A Conspiracy of Cartographers
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?
I apologize for the excessive map worship, but do consider this following snippet of page grab from Google Maps. To the left is a moderately wide-angle photograph of the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, along a route that I drive four times weekly. From this distance, they look moderately the same, except that New Hampshire looks significantly more verdant, as if its foliage is greener than its tax-laden commonwealthy neighbor.
However, since the border between the two states is imaginary and not marked by a physical or weather barrier, it seems unlikely that Massachusetts’ trees should be in such dire need of water, especially when immediately next to their lush New Hampshire brethren. The image on the right brings understanding in to sharper focus by showing just how low-fidelity the zoomed-in sattelite images for New Hampshire are. Whoever is responsible for the NH aerial imagery, namely Digital Globe, clearly isn’t providing the level of resolution acheived by the neighboring MassGIS (Geographic Information System) in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Exectutive Office of Environmental Affairs. How sad to live in a state that looks down its nose at its southern sibling, and thinks so highly of its environmental efforts, only to discover that that Mass’ enviromental agencies are going to be able better track erosion, weather damage, deforestation, suburban sprawl, blight, and the like with sattelite technology.
Click on the above image for a larger demonstration of blurry, trippy, low-rez New Hampster.
You Will Go To The Moon
Google has installed a special site in “honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969”, making this the amusingly non-standard 36th anniversary event.
It’s part of the standard Google Maps feature, which combines directions and roadways and available satellite photos into a pretty smooth interface, with the expected Google speed to its interactivity. Once again, Google’s functionality is stealing my heart away from the plodding, methodical, reliable Yahoo.
And in part, it’s because Google’s cleverness and sense of humor inspires allegiance. Question three in the Help FAQ reads, “What happens if I try to zoom too close?”, with the following dare as an answer: “Well, you’ll have to go and find out, won’t you?”
And just to spoil it for you, if one delves too close to the surface of the moon, one discovers that it’s features are composed of the following: Read the rest of this entry »
Beat to the Blogged Punch
Before I left the apartment this morning, I briefly checked Delphi to see if anyone had posted anything to me, and noticed that The V had changed it’s name from whatever it was previously to “Panic on the Streets of London”. I assumed it was a reference to vast escapades in celebration of snaking the Olympics site from France and went on my way. However, in the midst of my morning commute to class, I heard on the news about the bombings and quickly reinterpreted what the title had signified.
I stayed glued to the radio, wishing I could get to school so that I could find a computer and find out if everyone was okay. Renee Montaigne was clearly unprepared for a morning of this magnitude and did a game job, but she was a little shaky and tended to wander off on unfortunately discursive descriptions and recaps. And in the midst of all this breaking new and tense grasping at details, there came a promo for a later broadcast about the 25th anniversary of the release of the magnificent comedy film Airplane! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.) And I thought, what a brilliant thing to link to on the old ‘blog.
So it was a great disappointment to discover later that Jimmy Johnson, writer and artist of Arlo and Janis had thought the same thing and beat me to the punch while I was still in the car.
He even has the brazen temerity to celebrate that he posted first! Feh. I’m still blogging about it, obviously, but the excitement has left the building. Bizarrely enough, however, virtually the same story was broadcast five years prior for the 20th anniversary. And, incidentally, Airplane! made it on to the AFI’s Top 100 Movie Quotations, coming in at #79 with “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.” It’s no “Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue…”, but the fact that they made the list at all would be pretty cool if the AFI had any redeeming tastes whatsoever.
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