Google Earth flight I

I've been figuring out how to record flights in Google Earth (see this if you are struggling to record it on a PC).  This is a flight over the Chicago metropolitan area.

There are a few things I was going to do in Google Earth that haven't worked out.  One was to zoom in on every place I've lived; I moved every year or two when I lived in the Bay Area, so there was a lot of raw material.  I figured that would be easier than my first version of the idea: to take a picture of the front of every place I'd lived, and put them together into a block's worth of buildings.

(A creepily hermetic idea, that I just thought of a stupid name for: Memory Lane.  But it was interesting to remember all the places I'd lived and why I'd moved: one landlord shot at his brother with a rifle in the driveway; another landlord faded and died of a brain tumor over the year I was there.)

But the Google Earth pictures are what a bombardier, not memory, would see.  (Though descending like a missile on distant cities is pretty enjoyable; doesn't everyone dream of flight?)

Google Earth is an amazing product that demonstrates how earth is "turning into an idea" for us, as we put ever more layers of technology in between ourselves and the dirt.  Houses, plumbing, electricity, TVs, cellphones and the internet -- all this "wiring" -- has allowed each of us wire our own world, insulated from physical reality.

We are now better adapted to virtual flight in software like Google Earth -- with its 3D buildings and embedded informational links spread across the globe -- than we are to where we came from.

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