A Little Peek at Where We Used to Live from 2,400 feet

I was read­ing on Boing­bo­ing about the fact that Sir Tim Bern­ers-Lee, the Inven­tor of the World-Wide Web has just start­ed writ­ing a blog (fan­cy that!). As these things lead to oth­er explo­rations, I hap­pened to even­tu­al­ly link to MIT’s new(ish) Cam­pus Map. There I found an eeri­ly close Ari­al shot of where we used to live. The Dante Alighieri Cen­ter is the orange-red poly­gon at the bot­tom cen­ter, and I’ve drawn an arrow to where our lit­tle town­house used to be, sep­a­rat­ed only by a thin brown wood fence from the park­ing lot. Google does have ari­al views, but noth­ing this close. The doc­u­men­ta­tion says:

The pho­tog­ra­phy was cap­tured on April 17th, 2003 at a fly­ing alti­tude of approx­i­mate­ly 2,400 feet, pro­vid­ing an orig­i­nal pho­to scale of 1 inch = 400 feet (to sup­port 40 scale map­ping). These images were “cor­rect­ed” with a dig­i­tal ter­rain mod­el (DTM) that mod­eled both ter­rain undu­la­tions and the heights of buildings.

So here it is: (click image for full-size version)

Strange to see it this way, for the first time.