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Google Earth Rewrites History 2

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BUGGAR

Structural
Mar 14, 2014
1,732
I’ve been undertaking a hydraulic study of some canyons in San Diego and I have found a structure on Google Earth that is not there in reality. It is located at Google Earth Coordinates lat. 32.786860, long. -117.137290. I live across the canyon from this building and it is not there! If you trace back in Google Earth history, the building is still shown there back to the early development of this property. The image appears to have been edited to add this structure.
The owner of this “structure” is a large utility and this property has erosion problems that I have been studying (see creek west of the substation). I believe this structure is part of their “proprietary” facility expansion which has avoided being placed on recent EIR’s as well.

Can powerful entities control Google Earth?

 
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Seems like the issue is just the 3D Buildings feature; the building is not there prior to 2003 based on the satellite imagery. Furthermore the 3D building that appears when historical imagery is selected was clearly hand-drawn, as opposed to the automatically generated 3D imagery seen for non-historical imagery. The only issue I see is the one chris3eb brought up, which is that the dates may not be exactly correct.
 
"Yes, but the OP claims the building does not exist at all, ever."
I need to clarify that this was my bust. From my house, my line of sight (LOS) was about twenty degrees left of the actual building and all I saw was the flat field north of the "Traveling Building". That clump of trees to the west of the building hid it from my view. A hike into the canyon reveals that this building is there.
Ps: My house has the white roof.
 
IRstuff, if you zoom out in google earth it shows the earth as a sphere.
 
I know. The Earth is spherical but not a sphere. Google trying to trick us again. Everyone knows the earth is a oblate spheroid.

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
Well, you get what you pay for. Taking a peek at Google Earth I don't see it now, but there used to be a disclaimer about "entertainment purposes only" on the startup screen.
 
That's still the premise. I recent tried to use GE to determine the distance between two points and got two very different answers, depending on which tool I used. Additionally, the exact positioning of things on the ground are not particularly guaranteed, which was verified by comparing professionally surveyed landmarks against the GE lat/lon coordinates.

The other thing that irks foreign users is that the satellite imagery quality is somewhat correlated to how poor the country is.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
I suspect that 'poor' is NOT the actual determining factor. I think it's more related to the potential commercial value of the data. What I mean is that even if the people in a country or region were 'poor', if the commercial development of some local resource or geographical feature could benefit from high-quality, up-to-date aerial imagery, it would be readily available.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
Came here for the black helicopters.

Left disappointed.


Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
It would be funny if something clandestined got busted by some dork google earth or some surveyor.

There was a thread I was reading about the smartest odd people you have worked with on reddit. One person worked with a guy in grad school that would always disappear for 3 weeks and come back with working algorithms. The guy was old for a grad student and claimed that he was in grad school because he stumbled into government fraud and got canned and blackballed. The guy posting this believed the guys store just based on seeing how competent the guy was. There are probably things like that all the time where someone too smart and curious digs into something that wasn't supposed to be found.

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
pssst. Check recent EIR's in this area and try to find any contributory traffic data from Mission Control. Or any data. The area 51 of San Diego.
 
I believe those EIR's were for the Quarry Falls/Civita Project, San Diego Stadium, and Franklin Ridge Road Extension. The vernal pond on site is also missing from the City habitat plan?
 
HamburgerHelper said:
where someone too smart and curious digs into something that wasn't supposed to be found.

You mean like fitness trackers that give away the movements of US soldiers in Helmand province, Afghanistan?


No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF
 
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