From BLDG BLOG:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself-the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to theNazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral).Bill & Ted meet Cerne Abbas Man.

Google Street View gives you a good view of this somewhat unfortunate art form. In light of the recent economic conditions you wonder how many more of these there are. The waste in terms of labor and money as well as the environment has to be staggering.

One more post in what is turning into an all out love fest for Google. Google say it can track progress and spread of the flu through people’s searches in the interwebs. Whats more impressive is that they can compile this data and predict where the flu will hit next.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu. – Miguel Helft New York TImes

Head on over to Google Flu.

I love Google. Just when I was thinking I would have to mess around with a city gov website to figure out where my voting location is Google come to the rescue. Facebook and other social apps are doing things with people’s status etc. to get out the vote, but Google is doing something truly useful. Now if only it linked to sample election ballots it would be perfect.