REDBLIND » geo location http://redblind.com/blog Blog of Jonathan Cipriano Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:21:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 EARTH MOVER http://redblind.com/blog/2009/10/20/earth-mover/ http://redblind.com/blog/2009/10/20/earth-mover/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:02:47 +0000 admin http://redblind.com/blog/?p=233 Inspired by the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake I created this little prototype. I pull down the earthquake RSS feed from the USGS and parse the data for the longitude, latitude, magnitude and date/time of recent earthquakes. I then plot them in sequence on a Papervision3D sphere textured with an image from NASA’s Visible Earth. The quakes play to scale in time that they occurred. Each quake is assigned a musical note according to the magnitude. The higher the magnitude the lower the note. Currently I am pulling quakes with at least a 2.5M for that last 24 hours.

For plotting points, I used this blog post as a reference. The musical notes I exported from Garage Band. Also of note, the USGS does not have a cross domain policy set up for Flash, so I had to proxy the RSS feed with a PHP script. I will probably be adding more features, refining the musicality and adding a UI to this, so check back again sometime.

Click screenshot below to launch it.

UPDATE: Looks like the USGS not only moved their feed, but changed it a bit. For now, this won’t work.

earthmover

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