I can see my house from here
This right here… this is cool. It’s a program from NASA called World Wind, which gives you access to a whole pile of satalite and USGS data (~10 terabytes) and lets you zoom around the world in realtime. It’s a pretty slick bit of software, and is updated continuously with new data. The sad news is that it’s Windows only, a 170Mb download and requires a reasonably hefty machine and 3D card to run. The coverage varies for different bits of the globe, but at its most dense there’s a really impressive (and slightly scary) amount of detail.
Here’s a picture tour around Pixar’s offices. Lots of interesting spaces, though it looks like a lot of the areas would still suffer from the age old problem of having no soundproofing between the different work areas. There’s a more detailed tour of the offices on the ‘Monster’s Inc.’ DVD, for the terminally curious. Also, I still have a horrible image in my head after someone at work wondered aloud whether the artist areas in the pictures implied that the staff could be said to be ‘cottagers’.
Finally, lots of sites are linking to this solar death ray, but I still think a huge fresnel lens is the more stylish choice for all Bond-villains in training.