Felix Baumgartner's jump as seen on Google Earth

Felix was dragged to earth by the weight of his own testicles as one person memorably wrote.

Hw jumped from a height of 128,100 feet. That's 39,045 metres. That's about 24 miles straight down. It would take me half an hour to drive it horizontally, even if I was going quite quickly. He reached the ground 9 minutes later.

Anyway, here's what 39,045 metres above Roswell, New Mexico looks like on Google Earth when you look straight down.

 And here's what it looks like when you look northwards.

To put it another way, here's what 24 miles looks like on the ground.

It's like falling from Swindon to Oxford.

driving lessons in Wallasey? learn to drive in Wirral? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

9-11

Today is the aniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I suppose I should try to look at the event through the lens of Google Earth.

First of all, Google Earth's historical imagary for this point goes a long way back.

Right back to 1974 in fact, although what you get is just a blur.

By 1978, things are a little better. You'd probably decide you were looking at a city, rather than a mountain or forest.



Next time the image is updated is in 1994, and you can see the improvement quite clearly.



And then again in 1997...



Overlaying 3d buildings at this point, it's pretty obvious that things have changed radically. If you'd been in a coma, and had no other way of getting any information about the world than Google Earth, you could tell a lot from the next picture. It's dated September 12th, 2001. I'm surprised anyone was allowed to overfly the area, but perhaps police or military imagary found it's way onto Google Earth's database.



The time between then and now has been one of very slow reconstruction.

It's a measure of just how culturally important the attacks were that some of the most valuable real estate in the world has been pretty much undeveloped for the last 9 years. I think if the towers had been toppled due to some natural catastrophe, or an airliner had struck in a genuine accident, things would have moved on much quicker.



December 31st 2001. The clearance of the debris has been going on for several months, and Google Earth shows a clearer site, but with much work still to be done.



Six months later, and Ground Zero is staring to look more like a construction site, and less like a demolition site.










The above images show the development of the site since then. As the little red pushpins show, the image has been lifted from pretty much the same place each time. I suppose the pictures each represent a year, but they're not evenly spaced. Look in the bottom left corner for the image date. You can enlarge each image by clicking on it.

Should any truthers be reading this, I think you should know that going forward in Google Earth's historical imagary from 2009 yields a picture dated 2006. I do know why, but I'm sworn to secrecy.

Today's remembrance was overshadowed by the controversy concerning an Islamic Cultural Center a couple of blocks away from the WTC site.

From what I saw, I think many who'd lost loved ones just wished those on both sides that wanted to make political or theological capital would just go away.

So I'm not trying to make a point here, although I do have a definite and complicated opinion. I just wondered how the two places looked in Google Earth.

To keep the resolution the same, I moved the image and recaptured it, then stitched the two together to form a sort of panorama.



That's how it looked when the towers were still standing.



And this is the same image, taken from 2006.

Finally, I've been messing around with various movie making software. Specifically, Fraps and Windows Movie Maker. I thought that might give an interesting perspective.

See the video below...

Spiral Jetty

Spiral Jetty is an earthwork constructed by artist, Robert Smithson in 1970.



It's on the North shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah should you wish to visit it.

This is the sort of thing that Smithson did. Big land sculptures. He died in a helicopter accident while overflying potential sites for a future piece.

And while I'm about it, see this geoglyph ?





It's called the Marree Man and is a modern land sculpture in a similar vein to antique works like the Cerna Abbas giant. Nobody knows who made it, but it was discovered from the air in 1998.

9 years later, photographs were taken for google earth. It's faded slightly in the decade since it's discovery.

Taxi?

Never one around when you need one...

D and swastikas

There's a swastika shaped building in a navy base in Coronado, California, that's created a bit of comment over the last year. It's actually 4 L shaped buildings, each at an angle of 90° to the next. The controversy has been well documented elsewhere. For more information do a search for "swastika shaped building" in the search engine of your choice.

A swastika, although very much a symbol, is not a letter or number. Here's what Kurt vonnegut had to say about it.

''Socialism''is no more an evil word than ''Christianity.'' Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that that ''religion is the opium of the people.'' Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then: Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.

The same naval base contains two swimming pools. They could have formed an "i" shape for me, but I have a lovely "i" in the South Pacific already. The "." of the "i" is shaped like a "D", in a stylised, art decoish font.

So I can now make words like "DAViD" and "GiDDY" or even "ADDiTiVE"

Here's the link...

32°40'34.82"N, 117°10'13.95"W

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