Peter Pesti is using Google Maps in a nice way. He’s mixed up the Google API with night time satellite shots from NASA to give you images like this.
It made me think of an old 1994 Al Gore speech, where he quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s comment that
“By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time … The round globe is a vast … brain, instinct with intelligence!”
Wonder what the relationship is, if any, between connectivity and people burning the midnight oil? My guess is that there’s a reasonable correlation. And if there is, and you agree with the Hawthorne image, then you could almost view the pictures as a PET scan of this big brain we live in.
Of course, as Jack Vinson and Bill Brantley have pointed out, connectivity ain’t the same as knowledge or intelligence. And nor is it the same as global mental health.
Ho hum.