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The current Swine Flu pandemic headlines read like those flashing through the intro sequence of a post-apocalyptical movie. Now you can see the cases spreading in real time—as the WHO declares them—in Google Maps. Updated

In case you have not been paying attention to the news during the last few days, there's a pandemia going on. A spike of infections of the H1N1 Swine Flu—a mutation of a pork virus that jumped from pigs to humans—happened in the city of Mexico (103 dead already) and it is quickly spreading through the world now, thanks to airline connections.

Reading the map is very simple: The pink markers are suspect, the purple markers are confirmed, and deaths don't have a black dot in the marker. The yellow markers are negative.


View 2009 Swine Flu (H1N1) Outbreak Map in a larger map


View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

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A new feature lets you browse popular user-contributed photos from Panoramio at major landmarks around the world. The many people who virtually visit Paris to see the famous Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral in Street View can now also browse the wide array of user photos taken in the vicinity. Just look for photo thumbnails at the top right of the Street View image, and click to view. You can also connect directly to the community behind this great photo content - a link to the author's Panoramio page is shown with every user photo.

Try it now...Not a picture, it's a embed Google Street View!!

Eiffel Tower <--Click to view Panoramio Photo


Notre Dame cathedral <--Click to view Panoramio Photo


Take a look at this video to see more:


The feature is available in many other places too: New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney and New Zealand, to name just a few. Anywhere, really, where Street View is available and where users have contributed lots of high-quality photos; of course, this usually is near famous landmarks but you never know where you'll discover more to see. With user-contributed photos you can inspect architectural details and close-up quirks, or see what is happening at a place at more than one time of day, or see whatever else it was that inspired the photographer to press the button.

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Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan...
The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

The Shamsi airbase in 2006 with three drones apparently visible

But recent Google Map of the same base, three drones disappeared!!

The location coordinates is 27°51'17"N, 65°10'6"E.
Right Click to Save Google Earth KML file.

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It's a real place on the Earth. This lovely heart shaped Croatian island is located in Zadarski Kanal (Zadar Channel) between Zadar and Island of Pasman. Now You can easily "travel" on Google Map.

Right Click to Save Google Earth KML file.

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My heart in the sky, loves everything in the earth...

The Valentine's Day is coming, don't forget to say Happy Valentine's Day to your lover. If you worry to lose it, you can use WebSkype to help you.
Schedule to send a Rose and messages to.....

Send a (F) to you, and Happy Valentine's Day~~ (h)<br />(inlove)(inlove)(inlove)(inlove)(inlove)(inlove)(inlove)
Setup the date and write down your messages, and he / she will get this...

If you're in Taiwan, refer the following map to invite your lover.

Original Map

If you're in China, link to 北京情人节地图.

Choose one you like...

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A sunny day, decided to go to Taiwan's most beautiful Taroko National Park. I drove my Tribute along the east coastline to Taroko valley.

This is my route planning :
Home ->Chihsingtan Beach ->Taroko Gorge National Park
-> Baiyang Trail -> Water Curtain Cave -> Pulowan

Chihsingtan Beach



Taroko Gorge National Park





Baiyang Trail




Water Curtain Cave




Pulowan




Where's Taroko Gorge National Park? Let Google Earth show you, if you would visit there some day.

Original Map

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Now you should be more careful to do anything in the street!!
Google Street View Captures....


[Man/Woman Peeing In the Street...But, it has been Deleted]


[Entering an adult book store...]


[City sun bathing...]


[Crime in progress???]

Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth that provides 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street level views and allows users to view parts of some regions of the world at ground level. When it was launched on May 25, 2007, only five American cities were included. It has since expanded to thousands of locations in the United States, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and includes a variety of urban and rural areas.
Google Street View displays photos taken from a fleet of Chevrolet Cobalts in United States and Opel Astras in Europe, mounted with spherical cameras and placed in 'image orbs' within Google's maps, displayed against the backdrop of images previously taken from satellite that make up Google's maps. These 'image orbs' can be navigated using either the arrow keys on the keyboard or by using a mouse to click on arrows displayed on the screen. Using these devices, the photos can be viewed in different sizes, from any direction, and from a variety of angles. Lines that are displayed along the street that is shown indicate the direction followed by that street view camera car.
Google has demonstrated Street View on prototype phones running Google's Android OS[citation needed], and is a part of the Google Maps program pre-installed on the T-Mobile G1. On November 21, 2008, Street View was added to the Maps application installed on Apple's iPhone. On December 10, 2008, Street View was added to the Maps application for S60 3rd Edition.

So try to find some funny and real photos on Google Maps!!

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Taiwan say 2009 Happy New Year To You

¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸ ¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø¤º°¨
¨°º¤ø„¸ HaPpY ¸„ø¤º°¨
¸„ø¤º°¨ NeW yEaR``°º¤ø„¸
¸„ø¤º ``°º¤ø„¸ ¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„



Taiwan's Landmark

	Name:	Taipei 101
	Location	Taipei, Taiwan
	Floors:	101
	Spire:	509m
	Roof:	449m

View Map
The highest structural top, highest roof, and highest occupied floor are still held by the Taipei 101 Tower in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, R. O. C. Respectively, these heights are: 509m at the top of the structural spire, 449m at the highest roof, and 439m at the highest floor – the one hundred and first. Just as notably, these records were achieved despite the tower’s location in one of the most active seismic and typhoon regions in the world. In order to reach these heights and still meet the rigidity and flexibility demands of the extreme lateral loads, e. g. – earthquakes above magnitude seven and winds above 60m per second (over 200km per hour), the architect, C. Y. Lee & Partners, and the structural engineers Thornton-Tomasetti Inc. and Evergreen Consulting designed the steel and reinforced-concrete tower with features that readily invoke superlatives.
The building rests on a massive 5m thick concrete mat foundation laid over a veritable forest of 380 1.5m diameter concrete piles which are embedded with added high-strength concrete over 30m into the bedrock. From this foundation, 36 extra-high strength steel and concrete columns formed from just about the strongest steel and concrete available begin their ascent. Of these, twelve are corner and bracing columns ending at floor 26, sixteen are full height columns that form the core, and eight are full height, 3m x 2.4m “mega-columns” distributed around the perimeter. All are steel box columns assembled from 413MPa (60ksi) yield-strength steel plates up to 8cm thick and then formed into composite columns by either partially or fully filling their volumes with 70MPa (10,000psi) concrete up to the 62nd floor. (Curing tests indicated that this concrete strength actually reached 80MPa [12,000psi].)
To counter lateral forces, shear walls are formed by casting concrete within the spaces between the core composite columns in a 4 bay x 4 bay configuration from the foundation to the eighth floor. Above the eighth floor, core columns are reinforced with moment-jointed beams at each floor and then braced through to the top floor. Additionally, one- and two-story high outrigger steel trusses tie the core columns to the perimeter mega-columns at every eighth floor. The curtain wall system of glass panels installed into inclined moment-resisting lattices contributes to overall lateral rigidity by tying back to the mega-columns with one-story high trusses – also at every eighth floor. This facade system also accommodates lateral displacements such as those caused by seismic activity of up to 95mm without damage. Finally, deflections resulting from extreme wind loads are minimized by the installation of three separate tuned-mass dampers: a primary, low-frequency 635,000kg damping sphere almost 6m in diameter formed from 41 layers of 12cm thick steel is suspended between the 92nd and the 88th floor to counter overall tower sway, while two smaller, higher-frequency dampers 7 tons in weight are installed inside the 20m tall mast to counter mast vibrations. The engineers noted that this final structure is expected to survive once-in-2,500 year seismic events, i. e. – events which produce accelerations up to 0.5g at ground level. It is the very implementation of these innovations that allows the Taipei 101 Tower to achieve lateral resistances comparable to towers with more traditional structural cores of monolithic reinforced concrete walls, but without incurring the associated penalties in weight, assembly time, and most critically, free floor space.
Besides its state of the art building systems, the Taipei 101 Tower is also equipped with 48 of the world’s most advanced elevators. The elevators are installed in a novel staggered-transfer configuration with two sky lobbies and four transfer floors. Most of these have aerodynamically shaped, double-decked pressurized cabins and travel at very high speeds. But, the two elevators traveling between the lobby and the 89st floor observation deck can claim to be the fastest elevators in the world. Custom designed for the tower, these record-setting elevators took over one year to build and four years to install. Amazingly, they reach speeds of over 60km per hour and rise from ground level to the observation deck in just under 40 seconds.
Undoubtedly, these structural and service innovations will ensure that the Taipei 101 Tower continues to be recognized for its accomplishments even after it cedes the various height crowns to newer buildings in Dubai and China over the next few years.

By the way, read Chinese New Year.

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It's Christmas Eve! Thanks to NORAD and Google you can watch Santa make his deliveries around the world. The best place to watch Santa is with Google Earth. If you haven't already, download Google Earth, then simply download the official santa tracker.

• Official Santa Tracker -
  Google officially teamed up with Norad (the US North American Air Defense Command), which has been tracking Santa on their radar system for many years, to officially provide tracking for Santa in Google Earth. You should visit the NORADSanta.org web site to see the countdown to Christmas Eve and some games and other information related to the tracking system (and choose other languages).


• Santa's Route -
  You can check out Santa's route right now in Google Earth based on information from Travel by GPS. Click on the "Points" folder and select "Tools->Play Tour" from the GE menu to see a really cool flying tour of the route. Pretend you are Santa! You can E-mail Travel by GPS a placemark from Google Earth for the location of your house, and they will add your house to the route.


• Santa from Space -
  In 2005, one of the Google Earth Community members called 'ear1grey' posted an amazing discovery. He found a huge picture (36 miles tall) of Santa. He made a nifty Google Earth file for kids so they could go find the Santa by following the red nose of Rudolf the reindeer. Download this file and then turn on the "Little world" in your "Temporary Places". Look in the nose of Rudolf for Santa.

You can get more information about the santa tracker from the Norad Santa site, and there you will also find a Google Maps version of the tracker, or a version for your phone. Also, that site provides information in several different languages. Last night Google provided some information on the history of the Google Earth santa tracker in this post.
And, have a Merry Christmas!

聖誕老人再次游歷Google Earth
與過去四年的情形一致，Google將在Google Earth和Googel maps上測繪聖誕老人從寒冷的北極長途跋涉到世界各個角落的旅程。不過今年，Google新增了手機查詢功能，期待禮物的男孩女孩們可以通過手機追蹤他們的禮物到底何時纔能送到自己的手中。今年聖誕老人啟程於周三美國太平洋時間凌晨3點，聖誕老人將顯示在NORAD的聖誕老人網站，數據的提供由Google和北美防空司令部配合完成。
聖誕老人的愛好者也可以通過Google Earth提供的特殊NORAD KML插件追蹤，或是用iGoogle添加NORAD追蹤小工具。Google將使用高分辨率的視頻來演示『聖誕老人』駕駛雪橇游歷世界。並且，Google也首次為手機用戶提供Google Maps移動版的聖誕老人追蹤功能。
另外，聖誕老人追蹤並不是由Google發起的項目，北美防空司令部據悉已經追蹤了聖誕老人達50年之久。

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