Blog Yellek

I’ve been captivated of late with the art of earth surfing. The recipe goes something like this:

1. Download Google Earth
2. Find somewhere on earth that looks interesting and zoom in to about 10,000 feet or so. How far in you go depends on how high the terrain is but you want to be around 6000 to 8000 feet above the height of the pointer
3. Adjust the tilt control so that the horizon sits just between the search box and the text above it
4. Adjust the direction so that interesting things are in the direction that you are looking
5. Press F11. to go to full screen
6. This is the tricky part, get the pointer and whilst dragging it in the direction you want to go let go so that the scenery scrolls toward you. You may have to have a few goes to get the speed just right. You want it to be going slow enough that your internet connection can keep up with downloading the pictures but fast enough so that you are always seeing something interesting coming towards you

I’ve found it really interesting to slowly travel across places I’ve never been wondering who lives there and what they do and what their lives are like. We get such a fragmentary picture of different countries from the news. By the time it gets to us it has been drained of all it’s life, desiccated and jammed together with other fragments until it fits into the regulated minimum content requirements between the ad breaks in some sort of politically correct montage filtered by the prejudices of those who prepare and edit it.

Earth Surfing on the other hand allows me to capture not the dynamic bustle of daily life but the essence of the landforms that shape the lives of the people that live there. There is something about seeing, if only virtually, the mountains and the rivers, the roads and the towns, the seas and islands that are the setting of peoples lives, the cradle in which they live and die. Here they love and hate, struggle and celebrate, work and play, laugh and cry, totally oblivious that someone on the other side of the world is flying above their landscape looking at the things they have built and wondering why they built them and what their lives are like.

It’s humbling really to think that God created every fold in that landscape, designed it from scratch and then by his word brought it into being as a dynamically beautiful landscape, designed to change and grow over time. It brings to my mind the passage in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis where Aslan calls the world into being through a beautiful song. I look at the earth and I see that song in action, the wonder of God’s creation. Not only did God create the landscape but he created the people that live there and everything that dwells in the places He created.

Just tonight I’ve been scrolling across Iran. I started south of Teheran amidst lush irrigation, scrolled across the city itself and then up into the barren high mountains with tiny patches of green in the valleys where the water runs. As I came to the edge of the mountains and went down toward the coastal plain there was an explosion of greenery as the north facing slopes received the rainfall from the prevailing winds off the ocean, an astounding contrast. I even found a place I wanted to build a house on a small plateau with magnificent views over the Caspian sea and the coastal plain. I wonder if I’ll ever visit there.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 at 11:53 pm and is filed under christian, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve been captivated of late with the art of earth surfing. The recipe goes something like this:

1. Download Google Earth
2. Find somewhere on earth that looks interesting and zoom in to about 10,000 feet or so. How far in you go depends on how high the terrain is but you want to be around 6000 to 8000 feet above the height of the pointer
3. Adjust the tilt control so that the horizon sits just between the search box and the text above it
4. Adjust the direction so that interesting things are in the direction that you are looking
5. Press F11. to go to full screen
6. This is the tricky part, get the pointer and whilst dragging it in the direction you want to go let go so that the scenery scrolls toward you. You may have to have a few goes to get the speed just right. You want it to be going slow enough that your internet connection can keep up with downloading the pictures but fast enough so that you are always seeing something interesting coming towards you

I’ve found it really interesting to slowly travel across places I’ve never been wondering who lives there and what they do and what their lives are like. We get such a fragmentary picture of different countries from the news. By the time it gets to us it has been drained of all it’s life, desiccated and jammed together with other fragments until it fits into the regulated minimum content requirements between the ad breaks in some sort of politically correct montage filtered by the prejudices of those who prepare and edit it.

Earth Surfing on the other hand allows me to capture not the dynamic bustle of daily life but the essence of the landforms that shape the lives of the people that live there. There is something about seeing, if only virtually, the mountains and the rivers, the roads and the towns, the seas and islands that are the setting of peoples lives, the cradle in which they live and die. Here they love and hate, struggle and celebrate, work and play, laugh and cry, totally oblivious that someone on the other side of the world is flying above their landscape looking at the things they have built and wondering why they built them and what their lives are like.

It’s humbling really to think that God created every fold in that landscape, designed it from scratch and then by his word brought it into being as a dynamically beautiful landscape, designed to change and grow over time. It brings to my mind the passage in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis where Aslan calls the world into being through a beautiful song. I look at the earth and I see that song in action, the wonder of God’s creation. Not only did God create the landscape but he created the people that live there and everything that dwells in the places He created.

Just tonight I’ve been scrolling across Iran. I started south of Teheran amidst lush irrigation, scrolled across the city itself and then up into the barren high mountains with tiny patches of green in the valleys where the water runs. As I came to the edge of the mountains and went down toward the coastal plain there was an explosion of greenery as the north facing slopes received the rainfall from the prevailing winds off the ocean, an astounding contrast. I even found a place I wanted to build a house on a small plateau with magnificent views over the Caspian sea and the coastal plain. I wonder if I’ll ever visit there.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 at 11:53 pm and is filed under christian, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.