Wet google maps
Posted by Jorge Bernal April 17, 2007
Coincidence? No, serendipity. Last week I was on the bus going back home. This usually takes half an hour so I don’t have much to do except listen to music and think in absurd things like this.
I wondered what would happen if you ask google maps for directions from one place to another if there’s no road between those two. Hector got the answer today. Say you want to go from the new Warp HQ to the MySQL HQ (BTW, I’ve been there today and the sakila dolphin plush is awesome). No problem at all, google knows the way
So, swim across the Atlantic Ocean, cool! But there’s more, if you look at the Drive details it’ll give you estimates of how much will take you to get there.
After some experiments shortening the path, let’s say the distance is about 5500 km and Google says it’ll take you 29 days to get there. If you do the math you’ll find that you’ll need to swim at an average of almost 8 km/h (that’s 5mph) for almost a month (without any stops, and presumably no food). So, unless you are David Meca on tons of steroids you won’t make it. Just for reference, when this world record swimmer crossed the strait of Gibraltar, he did an average of 0.5 km/h for 2.5 hours.
Update: while reading another post on boingboing about the same topic, I got the insight for the old USENET acronym YMMV: your mileage may vary.
