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Around the block...
Oct. 27th, 2007 08:39 pmThe last time I looked at the quality of the data available through Google Earth for our place here in Colorado, it was pretty poor, comparative speaking. In Webster, you can distinguish our house from its neighbors because our house has a patio in the back. In Pagosa, up until a short time ago, you were lucky to make out major highways (nature rarely works in straight lines), and the occasional dirt road (the rule around these parts). In the end, it turns out - since the data has been upgraded - that the placemarker I created for the old homestead was off by a football field or two.
There has been speculation as to why it's taken so long for the data quality to catch up to that for other places in the United States. I've heard it's because there are alien crash sites in the area, which makes little sense. I've heard it's to prevent people from finding as-yet undiscovered Anasazi archaeological sites, which might make some kind of sense if it weren't for the fact that all sorts of senstitive images seem to crop up from time to time on Google Earth. My personal favorite is, simply, that Pagosa Springs isn't the hub of the universe, and therefore, not as high a priority as, say, New York or San Francisco, or even Durango.
The upgraded data has allowed me to create a snap of my standard walk, which I have referred to in my LiveJournal as "around the block":
The distance for the entire loop is about 1.3 miles. A walk from the start point counterclockwise to the upper left corner of the path and then back along the same path to the finish is just over a mile, horizontally, and probably a hundred or more feet vertically. Descent is easy; ascent... isn't.
Data point: When Shiloh and I walked the route the other day, we went clockwise around the path. This morning, we walked counterclockwise, and it was uncanny to see how Shiloh followed pretty much every twist and turn in the wooded section between the cul-de-sac nearly due south of the house and the house itself. Was her memory providing cues (in reverse), or was it her nose, or something else (the ghosts of the Anasazi)?
Cheers...
There has been speculation as to why it's taken so long for the data quality to catch up to that for other places in the United States. I've heard it's because there are alien crash sites in the area, which makes little sense. I've heard it's to prevent people from finding as-yet undiscovered Anasazi archaeological sites, which might make some kind of sense if it weren't for the fact that all sorts of senstitive images seem to crop up from time to time on Google Earth. My personal favorite is, simply, that Pagosa Springs isn't the hub of the universe, and therefore, not as high a priority as, say, New York or San Francisco, or even Durango.
The upgraded data has allowed me to create a snap of my standard walk, which I have referred to in my LiveJournal as "around the block":
The distance for the entire loop is about 1.3 miles. A walk from the start point counterclockwise to the upper left corner of the path and then back along the same path to the finish is just over a mile, horizontally, and probably a hundred or more feet vertically. Descent is easy; ascent... isn't.
Data point: When Shiloh and I walked the route the other day, we went clockwise around the path. This morning, we walked counterclockwise, and it was uncanny to see how Shiloh followed pretty much every twist and turn in the wooded section between the cul-de-sac nearly due south of the house and the house itself. Was her memory providing cues (in reverse), or was it her nose, or something else (the ghosts of the Anasazi)?
Cheers...
