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Metro map

How Google Builds Its Maps

Interesting article from The Atlantic

“The secret to this success isn’t, as you might expect, Google’s facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world”.

And:

” Your location is the current that makes Google’s giant geodata machine run. They’ve built this whole playground as an elaborate lure for you. As good and smart and useful as it is, good luck resisting taking the bait”.

The image is from the work of Canadian artist Jon Rafman. He uses the alignment errors in Google Earth as the foundation of his work. You can see more of his stuff here. 

You know what’s fun? Putting Fresno into Google and zooming around the satellite views of all the fields. So many different greens.

But when you zoom in close, everything turns brown.

Reminds me of that quote from East of Eden (the book, duh).

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

Looks like Google fixed that problem too. Not much they can’t do.