Eye on the World

You don't see this every day -- Los Angeles was enveloped on Tuesday by a blob that oozed out of the ground:

"dozens of firefighters worked throughout the day to identify what was first deemed 'a black tarry substance' and later morphed into a 'watery mud.' ... there was a gooey substance, a tarry-type substance, coming out the underground electrical vaults, out of manhole covers in the street, through the sidewalks and possibly in one older apartment building ... Sidewalks were as hot as Jacuzzis. And a pressurized liquid shot from every street orifice"

-- http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_3529716

After extensive testing, it is an unknown substance of unknown origin.

Sounds like the tar pits are returning. The Los Angeles types may be going the way of the dinosaur before long.

If you've ever dreamed of being able to fly through the air without an airplane, you will love Google Earth, a 3D geographical program.

You can go anywhere in the world and see what it looks like from the air. Actual satellite imagery is projected onto virtual 3D surface so you can fly through the mountains, across deserts and over oceans in proper perspective.

You can create sets of places and automatically tour them. You can see notes others have made of interesting places and view their photographs taken at ground level. You can share your own notes with others. If you fly high enough, you can even see the stars.

Google Earth for the Mac is free and can be downloaded here. All you need is a fairly modern computer and a broadband internet connection, not dial-up.

Be warned that you may end stay up all night going on adventures and viewing the sights, trying to find all your favorite places, reliving past adventures and planning for new ones.

I have been using VoodooPad for almost all of my casual and technical writing. It replaces and improves upon my piles and stacks of three-ring notepads filled with notes about everything.

I keep pads with lists of todo items, pads with information for dealing with Unix features, pads with notes about compositions I am working on, pads listing my favorite patches on each synth and what controllers they use, pads of notes of things that people have told me, schedules and more.

VoodooPad is like a notebook which allows you to create Wiki-style hyperlinks between pages. This makes it very easy to organize information: once you have several paragraphs about some topic, you can make the section title be a link and put all the text on its own separate page that is linked to from the first.

You can also add links to folders on your system by simply dragging and dropping, you can add photos and drawings, you can add links to web sites. All links are clickable and open the folder or file or web address that they link to. So VoodooPad can even be used to organize related files on your computer instead of messing with making aliases or moving files around.

There are many other features. The $25 full version has all the bells and whistles, or you can try the free VoodooPad Lite version that does everything I have mentioned here in this review. I recommend you try it and see and you'll find you will use it daily to keep track of everything. The full version is reasonably priced, given how much more organized I now am, and how it's been a long time since I've bought a new paper notebook.

Did Admiral Zheng He circumnavigate the world 100 years before Magellan even started his voyage in 1519?

A controversial book published in 2003, 1421 The Year China Discovered the World, claims he did. There has even been talk that Columbus and other European explorers used Chinese maps of the world to plan their voyages, although none of those maps have ever been found.

Until now.

Here is the mysterious world map: Old Chinese Map of the World

This is a good article about it: Old map found in a Shanghai shop may rewrite history's voyages of discovery