Putting Events in Context By Putting Them on Your House

The floods in Pakistan sound bad, but just how bad are they, really? Well, if they were in America and centered around New York city, they would extend along the east coast, all the way from Canada to North Carolina:

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That's just one of the options at the BBC's amazing Dimension's site, which performs the simple but often mind-blowing action of transposing world events onto a Google map. Would you like to see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch over your neighborhood? (Note, it will cover your neighborhood and neighboring states.) How about how far you could launch a Predator drone from your house? Or what it would look like if you finally get the money to construct that pyramid? Everything seems to makes more sense when you see it in a geographic context you can understand.

Via Kottke.