (e.g. didn't want to have something like the HD-DVD codes on the front page), we wouldn't ever know about it unless we read the rants of the submitters' journal or their modded-down trollings on other articles. Some have pointed out (bragged?) that stuff like the HD-DVD code now appears as a user-instigated tag on slashdot. This is true, but only after the article was accepted...
[sigh] I'm saddened that I even bothered to think about this...
Using LASER cooling to bring a macroscopic object o 0.8K is pretty darn neat. But cooling big things in general to sub-Kelvin temperatures is not that unusual (the article only gives a nod to this idea). For example, in our bolometry experiment, we cool 40 kg of TeO2 crystals down to just 10 milliKelvin using an ancient Oxford (brand) dilution refrigerator.
As far as I can tell, big corporations have almost always historically "bought the zeitgeist." Perhaps it is "uncool," but why should they care? They aren't teenagers, they are businesses. They are quite frequently unchilled all the way to the bank, which is their ultimate goal anyway.
1) They have the nerve to call this science!! Give me a total break. This is transmutation and is a crime against humanity. Who are these criminals. Arrest them now!!!
2) I think we may be repeating history. We probably had great technology and did it thousands of years ago and destroyed ourselves almost completely. Few humans survived and started over. That is why there are these myths of all these half human half animals.
WTF? Transmutation=crime against humanity? Repeating history? First, I occasionally need to be reminded that slashdot posters, while frequently irritating, self important, and ill-informed, are still many orders of magnitude brighter and more articulate than typical internet users. Second, I do believe the aforementioned sheep actually have more human cells in them than these folks. I guess it is just wishful thinking that they haven't bred yet (the posters, not the sheep). I'm hoping someone here at slashdot posted those comments as a joke, but somehow I don't think it is the case...
And just imagine what kind of contributions to science Stephen Hawkings might have made if only he could work out like Arnold!
I agree; good point.
Although I'm all for reducing public fears of radiation (its everywhere!), the message of Myth 3: "Everything is Illuminated: The Myth of Radioactivity" is somewhat flippant; as other posters have said -- radioactivity can be dangerous. But also, radioactivity CAN cause things to glow in weird, unexpected ways -- which is downright creepy. For example, the water shielding this reactor gives off a Pretty Blue Glow from Cherenkov radiation (radiation emitted when a charged particle is going faster than the speed of light in a particular medium -- sort of a luminal "Mach cone" effect). I had a lot of water between me and the hard radiation, so could take the photo in reasonable safety. If the effect occurs in your eyeball fluid, that's probably something to worry about.
Your approach is exactly the kind of service I hoped to get based on the Geek Squad web site and talking to the guy on the phone. Perhaps I just hit a group of uninspired and non-proactive agents at my local precinct.
What work did the agent in question do to your PC if he couldn't get it to boot? The diagnostic cannot be performed unless the PC is bootable and can at least function a bit (boot from a CD and run diagnostic software). You should have gotten your money back because no work WAS done.
I got mixed messages on this one and in the end, I really don't know. They originally told me they couldn't boot it, so couldn't perform the diagnoistic, which is why I wanted my money back. But they gradually changed their story during our real time "discussion", implying they did "some kind of test" that told me they didn't have the means to fix it. I was ready to pay upwards of a couple hundred for a new PSU -- or even a new cheapass motherboard, if that was the problem -- just to get it going again and figured that the original diagnoistic was just one point along a line of proactive repair efforts.
Anyway, thanks for putting up with my anti-Geek Squad rant. I may have just had a few bad apples. Next time I'll go to a small town and ask for Geek Squad employees that read Slashdot. I understand that the guys and gals down in the trenches have to put up with a lot of customer crap, so perhaps their behavior is forgivable. While I was annoyed with the Geek Squad employees, I was much more disturbed by Geek Squad/Buy's corporate stance after my letter, which was orthogonal to the apparent promises made on the website.
Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of Best Buy, so am glad someone is calling them publicly on this intranet pricing thing (potential scam).
In a place like that, if that's all he's doing, I might be worrying about job security if I were that guy.
These professors are simply holding students to the same standards the academic community (and the planet) holds the professors to. In submitting an academic article or tenure packet, you certainly wouldn't be allowed to cite Wikipedia as a publication or as a reference. If you contributed to Wikipedia, you would be nuts to claim Wikipedia contributions as part of your CV. You'd be laughed out of your department (unless you were doing a study of Wikipedia as part of your work). I personally love Wikipedia for a "zeroth order" pass on a subject (especially obscure ones), but the lack of accountability makes it an abysmal reference for serious work. That said, the good articles on Wikipedia have lists of real references which can actually jump start a new research topic.
Some beautiful and amazing shots compiled for our viewing pleasure, Phil. Thanks for sharing. Number 5, the phenomenal short exposure shot of the sun with Atlantis and ISS silhouette, seems to have some other dark patches near 2 o'clock and 8:30 near the edge. Sunspots or something else caught in silhouette (or me hallucinating)?
Four drinks in one day is fairly unremarkable for an average adult male (for example, this might be 2 glasses of wine with lunch and 2 with dinner, which is essentially nothing but flavor). And don't get me wrong, I'm all for responsible drinking. But strangely, 4 drinks for a man in one day is technically regarded in some social science circles in the US as one drink shy of binge drinking: "According to the 5/4 definition, a binge drinker is a man who consumes five or more alcoholic drinks on an occasion of unspecified duration and is a woman who consumes four or more drinks on an occasion of unspecified length." Obviously the idea of "a binge" is meant to evoke the image of 5 wanton shots of whisky in 10 minutes on the hour every hour all day. However, for research purposes, it seems crazy to call 5 drinks over an "unspecified time" a "binge", yet these are the kind of statistics used in the US to highlight college and high school drinking epidemics in recent years.
Statistically generated photojournalism can be intriguing on a large scale. Who would have imagined, even 15 years ago, having a spontaneous tragedy, like the first plane hitting the North Tower, filmed by chance? An average joe capturing something random like the Kennedy Assassination or even Rodney King beating, back in the 60s and even 90s, was mind-blowing. Although the technology was different, between 1960 and 1991, the probability someone happened to have a camera in hand to record an event was probably about equal -- and it wasn't particularly high. Now, cameras of every sort are so ubiquitous and the processing is instantaneous, if events are NOT captured at random by someone (and not on YouTube in hours from different angles) it is somewhat surprising. You mean NO ONE had the presence of mind to film tragic/important event X and share it with us?! With 9/11, even before seeing the footage of the first plane, I assumed that someone probably caught it on video. Obviously the price to pay for this is in the currency of entropy. You get a lot of interesting stuff at random, but there is mostly crap. The theory of large number will continue to work. I'm guessing, we'll end up celebrating banality and mediocrity more frequently, but we'll also get a finite number of macabre or surreal 6 to 15 sigma events recorded too, which will ultimately drive people-based, rather than profession-based, photojournalism.
I have no doubt such conversion problems occur from time-to-time, and my general experience with customer service across virtually all telecom compaines has been awful. Nevertheless, I honestly have to wonder if the recorded "Verizon conversation" linked to YouTube for this article is just a staged/scripted performed by pranksters. It has all the classic pacing of a well-done Chris Guest mocumentary and sounds nothing like an actual customer service call (in my experience). Or perhaps my satire threshold has been lowered to the point where real life and staged comedy start looking the same...
100k attacks per month for Microsoft seems low to me. That is about 1 attack every 30 seconds. I'm not saying that this is a low number on an absolute scale, but it seems low for MS. I might have just assumed they were continuously under multiple attacks.
The wake is, strictly speaking, large scale lattice vibrations due to molecular bond stretching. But PHYSICALLY, it is basically purely electromagnetic (and probably something even more fundamental at some deep level). One might argue there is some Pauli-Exculsion going on, but that's not strictly a force of nature, although it can act like one.
I agree, but per se is Latin, not English.
Obviously the price to pay for this is in the currency of entropy. You get a lot of interesting stuff at random, but there is mostly crap. The theory of large number will continue to work. I'm guessing, we'll end up celebrating banality and mediocrity more frequently, but we'll also get a finite number of macabre or surreal 6 to 15 sigma events recorded too, which will ultimately drive people-based photojournalism.
You may recall in David Brin's book Earth, set in 2038 or so, the middle-aged and "old fogies" (i.e. us today in 30 years) have an unhealthy, obsessive, paranoid preoccupation with documentary surveillance (using the equivalent of cell phone cameras, but mounted in UV-protective glasses, I believe). The younger generation of the 2030s find it amusing and annoying. Seems like we are taking yet another path to living up to Brin's prescient vision of the future (sans voracious Black Hole and semi-sentient planet).
Initially, I thought that their exercise was futile because Google Earth doesn't not have real time images and it is impossible (at a glance, although sometimes you can tell with some detective work) to know when various pictures were taken (e.g. see the Google Earth FAQ). But, it turns out that the group working in the Amazon actively makes requests to Google to update certain images faster so they can legitimately monitor various regions. e.g. from TFA:
""When Google Earth updated these images earlier this year with higher resolution versions, we could find nearly all the disturbances in the forest....We offered the Google Earth team a list of coordinates where it would be helpful to have sharper images. We also discussed the possibility of finding ways to include the Indians' nonproprietary data, as a layer with Indian names, on Google Earth."
While I appreciate the twisted aspect of this article and the depressing message it contains, I do think the term "visible from space" is being a bit abused here. Visible to whom under what conditions? Certainly not to space shuttle astronauts with the naked eye (even The Great Wall, which is REALLY big, isn't visible in that way -- nor is the CITY of New York during the day!). And certainly to Them (whomever They may be), the old KFC sign on the corner down the street was ALREADY visible from space using Some Technology....
I guess since Batman is owned by Warner Bros. can we expect the WB v. Disney lawsuit any day now? Or perhaps since the "song" is from the TV series, Fox will sue Disney for using their Batman meme ("Batmaaaaan" -- not even the whole song).