Saturday, November 06, 2010

Turn left, then jet ski across the ocean

You can count on Google maps to give you the best possible route between two places. See, this, for example, to go from Japan to China. Found on Flickr, here.

7 comments:

Adam Gaffin said...

They used to have similar direction for getting from Boston to London in "about 29 days, 6 hours."

Anonymous said...

Nothing wrong here; see entry 36 with "ferry"; this is the Shangai ferry company route,; it takes two days and costs about $200

Jean Olivier

Justin K said...

I thought that was a complete joke, until I went to Google maps and typed in "japan to china". Indeed, it tells you to take a ferry for a short hop, but for the longer haul it says "Jet ski across the Pacific Ocean
782 km". If you ask your Garmin to take you from Boston to Vineyard Haven it encounters serious problems. Too bad we all aren't as smart as Google is.

Google is fun, case and point, always make sure to go to google on april 1st, for their annual prank. This year they changed their name to topeka, as topeka changed its name to kansas. Ok, not the best prank, but in the UK they offered this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I24bSteJpw

However 2006 was my favorite, where google launched its parody of online dating. It was so real, than many were duped, and when they clicked to post their profile, they were taken to an error page explaining that it was a joke. See: http://www.google.com/romance/

Personally I thought they should have called it GLove.

Anonymous said...

Comments from college students(sic):

wow ur bored

oh come on...it was funny

haha that's gold mate

Jes{....} thats awsome.

Im mean its only 782km. It could be done.

Carole said...

I need a jet ski. ;-)

Anonymous said...

Good one, Justin. I couldn't find their 2006 April Fool explanation until my Google employee relative told me to click on the search box - with quite amusing results,especially if one is an attorney.

nonlocal MD

djbmcmur said...

Too funny... and if you add in a third destination, Taiwan, apparently the jet ski is no longer available and you get to 'Swim across the Pacific Ocean'.