Fun fact, the home page shows a few places, these are called Ducks in architecture [0]. When I found out about Ducks, I've been pretty obsessed about them, and call them out anytime I see one. My favorite one that I found was a tooth at Mexico City Dentist [1]
Not really the same, cool none the less. A duck is a building built in the shape related to the business they are in. If the ships were their offices, then it would be a duck.
If you are a Street View fan, check out GeoGuessr, a game where you try to guess the location of a Street View. Some pros on YouTube can guess with scary accuracy.
I got so addicted to this for 3-4 months that I had to stop. It was so fun especially after I started to get the hang of the game and various nuance of local infrastructure.
For those looking to see some pros in action I highly recommend GeoWizard (has a bit of a comedy bent and tends to be regarded as an original pro who relies way less on meta), and Rainbolt, probably one of the single best players when it comes to memory.
I happen to know the person who first came up with that when Flickr was looking for a name. He feels bad about it, so I try to keep my teasing down to once every few years.
>I am looking forward to the day that AP starts replacing the missing penultimate "e"'s in the poorly spelled names of companies that were too cheap to buy the correct domain name, like Flickr and Flattr.
>What really impresses me about Viber is the way they went all out and splurged with an honest to god penultimate "e" before the final "r". Most dot-com companies would have settled for "Vibr", but they went the distance and bought an authentic luxurious vowel, precisely where it was called for, without going overboard and throwing in a sometimes-vowel "y" in place of the "i". Very bold and straightforward spelling, I must say. Color me impressed!
>>Viber is an Israeli company, don't be so judgmental of their poor startup spelling skills.
>>>No, you misunderstand: I am truly and earnestly impressed by their good spelling, not criticizing any bad grammar. If they'd named it "Vybr," it would have come off like Steve Buscemie holding a skateboard over his shoulder wearing a MUSIC BAND t-shirt, desperately trying to appeal to the youth demographic.
>>>>Read that one again with </sarcasm> at the end :)
+1 for Geotastic. I play regularly with friends — It's very well developed and he shows you how much your play has cost in Google Maps API usage to reference if you choose to (optionally) pay.
But I thought that was a pretty midwestern phenomenon. I thought the rest of the US was in the "soda" camp, except for the south, where I was horrified to learn that "coke" is the generic term.
And an extremely enterprising soul, Alan McConchie, has produced an excellent map confirming this: https://popvssoda.com/
So why is West Virginia talking about pop? It looks like WV is a linguistic battleground, with all three words having influence. But this particular thing is in an area I didn't know existed, WV's "Northern Panhandle", a territorial incursion which creeps up between Columbus and Pittsburgh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Panhandle_of_West_Vir...
Having grown up in the northern panhandle, you really have to look at is a tri state area. PA, OH, and WV.
It’s extremely distinct from the rest of WV below the mason dixon line.
The original capital of WV was actually Wheeling, in the northern panhandle, but it was eventually moved south to Charleston because of the disconnect.
In the 19 years I lived there I never heard anyone say anything but “pop” to refer to carbonated soft drinks. It’s also part of my dialect that has stuck around.
I think the most distinctive word used in the region is that shopping carts are referred to as “buggies”. I didn’t even realize that was unusual until I went shopping with friends in college…
My dad, who grew up in Milwaukee, was shocked to learn that the thing he knew as a "bubbler" was everywhere else called a "water fountain". Like you, he didn't know until college.
Heh, "coke" is the only one that sounds normal to me (I'm from the southwest). Where I'm from, if you ask for a coke at a drive-through, they'll ask "what kind?". And then you say "Sprite", or whatever you want.
Then you just say "Coke" again. If you sound confused, we know you're not from here. If you treat this as a perfectly normal and sane interaction, then you're one of us ;)
I created streetviewr.com a few days after Street View launched in 2007 and ended up with some pretty fun images. After a couple of years, it became too much work to update and the domain lapsed. Kind of wished I'd kept it going.
Beat me to it! - officially they’re “Ring Junctions” I believe.
The big ones aren’t too hard to navigate (from a drivers POV they’re just a succession of mini roundabouts), but there’s one at Hatton Cross (near Heathrow airport) that’s so small you can see the whole thing so traffic appears to come from all directions and it’s a bit of a nightmare: https://goo.gl/maps/PR4XBTPeEg1YojUeA
Anyone know how this works? I thought for a while it was picking a random Atlas Obscura location, but sometimes you just get an interesting temporary moment captured by the street view camera, like a bear eating some salmon or a guy riding in the bucket of a loader.
Did Neal actually just spend days browsing street view and manually curate a list?
Folks have linked to interesting finds on Google Street View for just about as long as Google Street View has existed. I'd imagine he probably borrowed locations from listicles like:
This might be one of my favorite Neal.fun projects yet.
Like GeoGeussr but without the guessing and everywhere is an interesting place. Would be nice if I could click on the location name and it would take to to it’s Wikipedia page.
"Cubist church" is kind of a funny caption because of the grammatical ambiguity between "this is a church constructed in a cubist style" and "this is a church where people go to worship perpendicularity."
It's officially known as Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, but its shape reminds many people, me included, of a washing machine agitator. So it's commonly known as Our Lady of Agitation, or St Mary of Maytag.
I clicked on a few thinking "huh what weird places" ... then I stumbled upon the "Shark Attack" one (the famous "shark through the roof" in oxford, headington).
I used to live close by, literally two streets down. Small world ...
If you've never done it, revisiting places you've been before in Google Earth VR is a kind of surreal experience. Whenever I've introduced friends to VR, letting them visit their old homes is always a hit.
Note this isn't the same climb as the "Free Solo" movie, and while Alex Honnold climbed much of the street view climb without ropes he (and the other climbers he was with) did use ropes in part. See eg https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7297919,-119.6368427,2a,75y,... (and you can follow his beta up the climb!)
Looks like the image was stitched from multiple images taken by a single camera, but the camera moved around instead of panning/tilting in place. Closer objects (the rail) move more due to parallax and it becomes impossible to stitch perfectly
I think Google could improve street view with these points:
- allow the user to drag little pawn to a different point, while in street view
- when the user asks for directions, allow the user to follow the path of the route in street view (let the user click "next" to move to the next important intersection, but still maintain streetview controls)
- when the user asks for directions, show an overlay on the streetview with an arrow pointing into the direction where you're going
The first feature is available both on the browser version and mobile (click maximize button to enter a split view).
The second is more or less possible on the mobile app since recent versions, if you access the street view from the route steps. They have worked in improving this UI very recently, a few months ago it was unusable and now it's pretty intuitive.
The third one is also available on mobile, with the Live view feature that appears during walking routes.
hmm, I get a splash screen then a mostly empty screen with a few icons around the edge, but nothing else. What is supposed to happen? If I click "Random" it just spins, and nothing else changes. (firefox, ublock origin)
i dont know the nuances of what is and isnt "street view" but google maps does incorporate user uploaded static 360 images, maybe some of the ones you mention are in that category
[0] - https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-quirky-endeari...
[1] - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dental+office+%22La+Muelit...