Video: mapology of the Northeast vs. the Mideast

BoingBoing reader Andy Carvin writes,

Watching all the coverage of the fighting in Lebanon this week, i was curious to know exactly the scale of the distances involved between northern Israel and Beirut. I'd been to the region before but not where the fighting was going on. So I decided to take a screenshot of the war zone from Google Maps and overlay it with a map of part of the northeast US, using the same scale for both images. The result is this short video. Once you've downloaded the video, slide the scrubber back and forth so you can see the two maps overlap each other. For Americans who are used to countries being thousands of miles wide, it's quite astonishing to realize what a compact area of land is affected by the fighting. For example, the distance between Haifa and Beirut isn't much difference than the distance between Providence, Rhode Island and Lowell, Massachusetts.

Link, includes short video.

Reader comment: Edward West says,

I enjoyed Andy Carvin's video of the Middle East being overlayed with the Northeast US, but, being a native Californian, it didn't give me a visceral sense for the scale, not really grokking how far Boston is from Providence. So I overlayed a screenshot of his map on a map of the Bay Area at the same scale. It's a little bit jumbled with the three areas all on top of eachother, but (I think) interesting nonetheless. Link.