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Bad Boys

Classic! Now what do you think this conversation between the Google van driver & this police officer consisted of:

• Speeding
• Directions (wouldn’t that be ironic) i.e. Google Maps
• Or how about…”Sir, why do you have a gigantic camera mounted on your roof”?

View Google driver talking with cop in Google Maps

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Lots of public, not so much transit

Lol, here’s a good one. I wonder how long these three people have been waiting for this bus to come. It does look like someone perhaps graffitied the phrase in white spray paint…could very well be a prank, & if that is the case, not working as effectively as one would hope.

View people waiting for non-existent bus in Google Maps

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Hopefully this will help you better remember

Wow, that is a lot of post-it notes! I don’t even think I would put that kind of time/effort into a prank – & don’t get me wrong, I am quite thorough when it comes to pissing people off. I wonder if they actual have text written on them, & if so…What kind of ridiculousness may they contain – so much is left to the imagination here.

View car covered with Post-it notes in Google Maps

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White-supremacy headquarters perhaps?

Well this is a little more subtle I suppose – a swastika visible only from the air. I seriously doubt the original architect could have failed to notice the resemblance here; of course it may not have been their original intention, wait! A quick Wikipedia reference tells me this facility was commissioned in 1944, the plot thickens….

View Swastika-building  in Google Maps

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Land Ahoy!

Here is the location of a Bolivian cargo ferry named The “SS Jassim”. It is now shipwrecked in the Wingate Reef, near the Sudan coast in 2003. They say this is the largest shipwreck visible within Google maps.

View the SS Jassim shipwreck  in Google Maps

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Sky-rockets in flight

Check out this Google Earth view. Hmmm…wing-span is a bit short to be a plane, trajectory appears completely horizontal…couldn’t be a rocket. Eureka! This appears to be some sort of a missile in mid-flight near Junction, Utah. I wonder where its headed? Not too much besides mountains lie beyond its path.

View the missile  in Google Maps

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C.S.I Giant episode

Well now, this is odd…Now what the bloody hell could this have been used for…or what are they planning on using it for:

• A prostitute violence-awareness parade
• Some sort of playground designed with sexual-education in mind
• Goliath’s abandoned sex-toy

The strangest thing is that; not only are the arms/legs severed – but there appears to be representation of muscles & tendons where the arms would have been. Hmmm, I have quite the imagination & even I am having an awfully hard time determining what the hell is going on here.  It reminds me of that old Sesame street skit, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong”…Yeah & it’s the colossal severed torso being stored behind your warehouse!

View the giant mutilated torso  in Google Maps

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Valhalla!

Now here’s a nice change, two urban gentlemen battling each other dressed in medieval attire, I really can’t say I see this every day. I wonder if they are really true historians or just a couple of dudes who decided to play outside because their Final Fantasy co-op mission was interrupted on behalf of a neighborhood power-outage…What a couple of freaks.

View medieval urban combat  in Google Maps

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We don’t need no water

“The roof, the roof”…the roof is seriously on fire! We don’t need no water – Hold-up, we have no water because we didn’t pay the utility bill this month…Here comes the Google van, forget about our immediate safety for now – we need to look cool…Good job boys, mission accomplished.

View blatant disregard for personal safety  in Google Maps

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Look Ma – I’m on Google Earth!

Google has since removed the original image; you can see the two girls through the provided Google Maps link, just not the money-shot (Shucks). Even though they have replaced the image…this find still holds #1 spot for the simple reason that nothing screams “HI GOOGLE” like attempting to flash your breasts to an audience of nearly 7,000,000,000 potential viewers. Good work hun…You have earned Ben’s top-10 spot for Greatest Google Earth Moments! I’m sure your mother is proud.

View (Remind me why I like Google Earth again?)  in Google Maps

Related posts:

• Google How-To: Acquiring the Genius from your Competitor…
• Smart-Phone GPS: The demise of stand-alone units.
• Google acquires Episodic: Content vs Platform?

A Bunch of Brainiacs!

Anyways, this company isn’t outright owned by Google. Rather, this is one of the VERY FEW companies that Google is investing in. I would assume that Google wanted to acquire the company, but the brains involved probably see unlimited potential to make this into a multi-billion dollar industry.  Recorded Future has this to say about their employees:

“The Recorded Future team includes computer scientists, statisticians, and linguists with deep domain expertise in areas such as intelligence and quantitative finance. A high proportion of the team holds PhDs and other advanced degrees. Team members have received the Fulbright scholarship, were awarded MIT’s TR100 award, etc. etc. The team has built multiple successful analytics businesses with aggregate annual revenues in the 100s of millions of dollars.”

How does Recorded Future work, exactly?

Let me iron one quick thing out for you. This won’t predict the future any better than any human who is active in following trends. For example: If you’re a big-shot broker and wanted to know where your high value stocks and equities will be in the future, you would research everything you could about them. Right? This is exactly how Recorded Future works. It collects and correlates information that is made available from all over the world and makes assumptions based on what it has already processed.  Here’s how Recorded Future describes it:

” We have 15+ employees in various corners of the globe attacking a hard problem – organize the web in a radically new and useful way. The world’s 24×7 media flow constantly talk about time, whether it is reports of what’s transpired or statements of what’s expected to come. Recorded Future’s linguistics and statistics algorithms extract time-related information and through temporal reasoning helps users understand relationships between entities and events over time, to form the world’s first temporal analytics engine. Our customers include some of the worlds’ most advanced financial institutions and government agencies in the world. ”

It’s pretty crazy, but not revolutionary. If you think this will make you millions, or tell you what the next big industry boom will be… you could be right. But it’s nothing you wouldn’t already know if you just put your nose to the grindstone and did your own due-diligence.

[Sources: Recorded Future, Smart Planet, Gizmodo]

Related posts:

• All hail: Quadrotor-robots of the future…
• Warner Brothers Sued for Pirating Anti-Pirating Software.
• Footballs of the Future have computers and LEDs in them…

David Firth’s cartoon “Salad Fingers” is quite possibly one of the strangest things ever created. The first episode, Spoons, introduces the viewer to his very offbeat sense of humor.

Queen of the Internet Felicia Day created The Guild in an effort to deal with her World of Warcraft addition and to do something with her time between acting jobs.

After waking up from his trip to the dentist, David found his father recording the after effects of his anesthesia for our amusement.

Chad Vader would later parody David’s dental recovery experience in his video response.

Tay Zonday rose to international internet stardom with his hit song Chocolate Rain in 2007.

Tay would later go on to create a much more professionally produced follow up titled Cherry Chocolate Rain to coincide with the new Cherry Chocolate flavor of Doctor Pepper:

One of the funniest things about YouTube is you occasionally stumble upon a hidden gem. While I am no fan of Katy Perry, I heartily enjoy the Los Colorados cover of her song Hot ‘n’ Cold:

YouTube is also frequently used to catalogue our most miserable of failures, and public humiliations. This unfortunate individual decided to propose to his girlfriend in a very public manner and ultimately failed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esr_okP5Qmo

Earlier today I was discussing with friends how much traffic on the internet is related to cats. I’m betting it’s a significant percentage. Here are some of my favorite cat videos:

Parry Gripp, former frontman of Nerf Herder, is also a fan of the internet and I could assume broccoli kitty, as his ballad “Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom” would indicate.

If you’ve never heard of Clone High, I hope this helps rectify the situation.

Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy borrows many of it’s strange cutaways from internet memes. Peter Griffin working at Burger King, for example, has it’s roots in this video:

Then again, you can also find any manner of strange meme on youtube:

And of course, the most famous youtube meme of all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQVkGcn7Vo

So from us here at Tower Nation we say here’s to you YouTube. You fill our lives with joy!

Related posts:

• Happy Holidays from Tower Gaming!
• VUVUZELA!!! – Info graphic and the best of YouTube.

Jeff Jarvis (American journalist, TV critic, columnist and author of What Would Google Do?) has a few choice words for Murdoch’s new paywall. An article he published earlier this week on the Guardian website – followed by a subsequent rant on his blog – goes for the jugular of the Australian-born internet tycoon.

Put simply, Jarvis accuses Murdoch of being a decaying old git who can’t wrap his feeble mind around how the internet works. The paywall erected around the Times and Times London websites, Jarvis claims, are a sign of surrender; Murdoch has given up.

Some choice quotes:

“By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.”

“I used to work for Murdoch at his American magazine TV Guide. I respected his balls. It is a pity to see them gone.”

The comments are also well worth a read, with views supporting both sides of the issue:

“I decided never to pay money to that Rupert Murdoch the moment he decided to try to interfere with british politics. It’s surprising easy to avoid paying him money. I get House on itunes now he has stolen the program from living, and i will certainly not pay for online times content.”

“Don’t count your chickens. Didn’t the Guardian lose about 30 million last year and isn’t it in the process of presiding over the slow death of the Observer.”

“the only murdoch related publication i’d pay to read is his obituary. he’s a dark and sinister threat to this country; no-one undermines the reality and theory of democracy quite like the nefarious antipodean.”

“I think that you are all avoiding the major query from all this wonderful free content. How are the journalists and new writers going to be funded? How are we going to get REAL news stories not PR feeds regurgitated? Answer that one and then we will start to see interesting internet news not repeat print stuff.”

Personally, I think that there’s no real way to see how this’ll end up. Will Murdoch’s sites pull through with increased profits and revenue, or will they fall flat and shrivel up completely? At this moment in time, nobody can tell for sure.

Sources:

• Rupert Murdoch’s Pathetic Paywall (Guardian)
• Rupert’s Pathetic Paywall (Buzz Machine)