Mystery by John D. McDonald. Famous favorite of mine. Just for grins I tried plotting all the locations mentioned in the book on a Google Map. Educational to say the least.
I found most of the places mentioned in the book, though not individual residences. And for some reason the names of the traffic circles in Mexico City did not jibe. What was interesting is how difficult it was to find Yagul. It is a fairly extensive site, but it is off in the middle of nowhere. You have to get really close to be able to even detect any difference from the surrounding terrain.
One thing I noticed about Google Maps is that the power of magnification available is really quite extraordinary: two to the 20th power. As near as I can tell each step in the zoom scale is a power of two, and there are twenty steps. Okay, 20 marks with 19 steps between them. Two to the tenth is 1024, or roughly one thousand, so two to the 20th is roughly a million. Half of that (two to the 19th power) is half a million, or 500,000. A good optical telescope or microscope can magnify something a thousand times. But a power of 500,000 is something only an electron microscope can do, and here we have something just as powerful right on our desktop.
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