And you are here why?

Last July, the Drillship Titanium Explorer was docked right across from our hotel  for a crew change, and as I mentioned before , it was huge . Well, this time around, there was another  drillship across from our hotel - the Noble Don Taylor   was in for a crew change too. It is slightly smaller, coming in at 752x118 feet (tiny, isn't it?), but it Looms pretty much exactly as much as the other one It is, interestingly enough, made by Hyundai - which successfully manages to invoke quite a bit of cognitive dissonance.  (The Hyundai Elantra vs. Hyundai Gusto P1000. Discuss...) Sadly, we got back from a (glorious!) day of diving at Rif St. Marie, and the ship had left. Never fear - MarineTraffic.com to the rescue (a blank map means its out of range...)--> (Yeah, theres someone to tracking everything )

Planefinder.net , surely one of the cooler mashups out there.  I particularly like the way you can see flight patterns change during the day (e.g., in the middle of the night, there are no flights over India - contrast that w/ the US!)

The Guardian took WHO 's data on air pollution across the world and created a pretty nifty interactive mashup (using Google, of course). You can drill down to quite some detail, but IMHO, the "global" view is much more striking.  There is really not that much good news from India and China, but the middle-east's numbers are really quite striking (and depressing). These are just screen-grabs, go to the original for the full mashup ...

From conflicthistory.com comes this Visualization Gem - a Google Mapped timeline of (AFAICT) every conflict in human history. Ok, it may not have this one time when I got in a fight in 2nd grade, but boy howdy, is it every comprehensive - pretty much everything from 3000BC through 2005. As an added bonus, you can click on the marker and pop over to the associated wikipedia entry. The image below is just that, an image (albeit a humongous one).  Click here to go to the actual site and have your mind blown..