Who does not like maps. I, for one, can spend a lot of time navigating through maps. Often I head to Google Maps for a quick address look-up only to end up spending many tens of minutes navigating around. With street view, it is almost like tourism from my chair.

I ran into this tidbit that I thought was fascinating:

If you look at the Washington Monument in Google Maps the monument’s shadow follows the motion of the Sun throughout the day.

Now if Google Maps did the same to my house, it would make planning that vegetable bed in the yard so much easier. Also, I wonder if the shadow algorithm is cognizant of the time of the year (season).

Speaking of this, and maps in general, I found these two mashups that are both interesting and useful:

SunCalc

URL: http://suncalc.net/

In Vladimir Agafonkin’s own words, his creation SunCalc is a little app that shows sun movement and sunlight phases during the given day at the given location. You can also change the time of the year, and it will adapt sun movement based on the season.

isoscope

URL: http://www.flaviogortana.com/isoscope/

Now this is interesting. Isoscope highlights an area on the map that you can reach within the duration selected, at a given time of the day. So on a Thursday afternoon at work, you are wondering which restaurants you can reach in 10 minutes, you head to Isoscope. Select your location, day of the week, time and the duration (10 minutes). Isoscope will show how far you can get.

So there you go, waste your time!