As gold leaves drifted to the ground in Central Park on Monday, a strange-looking vehicle joined the park’s stream of pedicabs, bicycles, baby carriages and skateboards. It was straight out of Roald Dahl’s imagination, at once sinister and innocent — an ungainly contraption cooked up by, say, Good Humor and the K.G.B.
It was, in fact, Google’s Trike, a panoramic camera system with nine lenses mounted on an oversize tricycle. The company, which already offers 360-degree street-level views of New York City and other cities, has turned its attention to parks, as well as other locations inaccessible by car. The Trike has been wheeling through hard-to-reach places across the globe, mapping them and then offering online Street View tours on Google Maps that let the would-be parkgoer mouse-click along a path. Full story
Physical distance used to dictate how remote a place was, but no longer. Now that there are airlines reaching around the globe, 
“The latest layer to be turned on in Google Maps is one for webcams. Click the “More” button on the top right of a map right next to the “Traffic” button. When you do that, it shows you thumbnails from different public Webcams around the world. You don’t see video, just the most recent still image captured by the Webcam.
