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Imagine if George Washington was God (continued)
Using Google Earth to plot a route
Cairo is a lot like the game of Adventure, full of twisty-turny passages, all alike. Just how do you go about finding the best route for moving a 36-foot tall, 125 ton stone behemoth through the narrow streets of Cairo?
In this case, some engineers working for the transportation contractor used Google Earth and came up with the route shown in Figure C.
FIGURE C
 
Cairo's grown up around the statue. Moving it took a complicated route. Roll over picture for a larger image.
If you're not familiar with Google Earth, you're in for a treat. First, the program's free. Second, it's amazingly comprehensive. You can set the altitude of the eye in the sky to as close as 700 feet (and make out individual cars in their spaces) or as far out as 40,000 miles and see the whole Earth as a small sphere.
In addition to being able to stream satellite imagery from a top-down perspective, Google Earth offers a unique 3D perspective, which allows you to get in and see an area from a different angle, as you can see in Figure D, where we've looked at the statue's route from a different angle.
FIGURE D
 
By rotating and angling the map, different options become apparent. Roll over picture for a larger image.
With the ability to quickly zoom in and see a street up close, pull back and see the big picture, rotate to see various perspectives, and tilt to get a better view of the angles, Google Earth proved amazingly valuable in moving the statue to its new home.
If you haven't played with Google Earth, you should. As long as you've got a reasonably capable computer with reasonably capable graphics, it's an easy and safe download. Google Earth could prove incredibly valuable if you have your own 3,200 year-old, 125 ton statue to move.
Heather Wardell received her first Palm handheld in 1997 (from a boss who couldn't get the hang of Graffiti) and has never looked back. She worked in banking as a systems analyst for four years, and then moved into elementary education, teaching computers at a private elementary school for four years. Heather is now a full-time women's fiction writer, and her first novel, "Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo" is available for free download through her Web site at http://www.heatherwardell.com.
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