Sometimes I worry about Google Maps

[fivemack]

I was talking to a friend in Columbus, Ohio, and asked whether he'd been affected by the tornadoes in Kansas, because I thought the middle of America was all one place.

To drive from Columbus, Ohio to Greensburg, Kansas is 1541 kilometres; almost exactly the same distance as to drive from Cambridge to Vienna. People rarely ask me whether my house is dry when they've heard that the Danube's flooded in Austria.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

And you never checked on my welfare, though I'm only 450 miles away!

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

This is because, for some reason, I thought you lived in Somerset.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Somerset, famous for its mountain ranges and blizzards!

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Heh, he's only about 3 hours drive south of me though ;)

(I'm not sure whether Ohio gets tornadoes; Michigan certainly does, but not
the big classical twisters you see in Kansas)

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

We do get tornadoes, and the occasion flattening of somewhere. Columbus got a few houses flattened not so long ago. One of the more devastating touchdowns of recent decades was in Xenia. There was something a couple of weeks ago actually but I don't know how much damage it did apart from making us miss television shows in favor of emergency weather reports.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Of course it's not all one place. There's Minneapolis, and then there's all the rest of it.

When we went to Arizona on the train, we did get to see quite a bit of the middle of the US. There was a lot of it. We slept through Kansas, both ways.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't limited to Europe, or even Asia; there's a famous Saul Steinberg drawing (http://www.saulsteinbergfoundation.org/gallery_24_viewofworld.html), a New Yorker cover, rendered in an extreme perspective, which shows the whole USA telescoped into about 1/6 of the height of a page--much smaller than 1/4 mile of Manhattan island in the foreground, which gets 1/2 the height. And I am convinced there is a psychic barrier, like the one between Estcarp and the Old Country, at the Mexico-USA border; I can find more information about Tokyo in Powell's than I can about Ciudad de Mexico, D.F.