Gary Gale

Posts about chicken

All Of Today's Maps Are Wrong; We Live On A Giant Chicken

A giant chicken.

Up until the 6th. Century BC, it was commonly held that the world we live on was flat. Then Pythagorus came along and started to prove that the world is in fact a sphere. We now know that he was almost right and our planet is really an oblate spheroid, looking not dissimilar to a slightly squashed beach ball.

Today's Internet brings us many wonderful things. Some of those are maps. Today's map shows that with a little bit of cartographical cut-and-paste and a flagrant disregard for the theory of plate tectonics, the world we live on is actually a chicken. A giant chicken.

chicken

If this doesn't make you grateful for the Internet then I don't know what does.

(Geo) Chicken and Egg (The Problem with Press Releases)

James Fee were vastly amused to see Michael Arrington's TechCrunch refer to CloudMade's OpenStreetMap.

There's a danger in looking at too many press releases; you can easily come to think that the view of the world that these pieces of writing portray are a fair and accurate representation of the real world.

Thus both myself and the ever readable James Fee were vastly amused to see Michael Arrington's TechCrunch refer to CloudMade's OpenStreetMap.

Many people describe CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project as “Wikipedia for maps,” and they aren’t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data for third party developers.

Now is probably a good point to mention that CloudMade was founded (by OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast amongst others) in 2007 and OpenStreetMap launched in 2004. Geo chicken ... meet Geo egg.

Chicken Egg

I look forward to reading about other TechCrunch exclusives including the discovery of RedHat's Linux and British Airway's airplanes.

Photo Credits: The Eggplant on Flickr.