g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Thursday, February 1, 2007
11:21 - Stupid Google Earth Tricks

(top)
Now that I know that you can zoom by right-clicking and dragging (thanks to James in comments)—and more specifically, that you can zoom continuously by right-clicking, dragging, and releasing—I have a new favorite game to play. I call it "Meteorite".

You spin the earth at random, tilt it at some arbitrary angle, and then right-click-drag-release to zoom in slowly—fast enough to be interesting, yet slow enough to give it time to get all the high-res imagery in time. And then... you wait.

Just watch yourself zero in on some randomly chosen spot of earth. Watch the hills, then roads, then towns and buildings, come into focus. Watch all the placemarks crowd into view, then dissipate into the margins. And eventually watch yourself coming in to land at some location you might never otherwise have had occasion to look.

And then you find yourself looking at the neighboring towns and villages in the topography, researching them in Wikipedia, and imagining what would happen to them if an object from space were to come crashing down right where you did.

Argh! Someone save me from this program!

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© Brian Tiemann