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You Can't Stop Turbulence, But You Can Know When to Expect It

In-flight meals may not be the most sanitary things and engines may not work properly all the time, but the thing that scares us the most is turbulence. When the plane starts shaking, we close our eyes and try to go to a happy place inside our mind, where the skies are clear and smooth and we're about to land. But thanks to a website that we've kept in our bookmarks, we're able to prepare ourselves for turbulence by visiting the Turbulence Forecast.

The Turbulence Forecast is a straightforward site, which gives maps of countries or regions and layers over them with sectors where light to heavy turbulence can be expected. The map you see above shows only green sectors on the USA right now, so turbulence is light, but trust us when we say that we have seen those boxes go red (mainly over the Northeast) to distinguish more severe turbulence.

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'Let Me Google Map That for You'

How do you sightsee, or even find your way when you're a bit lost in a city? Paper maps are so several years ago, so naturally you're going to pull out that phone and fire up GPS. And, naturally, it doesn't always load or pinpoint perfectly.

Luckily Deutsche Welle's TV news show Euromaxx has introduced a character who silently parodies these little hiccups of modern life, and his name is Max X..

Enjoy the little video above—a little laugh to start your week—and you can find more on Max X's YouTube channel here. We discovered Max X. while watching too much hotel TV, and hint that another one coming soon to the internet touches on the issue of taking photos of yourself in front of landmarks.

[VIdeo: Deutsche Welle/ Euromaxx]

Airports / Airport News / Travel Tech / Travel News / Maps / Bing / Bing Travel / → All Tags

Bing's New Airport Maps Will Help You Track Down a Terminal's Starbucks

It’s clear that Microsoft’s Bing isn’t the most popular search engine, but they just launched a cool new travel tool that might just make us "Bing and decide" a little more often.

There’s now 42 different airport maps available through the search engine, and if things go well they’ll soon be expanding outside the nifty fifty. Now you don’t have to explore—the often archaic—airport websites to find what you need. With Bing you can easily access where to find a quick bite to eat, an overpriced latte, or just where to pickup your suitcase. The full airport list is right here, from Omaha to Orlando.

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MondoWindow: Combining In-Flight WiFi with the Appeal of Window Seats

Your flight sucks. You've got a middle seat, your seatmate's elbows have taken the armrests and you know you're flying over pretty scenery but you can't see a darned thing. Enter MondoWindow, a new site that promises to make "every seat a window seat" by allowing you to watch your flight (or any flight, really) travel over a satellite map of the terrain below.

The site, designed to be like the online version of those cool "Window Seat" books, launched at SxSW in spring of this year, and we've been watching the Beta version of the site since. It's pretty neat-o, if you're a complete geek for these sorts of things and always love to see data like your altitude and flight duration timeline.

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Google Maps / Google / Google Earth / Japan Travel / Technology / Maps / Tokyo Restaurants / → All Tags

Google Now Mapping the Inside of Japanese Businesses, Everything Else

Google continues to make progress on their project of enabling you to see the world without ever leaving your house (sadly, not totally a joke). The company is adding more and more information to Google Maps, this time encouraging Japanese businesses to upload panoramic images of their stores to Google's Business Photos database, which is hooked into Google Places, which of course is embedded in Google Maps. The Japanese focus is part of a broader roll out, with Business Photos accepting images from US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The upshot is that, metaphorically but not really, you'll soon be able to navigate your way "inside" restaurants and shops digitally on Google Maps. Just like with other photos in the application, users will be able to pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D panoramic images of business. CNN's hyperlocal Asia travel site CNNGo, showing an admirable awareness of cultural sensibilities, mused that the feature will especially appeal to their "more shy" Japanese readers. We imagine that users elsewhere will find plenty of other uses, above and beyond the wow factor.

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London's School of Economics Uses iPhone App to Map Your Happiness...Your 'Mappiness'

Before we explain the iPhone travel app "Mappiness," we've got a few question for you: Do you like to know that people care about your feelings? Are you willing to share your feelings with your iPhone on a daily basis? Do you live in the UK? If you answered yes to all of those, then Mappiness is for (and heck, even if you don't live in the UK).

Mappiness is actually more than an app; it's a project run by the London School of Economics to discover where/when/why people are happy across Britain. Eventually, when they produce the end result based on research provided by those who use their free Mappiness app (namely, you), a traveler would be able to glimpse a map of the UK and see, perhaps, exactly what towns are typically most happy while hanging out with friends at a pub, versus having a work conference or sitting solo in a park, reading.

The app, right now, is building that data by noting its (anonymous) user's locations, and asking them every day how happy they are and where they are and what they are doing.

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Awesome Stuff / Tourism / Tourists / Travel Photography / Maps / Flickr / → All Tags

Flickr Heat Maps Show Where the Locals Like To Go

New York City

Cool stuff alert! You've probably seen all sort of heat maps around the world, but this collection of 126 cities color codes photos uploaded by either tourists (red) or locals (blue on photo social media sites, and plots them so you can see just exactly where to go to avoid the tourists (or join them). To be fair, the National Geographic blog re-discovered the series first, but it's just too good not to share.

Here's how the maps are created: Eric Fischer, a Flickr user, made use of all the photo data (geotags, photo dates, each photographer's photo location habits) from 6 six years of Flickr and Picasa images and plotted them on maps of places—from Paris to Buenos Aires—to elucidate what areas of a city most attract the shutters of those who live there and those who are just visiting. Or the yellows, who could be either.

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Know What Kind of Turbulence to Expect Before Your Flight

In-Flight meals may not be the most sanitary things and engines may not work properly all the time, but the thing that scares us the most is turbulence. When the plane starts shaking, we close our eyes and try to go to a happy place inside our mind, where the skies are clear and smooth and we're about to land. But thanks to a tweet from flight attendant @Heather_Poole, we may able to prepare ourselves for turbulence by visiting the Turbulence Forecast.

The Turbulence Forecast is a straightforward site, which gives maps of countries or regions and layers over them with sectors where light to heavy turbulence can be expected. The map you see above shows only green sectors on the USA right now, so turbulence is light, but trust us when we say that we have seen those boxes go red (mainly over the Northeast) to distinguish more severe turbulence.

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Long Live Geeky Travel Statistics

What do you do when you're on a long flight with your own seatback TV and there's just nothing good playing? You turn on the "Airshow" channel, of course. The Airshow is the station that alternates displaying your flight's route map with other geeky information like speed, altitude, miles to destination and outside temperature. Tell us you love Airshow too?

Well, we recently went on a Carnival cruise with some family and were so thrilled to find that not only does the cabin television have the usual bow and pool cams, but they also have a channel just like Airshow ("Seashow?"). At any given moment, without having to call Guest Services or check a TV in the main atrium, we could see our ship's location plotted on the ocean, check sunrise and sunset times, view how many nautical miles we've chugged through, and—our favorite feature—discover the sea's depth below us (usually between 250-150').

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Google Maps / Google / Google Streetview / England Travel / London Travel / Maps / → All Tags

Visit the Most Picturesque Streets in the UK Via Google Maps Streetview

According to the just-released list of winners of Google Maps' Streetview Awards 2010, this little alley in York is the most picturesque streetview in all of the UK. Do you agree?

As Google Maps expands their coverage of Britain's roads and alleys on Streetview, they decided to celebrate by launching this little contest. Fans of UK streetview voted and winners were chosen in three categories: Best Foodie Street, Best Fashion Street and Most Picturesque Street. As you can probably guess, the top-ranked ones all look like good old traditional British streets.

See the winners, after the jump!

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What If You Could Travel the World by Subway?

You can travel around the world by plane, bus, ship, or even pogo stick, but what if you could go from New York to Alexandria, Egypt simply by changing trains in Lyon, France? This is the dream of Mark Ovenden, who partnered with an illustrator and the London Transport Museum for this special inclusion in the book "Metro Maps of the World."

Although it might be a dream, the idea is so appealing. Perhaps if we had world peace, better tunnel-drilling technology and faster bullet trains, it wouldn't be such a fantastical idea. But we don't have those things, and so we must be content with staring at the full size version of this map and imagining the possibilities. How awesome would it be to hop an express bullet subway train in Newark and be in Bucharest after only 5-6 stops?

We do have one issue with the map, however. As inspiring as it is, they've put Chicago further out than Minneapolis. Switch! Illinois comes before before Minnesota when you head west, and we're not so sure Chicago would be happy as anything less than a hub. Do we need a 2010 revision of the map? Perhaps!

Related Stories:
· Full-size of the world metro map [Flickr Creative Commons]
· Google Earth Zooms In on the US Military's Huge Aircraft Graveyard [Jaunted]
· Maps [Jaunted]

[Photo: Mark Ovenden/Annie Mole on Flickr]

Google / Google Maps / Google Earth / Technology / Maps / → All Tags

Google Virtual Reality Chamber Closer To Being An Actual Thing

A couple weeks ago we wrote up the new Google Maps Street View images for the San Diego Zoo. Definitely neat. It's hard to see, though, how those images could ever be transformed into anything "realistic." Ditto for the new Street View images that Google just posted for some of the world's better ski slopes and Winter Games arenas. They're eye-catching, and it's cool that they were able to mount their GPS-enabled camera on top of a snowmobile, but everything still has the feel of a standard picture gallery.

But take all of that Street View stuff, mix it with some Google Earth technology, and bake the combination into a full-blown virtual reality chamber - that's a different story. And that's what Google engineers have been doing with their Liquid Galaxy project, a kind of gazebo that they've been showing off at tech conventions. An upgraded version just made an appearance at the TED conference. Via Mashable, it does kind of look mind-blowing doesn't it:

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