Off-Topic: Google Earth

http://earth.google.com/ (was keyhole.com, Google bought Keyhole - the photos are from satellites and planes)

Google's latest free toy is an Earth observer program, it is a lot of fun to play with (find your house!). Of course, one of the first things I did with it was to search for and fly to some of the plants I've worked on. In some cases I had flashbacks back to when I was doing plot plans and immediately recognized major equipment that I drew (years ago - on paper, of course).

Here are a couple that I captured:

http://www.pipingdesign.com/plants/toronto.jpg http://www.pipingdesign.com/plants/copper.jpg

The image resolution for some areas is good enough to identify individual cars.

Note that Google Earth won't work on all computers/OSs yet, it was just officially released this week.

Paul

  From the website:

<<Are there cities covered in detail worldwide? Or just in the US?

The whole world is covered with medium resolution imagery and terrain data. This resolution allows you to see major geographic features and man-made development such as towns, but not detail of individual buildings. Additional high-resolution imagery which reveals detail for individual buildings is available for most of the major cities in the US, Western Europe, Canada, and the UK. 3D buildings are represented in 38 US cities (the major urban areas). Detailed road maps are available for the US, Canada, the UK, and Western Europe. And Google Local search is available for the US, Canada, and the UK.>> Received on Thu Jun 30 22:13:00 2005