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

By David Drucker

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.