Citizendium Blog

UPDATE: Ireland in 27 hours. 

Now for a little something off-topic.

Let’s face it, if you’re a map lover like me, Google Maps is just friggin’ cool.  Here’s the route from NYC to SF.  But now, let’s suppose you want to stay off highways.  They now let you check an “Avoid highways” box, and then you get this route.  How long would it have taken you to plot that out?  Not only is it instantly plotted, you can now instantly learn that the highway-free route is 25 hours longer?  I used to meticulously calculate that sort of thing by hand.

(Also, that’s 25 hours saved thanks to our glorious Interstate Highway system, an even greater invention than Google Maps.)

What is even cooler is the fact that you can how drag and drop routes.  Given points A and C, you can select any point B and construct the fastest route ABC.  You can add as many intermediate points as you like, too.  Maybe you’d like to try the southern route from NYC to SF?  And you can drag and drop all points as much as you like — and as you do so, it instantly remaps the route, giving you the mileage and timing in a little pop-up.

I’ve been checking that my usual routes to my usual destinations are the fastest.  They are. 

What I predict next: the fastest route (through town) given current traffic conditions.  They’re already tracking traffic, so it’s only a matter of a crunching a few databases.