Alexander Murphy Makes A Point

trp0 photos

From "World Hot Spots: What Google Earth and Geography Tell Us About War, Peace, and Politics" at the Dole Institute for Politics. Pretty fascinating discussion of geography and how we've had some stunningly stupid leaders the past 50 years or so that have gotten us into conflict after conflict without understanding the geopolitics of the situations which has lead to us being unsuccessful time after time after time.

If you've got windows media player, you can see the official video here. 
Or, you can check out the first of a couple clips I took during the event.

The google dude (Brian McClendon, on the far left) is originally from Lawrence (which is why Lawrence was the starting point for Google Earth for the longest time until he worked on a project with one of his friends, also from Kansas, which inspired a change of the center to Chanute, KS). He demonstrated some of the amazing uses people have put google earth to. One example was a visualization of the spread of the H5N1 avian flu over time.

Alexander Murphy, a geographer from the University of Oregon (and sitting to the right of McClendon) had some terrific anecdotes and some fantastic insights into Iraq, Iran, and other interesting spots around the world.