Some neat finds

First of all, happy Friday!  Second, a couple of links.

http://goingtorain.com/

This site finds where you are, checks the weather, and tells you if it's going to rain or not.

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Google.org is apparently Google's place for telling you what they're learning by datamining the world.  Their flu trends thing is pretty cool -- it uses search terms to assess what the flu risk is before the CDC data is released.  It looks to be pretty accurate too, at least for finding trends.

Apparently there's a group of scientists working on doing a similar thing for evaluating climate change.  I guess they're going to webcrawl and look for observations from various sources to get a better idea of how the environment is changing.  I never really thought about it this way, but they say we're changing it faster than data collection can really keep up, so we need a somewhat accurate way of assessing what's happening.  

This is also on Google.org, and I think it's a pretty great idea.  It's a power monitor project that would monitor your energy usage throughout the day so you know how much is being used and so you can see how much different appliances use.  Like they say on the site, you can't know what to change when you don't know the situation.