Digital Interactif

I'm no General but...

I came across news today that Google had added 54 new countries to Google Maps.  Here's the list of countries added(emphasis added):

Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen.

"Afghanistan and Iraq?" I thought.  So I figured if I zoomed into a random Baghdad neighborhood I might catch an explosion or maybe small jihadi's blasting away at each other.  What I didn't expect to see was a detailed view of American military bases from the sky accessible to whoever wants to look. 

Long story short, I typed "american military base Afghanistan" into Google and selected the number one result which stated that "Bagram Airbase is located in the Parvan Province approximately 11 kilometers (7 miles) southeast of the city of Charikar and 47 Kilometers (27 miles) north of Kabul."  I then typed in Charikar, Afghanistan and looked roughly 7 miles to the southeast in Google maps.  Here's a sample of what I found:

Now, as the title of this post states I'm no General, but this CAN'T be a good idea, right?  I mean, for all the privacy issues that Google has trampled on in the past (and present) this is clearly a radically different issue.  As far as I'm concerned, there is no need for "Average Jihadi-Joe" to have access to overhead shots of American/Coalition military bases overseas. 

I imagine this will gain attention at some point on a larger scale, but where is the outrage?  Why is Google giving away our troops positions and unit strengths in the middle of a war?   Come On!

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Asteroids are Scary

Researchers from the University of Southampton (UK) have just released a report on a modeling program they created which details the likelihood and consequences of a small asteroid (< 1km) hitting Earth.  According to Science Daily, a collision with a small asteroid would be devastating:

Initial investigations have examined how the consequences of an impact change with increasing impact energy. Taking a spherical stony asteroid travelling at 12,000 miles per second and varying the diameter to increase kinetic energy, the results indicate that a 100 metre diameter asteroid will predominantly cause localised casualties and damage across a few countries when impacting on either land or ocean. However, the consequences of a 200 metre diameter asteroid hitting the ocean increase significantly, with the generated tsunamis reaching a global scale. At 500 metres in diameter, almost any ocean impact will generate significant casualties and economic cost across the world.

Interestingly, the report specifies which countries are most at risk for a direct impact.  Those countries are China, Indonesia, India, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Nigeria.  I'm pretty surprised not to see Russia on there...it's huge! 

To see what a BIG asteroid would do to Earth, watch this ridiculous video: