Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

 

I posted a new avatar image (also on the right; it's one of two I added today so it won't show as the top one on IAM). I've been stuffing myself the last few days so I managed to gain a few pounds (to about 165 I think). I want to start back at the gym this week and really focus on gaining weight. It's funny… Everyone complains that I don't post heavy people on ModBlog, but then goes and attacks anyone who's underweight. Trust me, and this is coming from someone who spent most of his life overweight, being underweight is less fun. I guess in part because “fat rights and civility” awareness promotion has been so effective, it's considered in poor taste to make fun of someone because they're overweight, but no such poor taste rule applies in reverse.

Anyway… Here's a funny thing I saw on Google Maps — some strange “Escher” like behavior in NYC, where the perspective on buildings changes from block to block. The reason that it particularly interested me is that I don't believe that this is algorithmic — I'm almost certain that this is patched together in a Photo editing application. I don't think this could be done automatically.

There are plenty of places where Google has overlapped different map sources of course… Even inside Central Park there are resolution overlaps for example, where one image has higher quality than another. For example, here's one not far from the pictures above:

That's most likely done automatically because it's just a blurline (that said there's a suspicious distortion in the bottom right building that looks weird to me), but it wouldn't surprise me if pretty much every high traffic location in Google Maps has been gone over by hand… It reminds me of the “college student algorithm” that was said to be behind fractal compression (ie. where a college student sits in a closet and matches up the math by hand).