Saturday, April 11, 2009

World's biggest self-portrait

World's biggest self-portrait, "drawn" with GPS over several continents.
It's not clear to me how he made commercial airplane pilots take their planes in curved and curly paths over the ocean.


Pascal said:
Yeah, suuuure. An airliner actually went from the eastern tip of Brazil, flew south-east far over the ocean, then turned back in a loop, and nobody got fired because of the useless fuel consumption, delays in passengers trips, and disregard for very carefully optimized flight plans in these financial crisis times?
A likely story!
If ANY airliner had made that loop-de-loop [at the nostril] over Lebanon, I think I would definitely have heard about it. Especially if the very same plane, flying as if to spy on our fine touchy homeland's military secrets from above, also passed over Israel in the same go.
[...]

Reminds me of this story I heard on the TV news a couple of weeks ago:
"Another danger of global warming : experts worried that the multiplication of wind farms might end up slowing the planet's rotation, from opposing all that atmospheric motion."

Good grief. And if we tore down a mountain it would speed up the planet's rotation?

Anyway, it's looking like this "big drawing" is just a sham. Although a surprisingly carefully constructed one. It's a pity some people think it's great fun to make fools of others. That's rather low, I think.

16 comments:

tc said...

Eolake said...
"It's not clear to me how he made commercial airplane pilots take their planes in curved and curly paths over the ocean."

You're hilarious! lol! ;-) Good point, though!

tc said...

Dude must be loaded! Can you imagine what it must have cost to do that project w/DHL?! Wow!

Ray said...

@ tc -
Exactly what I was thinking - you'd need to be another Bill Gates to be able to pay for something like that,
and then you'd still have a lot of trouble finding people to actually do the whole thing.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I'm wondering if he cut a deal with them, they get promotion out of it.

tc said...

Yeah...it has to have been a promotion! Just lookit the amount to shipping tags he had and...@ a minimum of $15 (US) EACH and the instruction page?! OMG!! I would have FREAKED had someone handed me an *instruction* map like that one! Holy!! It also appears that the turkey got a free(?) *Round the world in 55 days* trip outta the deal, too! I need to think of something like that! lol!

It was a pretty cool idea, though! Pretty amazing outcome! :-)

Ray said...

I can more easily believe that this kid (without shoelaces in his sneakers) probably used a map of the world and a Wacom Pen Tablet on his computer to do all that... I think we're being 'had', guys...

Alex said...

Add me to the list of non-believers.

There are just a few places where it looks wrong.

I guess a few short coastal trips along the Northern coast Scandinavia with curve fitting could make his hair. But overall, it just doesn't work.

Philistine? Maybe.

tc said...

OK so...yes...apparently, a LOT of us have been *had*. It seemed cool, though. :-(

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

Yeah, suuuure. An airliner actually went from the eastern tip of Brazil, flew south-east far over the ocean, then turned back in a loop, and nobody got fired because of the useless fuel consumption, delays in passengers trips, and disregard for very carefully optimized flight plans in these financial crisis times?

A likely story!

If ANY airliner had made that loop-de-loop [at the nostril] over Lebanon, I think I would definitely have heard about it. Especially if the very same plane, flying as if to spy on our fine touchy homeland's military secrets from above, also passed over Israel in the same go.
D'uh! Don't you people know anything about geopolitics?
That plane's also supposed to have leisurely circled over some of the most dangerous countries in central Africa, where various rebellions routinely shoot down airliners with military missiles "for fun".

And, to top it all, it's also claiming to have passed smack in the middle of the Somalian region without being bothered by any pirates!!!

Reminds me of this story I heard on the TV news a couple of weeks ago:
"Another danger of global warming : experts worried that the multiplication of wind farms might end up slowing the planet's rotation, from opposing all that atmospheric motion."

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Good grief. And if we tore down a mountain it would speed up the planet's rotation?

Anyway, it's looking like this "big drawing" is just a sham. Although a surprisingly carefully constructed one. It's a pity some people think it's great fun to make fools of others. That's rather low, I think.

Anonymous said...

"Another danger of global warming : experts worried that the multiplication of wind farms might end up slowing the planet's rotation, from opposing all that atmospheric motion."That would suck - sure, summer would last longer but then so would winter!

Of course if they harnessed enough wind power to make the planet spin backward, it's possible to time travel.

Anonymous said...

That's weird. I'm sure I left a space in between the quoted text and my reply.

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

[Ahem!] "A couple of weeks ago" was the same day Domai decided to show latex fetishism.

Anyway, you're very right: making fools of others for fun is quite low.
1,000 feet of altitude, tops.
Just in case there were some breast implants with that GPS tracker. We wouldn't want them to explode in mid-flight, would we? :-)

"Of course if they harnessed enough wind power to make the planet spin backward, it's possible to time travel."Somebody's been watching Superman 1...

"That's weird. I'm sure I left a space in between the quoted text and my reply."
The same thing just happened to me on another post.
Must be the relativistic time lag from Earth's slowing rotation, disturbing Blogger's software because of the internet atomic clocks falling behind. (Or is that "falling ON THEIR behinds"? Do Caesium-133 atoms have butts?)

Alex said...

I almost fell for a BBC Radio 4 news item which was talking about relocating the British atomic clock from Greenwich to the top of the Telecom Tower so the different gravity would stop it running slow.

They actually broadcast this gag about three days before April first, so I was not ready for it.

And Pascal, does the Francophilic side of you get to have chocolate fish for Poisson D'Avril?

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

April 1st is the mating season for the fabled Gefilte Fish. Which Commandant Cousteau has spent his whole life searching for.
He should have tried the Google Sea...

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

"[Ahem!] "A couple of weeks ago" was the same day Domai decided to show latex fetishism."

Aha!

But there are actually people who worry that windmills may affect the planet. It's braindead, the surface of the earth is full of things blocking the wind.