Since 861 AD, almost 35,000 meteorites were recorded hitting the Earth but only 1,045 were actually seen falling. This animated infographic is a good way to visualize the data. Bolides is the perfect domain name. (via @DavidGrann)
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Ahnighito Meteorite
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a bolide!
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The halfcat, attracting newly revived interest on Twitter thanks to this blog post, appears to have first been spotted in this blog post in August 2009. But there are no attributions. The latest reports pin it to Street View - not mentioned in the original posting - and it certainly appears to be Street View image, but, lacking coordinates, the halfcat seems destined to be a mystery forever, one of any number of mythical beings, lost in the Clouds.
More interesting than the halfcat’s strangeness, perhaps, is its unknowability. Someone saw the halfcat, snapped it, but the route back is lost. The databases contain such multitudes of new myths.
New cryptids
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Precise Images of Buildings That 3D Scanning Enables by Scott Page Design
3D scanning—though it’s been around since the 1960s—has been in the news of late, with Harvard using the technology to recreate ancient statues and MakerBot announcing a desktop scanner last month. But cheaper, faster, and more accessible 3D scanners aren’t just revolutionizing how we print terrifying models of our own faces. They’re also changing how we understand the city.
A fascinating story about urban-scale 3D scanning published on the Atlantic Cities this week explores how a Bay Area architect named Scott Page is using a 3D scanner to generate super-accurate models of historic and dilapidated buildings.
Page’s system takes a series of photographs and patches them together based on how light bounces off each surface. Rather than taking weeks to survey an old building, architects can now generate precise dimensions in just a few hours. Because the scanner uses color photographs, the models are also incredibly beautiful, expressive documents—Page compares them to the first photographs ever made. “There is a magical quality to point cloud imagery, similar to the earliest photos that froze time onto small metallic plates,” he writes on his website.
(via pruned)
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livable planets.
