What Google Does

The news flap which arose earlier this week—that Google Maps' satellite images of New Orleans were pre-Katrina (1)(2)—has now been resolved as Google has replaced the earlier-but-sharper images with post-Katrina pictures (1)(2).

Coincidentally, we ran across this youtube montage of Katrina imagery this morning. The soundtrack is apparently an Aaron Neville recording of a Randy Newman song, Louisiana 1927 (see notes on a different youtube video). If you want to read about that 1927 flood, John M. Barry's Rising tide : the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America isn't much in demand anymore, there are several copies on the shelf.

One of our readers—the one who often sends map links— sent us this much more frivolous bit of google-mapping: directions for how to get from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cambridge, UK. Watch out for step 11: 'Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 miles'. We think it must have been inserted by a Google-ian with a sense of humor. Most requests for transatlantic driving directions don't work, and the ones that do (Miami, Florida, to Cadiz, Spain, for example) first take you up to Cambridge for exactly the same swim.