“Bing Maps Guides Public Transit - Softpedia” plus 2 more |
- Bing Maps Guides Public Transit - Softpedia
- 100 Days of Fantasy, Day 54: Ad&d 1St Edition Dungeon Master's Guide - Gather.com
- Telescopes Up! A Guide to the Night Sky's New Stargazing Season - msnbc.com
| Bing Maps Guides Public Transit - Softpedia Posted: 17 Sep 2010 12:29 AM PDT Bing Maps added transit guidance to its directions options, for every one of you Eco-friendly public transportation users out there! So now, you can continue taking the bus, the subway or whatever local rail you want, without risking of getting in the middle of nowhere, because you can turn to Bing Maps and establish the best route in advance. This feature is actually a very important one, as the interest in public transportation is continuously growing, and the networks are developing to accommodate more and more people. In the United States alone, there are over 10.7 billion public transit passengers a year! As this is the first release of Bing Maps transit directions, the service will cover only 11 cities, but no need to worry as more will come, and quite soon apparently! For now, the new Bing Maps service will be very useful to you if you take public transportation in: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Vancouver. As it can be seen on the screenshot, every route option features transit information on the side, so that users would easily compare route options depending on what transit they know and which one they prefer. Bing made transit options available for bus, subway, local rail and light rail and information about the transit routing can be found on Bing's AJAX site. Besides the transit novelties, Bing maps has also made major improvements on business details and information about landmarks. You also can open movie house detail pages and see movie listings added to the Nearby panel, besides many details on hours of operation on these listings. Still, the best way of understanding why Bing is excited about the new services is to explore Bing Maps yourself and try out all the new features, and to help you out, click here! This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| 100 Days of Fantasy, Day 54: Ad&d 1St Edition Dungeon Master's Guide - Gather.com Posted: 03 Oct 2010 06:07 AM PDT This is an ongoing series looking at books that influenced one fantasy author. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guideby Gary Gygax Tabletop gaming has been around for about 35 years now, and many players got their start with the game that started it all, Dungeons and Dragons. I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a fan of fantasy literature, so it was only natural for me to pick up on the D&D craze that was kicking off at the time. Yep, I bought all the main rules books (and then some) as well as some of the pewter or lead miniatures, tons of gaming dice, tactical maps ... basically all the goodies that went along with the game. But even back then I knew I was going to be a writer. And as an enthusiastic reader, I didn't just have those rulebooks for gentle perusing. No, I read them cover to cover. Multiple times. Yes. I was a D&D nerd in junior high school. To be more exact, I as an AD&D nerd back in junior high. What's the difference? Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was a slightly more complex version of the game than the original D&D, but not so much so that it really made a difference. If you played AD&D, you had probably played regular D&D, too. I had. My preference was AD&D, which was in its first edition back then, and is all the way up to version 4.5 last I'd check. But back to writing and reading. Of all the rulebooks for AD&D, the biggest one, and the one that took the longest to read because it was so full of text was the Dungeon Master's Guide. Look below this article for the two different covers this book was released in, the first one in the late '70s and the other in the early-to-mid '80s. Since then, there have been other versions of the DMG for newer versions of the AD&D and D&D games, but this first one is still my favorite. Why? Because it was much more than a book about rules. Sure, you had your dungeon mastering rules, but there were also lots of long chapters about fantasy in general and the fantasy genre and the books and authors that influenced the creation of the game in the early-to-mid 1970s. In the back of the DMG there were tons of lists of great fantasy authors, and that was better than cake and ice cream for my young self back then (and I really liked cake and ice cream ... still do, for that matter). It's just too bad today's gaming books, at least the ones I've read or flipped through, don't seem to have that same connection with the roots of the fantasy genre. Today's books seem to be nothing but rules and they're usually quite short, often leaving out what many a player would consider important rules. Why do publishers do this? My guess is so you'll have to go buy another gaming book that contains those important rules. Without the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, I would have missed out on a lot of great fantasy reading at various points in my life. That book steered me towards plenty of great masters in the fantasy genre, and I'm thankful for the book at Gary Gygax for that. And I'm thankful for one other thing. That DMG was actually a pretty good read. I can't say the same for many of today's gaming books, which might be one reason why I haven't gamed in at least 5 years.
Up next: Dracula Related links 100 Days of Fantasy: Day 52, Fight Club This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Telescopes Up! A Guide to the Night Sky's New Stargazing Season - msnbc.com Posted: 29 Sep 2010 02:48 PM PDT The end of September marks a transition in the night sky. With the bright stars of the Northern Hemisphere summer disappearing in the west, even brighter stars of winter will rise in the east in a changing tapestry of deep sky objects. The shift in Earth's seasons is a good time for skywatchers to prepare for the next round of stargazing. This sky map shows some attractive targets in the Northern Hemisphere as September passes to October. New skywatching season tour For skywatchers with good weather, there is a wealth of potential targets to hunt for at night. Here's a night sky tour for the new skywatching season: First you'll need some clear weather away from city lights. Granted that, the Milky Way will appear in the western sky, arcing up overhead. [ Great Milky Way Galaxy Photos ] Looking beyond the big constellations of the Summer Triangle, we find the neat little constellation of Sagitta, the Arrow, which is surrounded by interesting objects. Just above the Arrows tail is Brocchis Cluster, popularly known by the more prosaic name of the Coat Hanger" because of its appearance: a straight line of stars topped by a very obvious hook. Above the point of the Arrow is the Dumbbell Nebula, one of the brightest and largest planetary nebulae in the sky. Moving away from the Milky Way, we spy two of the richest globular clusters in the sky, to which 18th century French astronomer Charles Messier gave the numbers 2 and 15 in his catalog. Look a bit farther south and you are in the watery constellation of Aquarius, where you can find two more planetary nebulae. The Saturn Nebula is very small and very bright, so it can be easily be mistaken for a star; its easy to see how Messier overlooked this object with his poor-quality telescopes. The Helix Nebula is the opposite of the Saturn Nebula: very large and very faint. It is probably the nearest planetary nebula to the sun, 700 light-years away, and is nearly half as big as the moon in apparent diameter. You will likely need a telescope equipped with a narrow band or OIII filter to spot it, unless you are blessed with really dark skies. Beyond the Milky Way When we get well beyond the plane of the Milky Way, we begin to see more distant galaxies. Two of the brightest galaxies in the sky are just above and below the two chains of stars that mark Andromeda. Above Andromeda is the large, bright Andromeda Galaxy, visible even in the centers of our cities. With a telescope you can easily see one of its satellite galaxies, Messier 32. Its other satellite, Messier 110, is much more difficult to spot in urban skies, and may require a trip to a dark sky site. Both satellites are farther away from the main galaxy than most people expect because photographs of the Andromeda galaxies are often overexposed, making the Andromeda Galaxy look much larger in pictures than it appears in our telescopes. Just below Andromeda is a much more challenging galaxy, the Pinwheel Galaxy, in the constellation Triangulum. Although almost as bright as Andromeda on paper, the Pinwheel Galaxy is much more difficult to spot in the sky because it lacks any central condensation and fades away to nothingness in all directions. Its easy to sweep right past it in anything but the darkest country sky. Be sure not to overlook the interesting galaxy NGC 253 known as the Silver Dollar Galaxy in the little-known constellation of Sculptor. Tucked underneath the constellations Cetus and Aquarius, this constellation and its many galaxies are virtually unknown to observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere know these sky targets well, especially the treasure that is NGC 253, one of the brightest edge-on galaxies in the sky. Although difficult because of its low altitude for northerners, the galaxy is still a fine object and worth searching for. Although 10 million light-years away, it is one of the brightest galaxies in the sky. This article was provided to SPACE.com by Starry Night Education, the leader in space science curriculum solutions. © 2010 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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