...I Watched as the World Shrunk Before My Eyes

Zwoop! There it goes!

What? Right. Google.

The time stamp will tell that I am up late tonight, and finding myself unable to concentrate on anything I was supposedly up to do (writing, natch), I've spent the past few hours doing my usual time waste- when I've bloghopped myself to death I start jumping over my Science/News links, and once that's run out I just cruise around on Wikipedia and IMDb.

Somewhere in the middle of it all I noticed a little blip on PopSci about Google's newest map feature and decided to check it out for myself. In the process I discovered a few things that you will no doubt be wildly interested in.

The feature discussed in the article was Walking Directions for Google Maps, a useful little addition that I've been wanting for a while. It avoids no right turn signs and one-way streets, and makes me just that much more dependent on its route calculations than I already was.

Turns out I've been right about my way to campus being shorter all along. Take that.

Of course, once trapped in the endless labyrinth that is Google extra apps, I started using Street View, and lo and behold, some minor mapping has been done in France (which follows the Tour de France, note if you will the modified icon for the route), some cities in Japan and a whole lot of Australia- you can check out a little bit of Paris, or quite a bit of Tokyo, or some mysterious post-apocalyptic wastelands. The resolution of the Tour de France street views are a significantly higher resolution than the rest of the world, which is refreshing, even if it makes every other street view that much more disappointing.

The oddest thing that I found though, is that Google Maps has no mapping of Israel. None whatsoever. They have satellite imagery, but just try getting it to give you directions from Cairo to Leipzig. Apparently, Google Earth was being used by Palestinian militants to plan attacks.

Seems so pedestrian, but I guess you can weaponize anything if you try hard enough.

I can easily plot the course, however, from Paris to Berlin.

yours,
Noah J.