November 10th, 2009
Cool New Google Maps Feature: New Jersey Wormholes!
In Google Maps, Try to drive to Whole Foods in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and you’ll be teleported 11 miles to the west to IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey. AWESOME, right?
Last week, ZDNet iGeneration blogger Zack Whittaker wrote about Argleton, the English town in Google Maps that doesn’t exist. I thought that was pretty cool, but now I’ve found something even cooler — a rip in the Space/Time continuum in Google Maps. You know, like in Star Trek.
Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.
Okay, let me explain. I was trying to find the local IBM branch near my house, which is located at 930 Sylvan Avenue (Route 9A) in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. So I plugged the address into Google Maps.
Lo and behold, I notice that there is in fact a Whole Foods there. WHAT? A Whole Foods five minutes from my house? Right next to the CNBC Headquarters? You gotta be kidding me. Where did that come from? Surely, I would have noticed it before. 
So I clicked on “Street View”, thinking that this was probably a regional office in the same building as IBM. But when I did that, something very weird happened. 
As you can see from the picture in the lower right of the screen, the geographical coordinates have not changed. But I was disoriented to find myself on a four lane divided highway, which would be nowhere near the IBM office on Sylvan in a corporate park near a residential neighborhood. Trying to get my bearings, I rotated the street view, only to see the the giant IKEA building on Route 17 in Paramus. Huh? IKEA and Route 17 is ELEVEN MILES FROM 930 Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs! Freaky. 
As you can see, the starting location is eleven miles as the crow files to IKEA. 
If you rotate the street view to align itself with “Sylvan Avenue” and orient North-East on the sky view on the lower right, and click the up arrow key FIVE times, you will actually pass through a “Wormhole” which will bring you… 
To Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, ELEVEN MILES AWAY. Have you found any other “Wormholes” and other weird Time/Space anomalies in Google Maps? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
Jason Perlow is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/11/09
