I've been figuring out how to record flights in Google Earth. This is a flight over the Chicago metropolitan area.
There are a few things I was going to do in Google Earth that haven't worked out. One was to zoom in on every place I've lived; I moved every year or two for a while, so there was a lot of raw material.
I figured that would be easier than my first version of the idea: to return and take a picture of the front of every place I'd lived, and put them together into a block's worth of buildings. It's a claustrophobic idea that I just thought of a stupid name for: Memory Lane. But it was interesting to remember all the places I'd lived and why I'd moved: one landlord shot at his brother with a rifle in the driveway; another had to move out of state, and politely offered to rent me a place there, making me a portable tenant.
But the Google Earth pictures are what a bombardier, not memory, would see. (Though descending like a missile on distant cities is pretty enjoyable; doesn't everyone dream of flight?)
Google Earth is an amazing product that demonstrates how earth is "turning into an idea" for us, as we put ever more layers of technology in between ourselves and the dirt -- houses, plumbing, electricity, TVs, cellphones and the Internet -- insulating us from hard physical reality, so more and more of us are now better adapted to virtual flight in Google Earth than we are to where we came from.