Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
You've all heard the amazing stories of soldiers hacking on the battlefield — the stories of fox hole radios, scrap armor, and anti-IED tech (that must constantly change as IED tech itself adjusts to the hacks). In time for this year's Memorial Day, the Army announced that they are going to start giving awards to recognize soldiers for their "Battlefield Innovations." Jeez, what took them so long? They're calling it the Soldier Greatest Inventions Awards.
I love the amazing stories of some of these battlefield innovations, some done at the risk of a soldier (or POW's) life. There are all of the pee hacks, for instance — peeing on machine gun barrels in WWI to cool them down, peeing on stuck gun mechanisms in WWII to unfreeze them from the winter cold, and the most amazing one, of Jewish prison workers secretly peeing on V2 control mechanisms to create time-released rusting which would remain undetected during assembly, but cause a malfunction by the time the rocket hit the pad. Recently, there's been the cat and mouse "game" between US forces and insurgents with tricks like suspending a toaster from a pole in front of a truck to cause heat-triggered IEDs to detonate early.
What are some of the more clever battlefield innovations that you've heard about?
On this Memorial Day, we offer you a few tools to help honor those who gave it all.
As we've done the last few years, we encourage you to check out Sean Askay's Map the Fallen project. Using his KML file
Another neat item to check out today is the US Medal of Honor collection that we first showed you in 2008. It was created by user 'Up_The_Spurs' from the Google Earth Community. You can download the KMZ
If you know of any other great Memorial Day resources for Google Earth, please leave a comment and let us know.
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
We've covered a lot of games that have been created using Google Earth (and/or the Google Earth Plug-in) as the playing field. We wrote up an overview of many of them last year, and since then we've seen a few other great ones like "Drive the A-Team Van" and "Ships 1.5". However, I don't think I've yet seen a game that makes such extensive use of Google Ocean as I've seen with Sony's new Project Shiphunt.
The game is very well done and certainly quite challenging. You can play it at discover.sonystyle.com/shiphunt
Have you tried it yet? Any luck finding some ships?
