Last night a Navy helicopter crashed near Mexico’s Coronados Islands south of San Diego. All five on board were lost. From the safe vantage point of my laptop, I can see the Coast Guard ship combing the waters for debris, thanks to the site I wrote about yesterday.
Watching this makes me appreciate all the people out there saving lives and taking care of things.
The net is all abuzz today about the fab new game built on top of Google Earth, Ships, by Planet In Action. It’s a fantastic accomplishment, involving steering a huge tanker into and out of harbors around the globe. You see the actual terrain in the Google Earth viewport from four different vantage points. Not sure yet how it plays as a game, but as a simulation and an example of bleeding edge programming, it’s quite an accomplishment.
Coincidentally, I happened on another combination of shipping and Google Earth over the weekend. Marine Traffic is a site that keeps track of over 10,000 ships at sea. If you live near the ocean as I (sort of) do, you can see what’s arriving and departing and identify whatever it is going by on the horizon. The site is run by a consortium of universities in Greece and depends on the contributions of volunteers around the world. Since 2003, ships past a certain size are required to maintain a transponder on board that periodically sends out the ship’s location, heading and speed through a system called AIS. The signal is carried on VHF radio frequencies so it only travels a hundred miles or so. Volunteers on the coasts have set up receiving stations that relay the ship’s information back to the web site in Greece. The end result is that you can check in and see in real time, what’s happening in the ocean near you, or anywhere else where there are volunteers.
The West Coast is covered from Baja California up through Vancouver. Here’s a shot of what’s in the water right now around San Diego harbor.
Out in the ocean, there’s a Liberian Tanker heading for Salina Cruz, a cargo ship going to Japan, and a cruise ship going from Long Beach to Catalina. You click on the ship and a name and sometimes a (volunteer-provided) picture appears along with links to the ship’s previous history over the last 30 days. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m a geek who’s always craved omniscience, but I think this is really very cool.
I think creative teachers could find lots to do with this site. The speeds of the ships are listed, so there are opportunities to see the distance = rate x time equation alive and well in the real world. There are all kinds of geographical comparisons that one could make, too, by looking at the numbers and types of ships at work in different parts of the world. Here, for example is a look at the Aegean between Greece and Crete.
The blue ships carry passengers, the red are tankers and the green are cargo vessels. It would take a bit of clicking and googling to get a handle on it all, but one could learn where they’re all going, where they came from, and even what they’re carrying. Kids could adopt a ship and keep track of where it goes over the course of a few weeks, looking up more info and pictures of every port it stops in. What a great way for kids to get a sense of how the world works! It’s even a good way to get a sense of how the world isn’t working well lately. A blog by the editors of Foreign Policy magazine uses a similar site to show cargo ships idling off of Singapore. With trade depressed by the present economy, they’re all dressed up with nowhere to go.
I like the Marine Traffic site for another reason: it invites participation. Many of the ships they track have no photograph on file. It’s up to volunteers to provide them. So last Sunday when I saw that a new tanker named Pelican State had no photo, I dashed down to the harbor with Nikon D60 in hand hoping to catch it coming in. My timing was off and the ship was too faraway for the photo to be useful, but I’m going to use this an excuse in the future to step away from the keyboard and try again. If you’re a teacher near a seaport, you might consider making this a class project.
If anybody out there builds a lesson around this, I’d love to hear from you.
Craig Nansen, a longstanding ed tech leader in Minot, North Dakota, is organizing a dinner gathering at NECC of other longstanding (and too often sitting) ed tech people. He just posted a Google Spreadsheet asking some questions of anyone who was using computers in teaching in the pre-Macintosh/Windows era. One item in the form asked for a favorite story from that era. Here’s mine:
I started Ed Tech PMS, a BBS for teachers in 1982 using People’s Message System by Bill Blue. We made it easy for anyone to set up an account and in short order we had dozens, then hundreds, of users. One user, though, was a junior high school kid would would log in every afternoon and leave countless amazingly profane messages on the system. Every evening I would have to call in (one user at a time… others got a busy signal) and delete what he wrote.
There was an obscenity filter built into PMS that every message would be checked against before publishing it. It came with a small starter set of dirty words familiar to anyone who has ever slammed a door on their fingers. The kid soon figured that out and learned to write alternate spellings of every four letter word he knew to get past the filter. Every evening I would dutifully add each new variant to the filter.
After several weeks of this obscenity arms race, one evening I was happy to log in and see no new messages from the kid. Same thing next day. And the next.
But then I noticed that no one else had posted any new messages, either. It turns out that I had fixed things so that no one could post a message that contained the letter “F”.