A very brief work by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, from Borges's A Universal History of Infamy:
"On Rigor in Science"A fiction and a forgery* but also a prediction. Behold! Google Earth, the dimensionful version update of and successor to Google Maps. A devastatingly neat little desktop application and a quick and painless end to that productive day that's been pestering you. (Thanks to Eszter for passing it along.). . . In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
—J. A. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
. . . you know, the site is all well and good, but I would greatly appreciate it if the architects at Google HQ were to develop a Google Earth handheld. Nothing that calls your mom and coordinates your photo albums or anything, just a slim, digital map and compass. I suffer from an absolutely debilitating lack, no, void of a sense of direction, and so long as I'm going to be lost all the time, I could get a lot of use out of a device that at the very least directed me toward the nearest coffee shop.
UPDATE: A screenshot with callouts:
* If you aren't familiar with the story, now you are: That quotation is the whole shebang, first published by the authors under a psuedonym (B. Lynch Davis, sez Google (always flexing its muscle)). I'm not sure how Cesares got nudged out of the picture, but I always see that story attributed to Borges (e.g., in Foucault's The Order of Things). Apparently the idea preceded Borges, appearing in a Lewis Carroll story called Sylvie and Bruno in which Carroll describes a map featuring "the scale of a mile to the mile."
You say simulacrum, I say simulacrum, let's call the whole thing off.
Posted by Kriston at June 28, 2005 2:40 PMi don't remember that quote in Foucault -- the place in the po-mo canon where it's most famous, iirc, is in the opening graf of baudrillard's seminal essay. (possibly the only useful thing he ever wrote)
incidentally, you might find this program interesting, capps:
http://www.mibasoft.com/podquest/podquest.html
seems to me that the problem with a fully-portable map program like you're discussing is that it would require a lot of bandwidth to transfer over cellular, which is the only way you could reach everywhere. they probably assume that if you have a wi-fi network available you're not really on-the-move. text-based directions would make a lot more sense than this; images are just too big.
not that text-based directions wouldnt be goddamned useful, but i bet mapquest or someone does something like that already,
Posted by: seth at June 28, 2005 4:35 PMA good alternative would be some sort of LoJack-style service and a cel phone. You'd call and they'd tell you where you are, and maybe even send you some coffee.
Posted by: David at June 28, 2005 4:47 PMYes, and Baudrillard didn't cite Borges, right? I think Umberto Eco also has a story about Borges's map.
So long as I'm asking Google to make my handheld, I guess I'll ask them to make all that bandwidth and stuff so my handheld works. Prego, Google!
Posted by: Kriston at June 28, 2005 4:47 PMno, baudrillard cited Borges. it's the first line of the essay after the Ecclesiastes quote. hold on...
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
he goes on to talk about the story's contemporary irrelevance, but that's just baudrillard. still not a bad essay from a cultural-theory standpoint.
Posted by: seth at June 28, 2005 6:53 PMEco does have an essay on the quote, yes.
Posted by: seth at June 28, 2005 6:54 PMA Universal History of Infamy is one of my favorite books--I love "The Dread Redeemer, Lazarus Morell."
Posted by: Rob W at June 29, 2005 11:23 AMHas anyone else played with GE? If so, have you been able to get the 3-D building feature to work (it surely ought to work for NYC)?
Also pumped about the census and crime stats overlays, which don't seem to work at the moment.
Posted by: Kriston at June 29, 2005 2:18 PMyou want maps of that stuff, go here: http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_program=DEC&_lang=en
use either summary file 1 or 3, that's where the useful information is. click through the menus, but only click "map it" when you've gotten to a point where you're selecting the data you want to see.
if i can get this link to work, then here is a map of the percentage of people who commute to work in travis county, to grab one random statistic available.
Posted by: matty at June 29, 2005 5:05 PM