Knowledge is delicious

This morning I was having fun researching the proposed skyscraper for St. Petersburg, Russia, the first building over a few stories in the entire city. For Gazprom, it would be in the shape of a natural gas flame, and blue, and astonishingly tall compared with the rest of the city. Architectural and aesthetic battles are ongoing.

While looking up the proposed location, I discovered the Google map showing where it was. This program is not new but I've not been able to find very much in St. Petersburg before. It was all fuzzy, no resolution possible, so they said. I have to believe we have long had the capacity to see quite clearly from sky to ground there.

So hey! Let's look up the children's hospital, there it is! I felt like waving hi or something. Then looked up the city center and my colleagues' apartment buildings.

That was great, what about on the home front. I switched it from Map to Satellite and headed on over to North America. Now we see what the astronauts and cosmonauts see: land with no stripes and words on it. I was astonished how much I think of our country with the state lines and labeled cities on it. Even around Washington it took me a while to find familiar territory.

Zooming in and out gave a very different sense of perspective of how close things were to each other. I kept wanting to switch to Map, to get boundaries and names, but resisted as an experiment. Finally I found chez egregious, and traced the path of my forest sanity walks. It was different that I had supposed.

And so does our perspective vary on other matters, life, politics, creativity. I am experimenting with different levels of perspective in these areas, somewhat uncharted terrority.

I feel that I am looking in Satellite view, and would like to find familiar places with Map. But this time I must draw my own maps.