April 28, 2009: Unexpected maps from geotagged photos

[Clodfobble]

I remember a little side bit in one of the Baroque Cycle books by Neal Stephenson, about how with enough data you can pull relevant patterns out of anything. His example was if you somehow had a list of flat-steps (along a sidewalk) versus up- or down-steps (on or off a curb) taken from everyone who walked all over the city, you could eventually create a completely accurate and usable map of that city's streets, even though the individual data paths never accounted for who turned where on what length of walk.