Numbers Don't Lie

Mathematics tends not to be seen as the most emotional science.

And yet, when I use a VOIP connection to hear my daughter tell me about her farewell party, 10,628 miles away, her giggle is being crunched into a string of 1s and 0s, and streamed across the Pacific Ocean to my ear, where it of course has a profound emotional effect on me - just as though we were together...

Somewhere, there's passion in all of that maths.

This Morning, I woke up early to stare at a yellow line and a dinky picture of an Airplane:


Which is having a similar effect - that dinky airplane picture is a live 3D feed of Qantas Flight 149 as it brings me and my family back together for the first time in over a month. Data like Altitude, direction, speed and flight plan are all available and charted in real time

fboweb.com offers the live updates as a KML feed, available for viewing through Google Earth.
This must be one of the coolest uses of Google Earth I've seen (It does seem to be limited only to flights in US airspace though.)

If you want to track QA 149, the direct link to the kml feed is

http://www.fboweb.com/antest/km/geR135035.aspx

(You'll need Google Earth installed - you can get that at http://earth.google.com/)

And to think that it's all just because of numbers, piped around the world.