Google Maps

Even though I like to think that I’m smart and good at math and science, I can’t help but admit that I have a hard time truly grasping huge numbers. I used to find Boston an improbably large city, but now I kind of think of it as a small town. Even though part of me recognizes that it’s intuitively off by orders of magnitude, if you asked me how many buildings I think are in Boston, some part of me — the part that’s trying to get a mental picture and make a ballpark guess — would say there are about a thousand.

Google Maps, of course, reveals just how absurdly bad a guess that is. And even though I consider myself pretty intelligent, I’m utterly incapable of even beginning to fathom the true scale. (And yes, a good eye will spot that Boston is just a tiny bit of the very bottom, and that it’s mostly Somerville and Cambridge that you’re looking at.) And then you realize that this is just a tiny, tiny little bit of the Earth.

But then I think back to home, and am equally as amazed by just how much of the land is completely untouched.

And as long as I’m posting random babblings about Google Maps, here’s another one for you… Here’s the Merrimack dump. The big spiraly thing at the top is where we used to dump our trash, and the buildings are the transfer station we use now. But looking at the lower right, what on earth (literally) is this and why are those roads/clearings so loopy? The coloring implies some sort of massive drop-off, too.

But then other optical oddities abound. Just to the left of the dump, we find this. What is with the big loops? Irrigation ditch? And then, in the lower left quadrant, I can’t even tell what I’m seeing. It almost looks like a bunch of fallen trees. Bing Maps provides a much clearer picture shot form what I presume is an airplane, and I’d really like to link to it, but I can’t for the life of me find a way of directly linking to what I’m seeing.

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