Insights | 19/12/2015

Google’s New Cardboard Camera Meets a Two-Miles-per-Hour World: Our Weekly Top 5

Today news spread within seconds – 500 years ago they spread at the speed of a horse. Besides three maps that show a Two-Miles-per-Hour World we have some more links that demonstrate how different the world is that we are living in: From Google’s Cardboard Camera to images from Pluto.

Test your relationship to music

Are you more of an emotional or analytical listener when it comes to music? Do you like to listen calmly or do your feet start to dance automatically at the first sound? The University of Cambridge created three tests to get a better insight into people’s relationship to music. Get tested and find out how and if music accompanies you every day. Additionally you will help researchers discover the musical universe.

Create your own 3D panoramas

We are always curious about Google’s new releases, thus we are very happy to introduce you to the Cardboard camera. The app allows you to take 360° panorama pictures on your phone and that then are processed to imitate a 3D depth. The cardboard camera is available for free in Google PlayStore and is the third member in the cardboard family, after the cardboard headset and the cardboard app.

Diet.js helps you to get a node ninja

Diet is a tiny, fast and modular node.js web framework. It is perfect for making fast and scalable apps and APIs. In comparison to many other web frameworks diet has a structure that supports virtual hosting without any additional modules or configuration. Diet has Server Instances that function as virtual hosts.

Sharpest views of Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades. These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface. In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains. Here you will find a more detailed description of the surface.

1500–1800: A Two-Miles-per-Hour World

The course “History 301” at the University of Oregon introduces students to the history of Europe from the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) to the French Revolution and its extension throughout Europe by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. These maps show the speed at which news traveled to Venice, from 1500 to 1765. The isochronic lines represent one week, and give a broad indication of the time required for letters to reach their destination. The author explains the differences as follows: “All three maps describe the speed of letters traveling toward Venice. The differences from one map to another ( …) are a result of the varying frequency of communications, depending on the urgency of the circumstances (…). Theoretically, speeds should be compared over distances defined by comparable isochronic lines. However, if one images the maps as being superimposed on one another, they are very roughly equivalent, an extension in one direction being compensated by a reduction in another.”