Where’s the peanut butter?!

…no more. Our href="http://www.kirstenjohnson.com/xdesperate.html">piece from
Kirsten Johnson’s brilliant Touchy-feely series came in the
mail this weekend. Tanya read about it on the href="http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/001235.php#more">MoCoLoCo Art
blog. It’s amazing that the architects in the 1910’s foresaw this
day when we could put use this painting to fill the void above our
fireplace!

I recently wanted to see some old satellite photos of my neighborhood.
As far as I know, you can’t do this with href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps, but you can with href="http://terraserver.microsoft.com/">TerraServer (which
predates Google). I start with a URL like this: href="http://terraserver.microsoft.com/Image.aspx?T=4&S=8&Z=10&X=11028&Y=105601&W=2">http://terraserver.microsoft.com/Image.aspx?T=4&S=8&Z=10&X=11028&Y=105601&W=2.
Breaking down the querystring, we get:

• T - the theme indicates the photo set you would
  like. 1 contains USGS photos from the early 90’s, 2 is USGS topo maps,
  and 4 is circa 2002 USGS satellite photos.
• S - the zoom level ranges from around 8 (0.25 meters
  per pixel) through 19 (512 meters per pixel), depending on target
  coordinates and image source
• Z - the scene apparently should always be set to
  10
• X - the x-offset seems to be a function of zoom
  level, so you can’t simply change the S parameter and expect it to
  zoom appropriately because the X and Y coordinates will have
  changed
• Y - the y-offset - same caveat as X
• W - the image size - small (1), medium (2), or large
  (3)

Some additional poking could be done to understand whether scene 3
exists and what it contains and to understand the relationship of
zoom-level to x and y coordinates, but I was content to get the 1990
images from around my house.