Pausing by Ground Zero, the New York Reaches Manhattan
The U.S.S. New York reached New York City Monday morning, sweeping under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, pausing at the World Trade Center site and traveling along the Upper West Side before circling around, like a candidate in a beauty pageant, to dock in Midtown Manhattan. It’s fantastic to be here,” said Cmdr. Curt Jones, the ship’s captain, stepping out of the bridge to watch the ship pass under the Verrazano Bridge. “It really does feel like we’re coming home.”
The ship, an amphibious assault dock, has 7.5 tons of steel from the World Trade Center in its bow. It left Norfolk, Va., on Thursday, and it will spend the week here before being officially commissioned on Saturday. The sailors that lined the rails arrived early, well before 7 a.m., despite the brisk wind and occasional drizzle that left many hopping from foot to foot in their dress uniforms.
“They wanted to stake out a good spot,” said Cmdr. Erich Schmidt, the executive officer. As the ship rounded Battery Park, Commander Schmidt offered a few words of encouragement to the crew over the loudspeaker. “You’ve done a great job getting us here. Enjoy it. That’s all.”
Google Maps Gets Updated Satellite Imagery!
Online mapping services are becoming increasingly popular and useful and, as a result of that, more profitable for those running them. All the big players are present in the space, Google, of course, which started it all, but also Yahoo and Microsoft. They each have their advantages, but what most people don't realize is that they all share pretty much the same mapping data, from the same providers. It's no surprise then that Google and Bing announced new satellite imagery on the very same day.
Google also introduced updated imagery, but it also announced that it was stepping up the update frequency. “Today, I'm happy to announce that we're increasing the frequency of our updates to bring you the world's freshest and most complete imagery,” Senior Geo Data Strategist Matt Manolides wrote. “As a part of this announcement, we're also making some changes to the way that we tell you about new imagery.”
The interesting part of the Google announcement doesn’t necessarily lie in the images themselves, but in the fact that it has increased the rate at which these updates will come. Along with this, Google has also changed the way it will present the new data by providing users with a link to preview it inside Google Earth, but also with an embedded Earth plugin.
