11:59, Saturday 21 Jan., 2006 Link

In the video for Such Great Heights by the Postal Service, which, yes, is like the much better director's cut of the Apple Intel ad, there's a scene near the end where the camera zooms from Earth orbit down through the atmosphere to the city. And what it reminds me of, more than any Powers of 10-like sequence I've seen, is using Flash Earth, pulling all the way out and zooming all the way in. Only instead of passing through layers of clouds, I'm passing through layers of compression artefacts. Each zoom layers pixelates, fragments, then resolves as the higher-resolution map tiles stream in. The video does this too, or maybe it's the way the video is presented at youtube.com. Somehow, because Google Maps is something I've directly experienced, and I've never been in space, zooming through artefacts seems more authentic than passing through clouds.