Harry Lowe of the University of Washington published an article called 2005 Tour de France with Google Earth where he has recorded the routes of the first five stages of the Tour de France for playback using Google Earth.

For those of you who haven't been following its evolution, Google Earth is the name for the latest version of the PC application program formerly known as Keyhole. It allows you to zoom in on an address pretty much anywhere in the world using satellite imaging and a sophisticated geographic information system. Yes, you can see a satellite image of an address using Google Maps, but Google Earth is much more interactive since it is a full blown PC application.

Harry says that enjoyment of this experience requires "Lotsa RAM, lotsa Gigahertz, lotsa video card" and "Lotsa connection to the Internet", so keep that in mind if you follow his instructions.

I can't participate yet because my brother and I are running Category 5e cable into the Home Office today so we can connect my Blogging Workstation to the Internet for the first time since we moved to Newtown. When we get that done, I'll be downloading Google Earth and playing back some of these early Tour stages.

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