rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Now this is fun: Google Earth now offers historical map overlays! I just love this. For example, here is a (much compressed) image of the Lewis and Clark map laid right over the Google Earth interface. (Looks like those boys just missed Boulder. Too bad for them.)

Rick Broida on Lifehacker says:

Pardon me while I scoop my jaw off the floor. This may just be the coolest Google Earth feature ever. I absolutely love historical maps, and there's never been a better way to view and interact with them. Thanks, Jatin!

There are maps of the world from 1790 (so it's not quite the whole world), New York from 1836, Buenos Aires from 1892, Tokyo from 1680.... I don't know about you, but seeing old maps really takes me back. What was it like back then? We look at how our world is changing so quickly these days, but these maps really put so much into perspective.

In hindsight, layering historical maps over interactive mapping apps like Google Earth is really a pretty obvious idea. Here's hoping that they take this idea further. There are a lot of old maps out there. Something like this can be a great tool for getting people interested in geography (which, for folks in the United States, would be long overdue).

You'll want to update your Google Earth app to the latest version. Then look under the layers menu for Rumsey Historical Maps. There are some other new layers added in the past few weeks, too, making it worth going through the clunky (at least for Mac) non-self-updating update.