Google Earth is so cool. You type in an address, a business, latitude and longitude coordinates, the name of a historical figure... anything, really... and it zooms you right to the spot. People can upload photos of that particular spot and you can view them. There is a timeline tool which allows you to view satellite photos of that area from years past. You can even "explore" the ocean floor. It's the greatest internet time-suck I've ever found... right after Facebook.
Here are some cool things I've found while playing around with Google Earth:
A blue whale skeleton outside a marina in Santa Cruz, California,
A massive satellite installation in the middle of an island jungle in the Caribbean (just like in "Goldeneye"),
John Lennon's childhood home, Mendips, in Liverpool, England, (among many other points of interest concerning the Beatles),
The Top Gear test track,
The Quick Stop convenience store from Kevin Smith's cult-classic "Clerks,"
Dresden, Germany (made famous in Kurt Vonneguut's classic anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse 5... actually, it was already famous as Europe's center of culture and art, but then the allies firebombed it all to pieces and everyone forgot about it... until Vonnegut),
Guy Fawkes Island (Guy Fawkes tried to blow up British Parliament a couple of years ago... "Remember, remember the fifth of November..."),
An enormous house hidden in the woods a few miles from my home with a driveway that measures slightly more than a mile and a half,
A strange, but undeniably massive, mosaic on the edge of the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana...
You can also see a satellite image of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and you can see New Orleans days before Hurricane Katrina and days after. It's pretty sobering.
Those are just a few things that come immediately to mind. I highly recommend downloading Google Earth (it's free) and kissing the rest of the internet "adios" for the next several weeks.
Thank you,
Matt Beers
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