This app from NASA's EOSDIS provides the capability to interactively browse over 600 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers on desktop and mobile devices. Many of the imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, showing the entire Earth as it is "right now". This supports time-critical applications such as wildfire management, air quality measurements, and flood monitoring. Some satellite imagery layers span almost 30 years, providing a long term view of our dynamic planet. The underlying data is available for download, and Arctic and Antarctic views of several imagery layers are available for a “full globe” perspective.

An interactive online tool to draw Voronoi diagram on a google map

It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a "projection" to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.

Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.

Carte interactive qui permet de voir d'un seul coup d'oeil les pays qui exigent un visa avant votre arrivée, qui n'en demandent pas, qui en propose en ligne ou encore qui en fournissent une fois arrivé à destination, tout ça en fonction de votre nationalité.

(via sebsauvage http://sebsauvage.net/links/?68emog via korben http://korben.info/faut-il-un-visa-pour-aller-en.html)

The three-dimensional structure of the local universe may one day become as familiar as our local geography thanks to a new generation of maps that reveal our neighbourhood’s rich complexity and our place within it

Helene Courtois at the University of Lyon in France and a few buddies show off this newfound knowledge in a movie (and accompanying paper) that they’ve created to explore the rich structure of our galactic neighbourhood.