i just discovered something bizarre. i don’t know if any of you use mapquest to get driving directions, but i have before. anyway, tonight i was on there looking for a map of northern illinois to see where the hometowns of my friends were in relation to each other in an attempt to start planning my big winter trip. i punch in “chicago, illinois” hoping to get a nice medium-sized, general map. i didn’t get what i wanted, so i started fiddling with it. i thought maybe i could rezoom or something to get the right amount of information. then i noticed there was a tab on the top of the little map that said “street map”, and next to it one that said, “aerial photo”. hmm, let’s click on aerial photo.

and it’s an actual photograph from a satellite! the particular region i was looking at appeared to be some sort of shipping yards or something. but this was a bizarre discovery. so i punched in my address here and zoomed all the way in. up popped a reasonably sized view of the surrounding neighborhood–in enough detail that i could easily pick out our apartment building. i told my roommate, who tried his home address, and was also very wowed. then he said, “whoa, my neighbors had their pool filled in!” really, i think this is almost creepy. try it yourself. some satellite has been taking pictures of your home, and you didn’t even know it. just imagine, if they allow this sort of thing to be open to the public, the detailed and zoomed in pictures the goverment could take of you if they wanted to . . . (shudder).