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Google Map pilot
Thursday, July 2 2009
There was blast of rain this afternoon so fierce that it felt like our house had been positioned beneath a waterfall. Water was shooting from the downspout-free gutters on the east side of the house as if they were firehoses.
This evening when Gretchen made me some pasta and said that there were no more store-bought mushrooms in the refrigerator, the dampness of outdoors reminded me of the possibility of wild mushrooms. It's a little early for mushrooms still, though some sort of cup fungus is growing out of the shale floor of the greenhouse and Gretchen says she has seen a few mushrooms in the woods. So I went on a quick mushroom hunt along the farm road and managed to find a few boletes just emerging from the button phase. They had scaly dark reddish brown caps and yellow pores. I'd also been beaten by the slugs, but they were easy to flick aside. Their contribution to my pasta sauce was negligible but it always satisfying to successfully hunter-gather even when the results are essentially symbolic. Gretchen doesn't eat wild mushrooms so I didn't ask her if she wanted any, particularly since I didn't even bother to cook them.
I take generally dim view of Verizon, our DSL provider, the only broadband possible in this remote rural area. But a couple months ago Verizon doubled our internet speed unannounced (to over 3000 bps), and now Google Maps is a bit more like the futuristic interactive map that John King manipulates on Super Tuesday. It especially feels that way when I pull my finger across the scroll button and it's like I'm looking down from a rocket ship accelerating at 2000 Gs, the map scaling down almost in real time. (Though the internet speed is a huge factor here, it probably also helps that my computer has an abundance of memory and processing power.)
This evening I found myself "flying" around the country, virtual-traveling at impossible speeds using nothing but Google Maps as my vehicle. Flying over the west end of the northern boundary of Wyoming, I saw an interesting anomaly and so I zoomed in saw that the border isn't actually a straight line but wiggles with the underlying topography. According to Wikipedia'e Wyoming entry, this is the result of survey errors dating from when survey equipment was more primitive.
Next I found myself flying over the border between Virginia and North Carolina, looking to see places where that supposedly-straight line diverged from the latitude. But then I got distracted by the hunt for places where the state line did and did not affect land use. I found a little three-house subdivision whose entryway was in Virginia and two of whose houses were all in Virginia, though one was in North Carolina. I wondered if this was known when the North Carolina house was built and to what state that house pays taxes. There are also houses that sit directly on the state line. How are they taxed? Is it possible they pay no state property estate taxes at all? (They could always tell the state that's asking that they're paying taxes to the other state.)
Later some stray fact had me looking up a ranking of American states based on their geographic areas. There were some surprises in there, the biggeest being that Michigan is bigger than either Minnesota or Utah, although a large fraction of the state (a part the size of the state of Kentucky) is water.
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