Noodling around in Google Earth and NASA Worldwind is really fun. Every now and then, I fire one of them up and then lose hours while my son and I wander around the virtual Earth. It can be a disorienting experience. We whip around the terrain, zoom in and out, and stumble through borders. But it’s amazing to have these tools at our disposal.
There’s no reason that a geography curriculum ever has to be boring. Project either program onto one of those digital teaching screens and escort your class through the history of a region. Water rights is a concept that easier to understand when you see the lakes and rivers in question.
What’s more amazing, though, is that these innocent inquiries can affect nations.
In June 2006, a man in Germany using the handle “KenGrok” logged on to the Google Earth Community page and asked for help in identifying an unusual land formation he had found in a desert near the city of Yingchuan in central China. In his post, he provided coordinates and described an enormous model landscape outside a military base with “mountain ranges, complete with lakes and snow-capped peaks.” But what was it, he wondered?
Check the borders, suggested “stiuskr,” a fellow Google Earth fan boy. Two weeks later, KenGrok found what he was looking for: Aksai Chin, a disputed border region of Kashmir claimed by both India and China, over which they fought a war in 1962. The Chinese military appeared to have constructed a 500:1 scale model of the region on the base. Confronted with satellite evidence of the accurate model, Chinese officials denied that it was a replica of Aksai Chin, saying only that it was a tank-training center. That may be, but given its close resemblance to the disputed area, it’s still worth wondering what those tanks are training for. (Pauker)
Read the whole article here at Foreign Policy. We’ve entered a strange new world where it’s possible to discover information that should be classified but – thanks to global satellite imaging – simply can’t be.
Sans Privacy
We’re all well aware of one scary thing about modern life: that privacy is increasingly hard to keep. But instead of past dreams of some Orwellian future where information is strictly controlled, we’re drowning in information.
It’s filled to the brim with down-sides and these will become more apparent as the reality sets in.
But it’s strangely comforting to know that the tech cuts both ways. Governments have a damnable time keeping secrets that a few generations ago would have been easy-peasy. Some technologies disrupt existing industries. These technologies can disrupt governments.
