The title says it all. ( I almost put this in GQ, since some answers will be factual, but I’m interested in hearing fun stuff, too.)
I just re-discovered my icon for Google earth, and clicked on it for the first time in a year or more…
And you know what I discovered?
GEE WHIZ, folks, yep…you ain’t gonna believe it…my house looks just the same as it did the first time I installed google earth…Now who wudda thunk that, heh?
Okay, yeah ,sure, it’s a lot of fun to play God, and make the earth spin backwards, and then you look for your house, and the old house you used to live in. But after that, you’ve pretty much run out of stuff to do with google earth.
Back when I was a 911 dispatcher we used it for the latitude and longitude feature when people called in on their cell phones. Since people are for going the land lines and going to cells phone as their primary and only phone, it was helpful when someone was in distress.
My understanding is that the pro version allows you to overlay your own data on the map, so that town planning departments can overlay lot lines, utility companies can overlay pipelines and electrical lines, etc, etc.
I use it all the time to determine flood zones and distance to the nearest body of salt water. I am an insurance agent and we write homeowner policies all along the east coast.
I use it for work. I work at environmental consulting firm and sometimes I use it to create maps for myself when I don’t want to bother the CAD or GIS groups.
Your ex-wife’s house, previous girlfriends, that guy who beat you up in high school, the girl you had a crush on in the third grade, where the bodies are buried…
Living in a rural area with limited water supplies available for firefighting, I plotted the location of every hydrant or accessible pond and then measured the distance to our larger exposures (things that might burn). That way when fire happens, we can quickly look at our cheat sheet and know that the Smith Road hydrant is closer than the Duck Pond before we lay out 2 or 3 thousand feet of hose.
thanks for a good answer.
But what did you do in the days before google Earth? Couldn’t you plot the hydrants on any good road map of the area? And doesn’t your county’s engineering division already have very detailed maps showing all the electric and water lines?
It’s proved to be very beneficial at times for my work. My job involves aspects of utility routing (I’m talking 100s and 100s of miles, not local distribution lines) and it helps get a feel for the terrain. You can overlay a line and follow it and see where exactly that right-of-way will cross.
What did we used to do? Helicopter overflights. Drive around and get out and look. Plot a line on topos and aerial photos. Sure we still do these things all the time, but the Google Earth application adds to the mix of helpful tools.
I show my kids all kinds of cool stuff- Uluru, the Pyramids at Giza, where my husband lived in rural Chile when he was 20, the Parthenon, Pompeii, Hadrian’s Wall, anyplace on Earth.
There’s an online flight tracker that plots airplane route and position in Google Earth as a 3D overlay. So when I’m expecting my girlfriend or somebody, I fire it up, put in the flight number, and keep half an eye on it. When the flight crosses a certain geographic boundary, I know it’s time to wrap up whatever I’m doing and head for the airport.
I remember a couple years ago there was a bomb scare in my hometown- someone left a sketchy package on the base of a statue with wires hanging off it. The police had some protocol that everyone was supposed to stay 200 feet back, but how to figure out where 200 feet was? So they grabbed a laptop and checked on Google Earth. Struck me as pretty clever.
It takes all of our firewall logs and lays it over the globe, mapping IP address to location of origin. It’s a GREAT way to visualize how the badguys are trying to hack our systems.
It’s also a killer spinny cool thing when projected on a 12 foot screen in our operations center.
Like some others here, I work with building site plans on a regular basis and it’s handy for seeing if the plans are for brand new construction or if there’s existing stuff on the site, seeing what else is around, etc. I don’t use it often but the times I have used it, it came in real handy.
Not exactly an amazing thing to do, but recently I had a friend on the phone wandering down a street not knowing how to get to a certain subway station. I opened Google Earth, found her location (she gave me cross streets) and I was able to overlay subway stops and guide her in the right direction.
Like others have said, we use the professional version to plot the actual site conditions of drawings onto the proposed developments. It makes a world of difference when showing drawings to clients.
I’ve gone over our favorite camping spots with my father, allowing us to plan hikes in new areas.
Make my friend feel really bad, by pointing out all the lush, green lawns in his neighborhood, and his dead, dying one as the worst eyesore for four blocks.
