Ship Tracker

This site keeps track of a large number of ships in near realtime, using GPS as the source of positon data. There are facilities for finding ships by name, call sign, and more. I’m not sure what fraction of ships are participating, but when you look at the world map it’s clearly quite a large number of vessels.

Having spent time at sea myself (in the U.S. Navy), I can easily imagine how wonderful this web site must be for the friends and relatives of the cargo ships' crew members. Anytime they want to, they can see exactly where their loved ones are.

And of course there are numerous practical uses as well: identifying ships in the way of storms, or those nearby someone who needs help, and so on.

This is a terrific example of several technologies (GPS, web, radio in this case) being used together in a novel way to provide a capability I’m sure nobody anticipated even just a few years ago…

Stereo Image

This is not an anaglyph, and you don’t need any special glasses to view it. You just need to learn how to view it, and most people don’t find it very difficult — just a little weird. Here’s how you view it:

First, sit a comfortable viewing distance from the screen, as close as you can without straining your eyes to focus on the picture.

Then orient yourself so that the border between the two pictures at right is directly in front of your eyes, both vertically and horizontally.

Easy so far — but now comes the tricky part. “Cross” your eyes until you see three pictures, instead of two. You will probably have to move your head slightly, and change the amount you’ve crossed your eyes, to get everything to line up, but when you do, the center picture of the three will be a 3D picture with full depth — it kind of “pops” right out of the screen, visually.

This works much better with the larger view you get when you click on the little photo…

A Dog, A Rope

It doesn’t take much to make our dogs outragously, completely-out-of-control happy. Here Lea (our seven year old female field spaniel) is playing with a rope — and having an absurd amount of fun with such a simple toy!

These pictures were taking just before daybreak yesterday, as we left our house for our morning walk. That’s contributing to this dogly joy, of course. Also adding to it: the “rope” in question is actually a horse lead that we use for a leash — and the dogs know that leashes mean walks.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often or how regularly we go on our walks. Each one is a new occasion for dogly joy; they never tire of them and the walks never become just a routine. They sure make being happy look easy…