.FLYINGHEAD VIRTUAL MAPPING TECHNOLOGY
.TITLE Imagine if George Washington was God
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY Imagine if George Washington was still alive today. Imagine that even though he was born in 1732, he was still hale and hearty and large and in charge 275 years later. Unrealistic? Farfetched? Frickin’ crazy? Well, of course. Nothing like this could ever happen. Or could it?
.FEATURE
Imagine if George Washington was still alive today. Imagine that even though he was born in 1732, he was still hale and hearty and large and in charge 275 years later. I know, this seems like a strange premise, but stick with me on this for a few minutes.
Imagine that, instead of being unanimously elected President by the Electoral College back in 1789 and again in 1792, he had accepted the role of King that had been offered to him.
.CALLOUT Imagine if George Washington was still alive today.
Now, imagine King George Washington was a good and just king. Imagine that the economy flourished consistently from 1789 all the way through to 1989 and even to today’s 2007. Imagine there was no Wall Street crash of 1929, no Great Depression, and even no World Wars.
Further, imagine that, like today, most people had a life span of 70 or 80 years, but George was still ticking strong, even after 275 years. He’d been king for all your life, all your parents’ lives, and even all your grandparents’ lives. His being king was all anyone had ever known.
.TEASER Despite how weird this seems, this is a fascinating article you’re going to want to read. Tap here for the rest.
Imagine George had a big ego (which, in fact, the real George did). Imagine he was so taken with himself and so politically astute that he declared himself to be God. I know, for most of you that’s a far-fetched or even blasphemous idea, but hang in with the premise. Just for the purpose of our exercise, imagine there was no Bible and all of biblical history had just never happened.
Just imagine it with me. Just for a few minutes. As an exercise.
So George, who’s lived now three times longer than anyone else on the planet, decides to declare himself a god. There are no other big god myths to get in the way of his claim to godhood and since he’d lived so long, the people already thought of him as something a bit super-human.
He’s very good at PR, so imagine that instead of there being a Statue of Liberty, in its place was a Statue of George. Instead of there being four presidents on the side of Mount Rushmore, there was just one big, huge carving of George. Imagine that instead of the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial, we had more huge statues of King George Washington, the god.
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Imagine if, on the walls of every building in Washington, DC (which, properly, was named after our imagined king god), the stories of George’s many glories were carved deeply in stone. Imagine, further, if the walls (inside and out) of the Empire State Building and all the important buildings in New York City, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and so forth all had, on all the buildings, deep carvings that all cried out the glories of George the god.
And they’d been there for as long as anyone remembered.
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Unrealistic? Farfetched? Frickin’ crazy?
Well, of course. Nothing like this could ever happen. Or could it? Could it?
.H1 The reign of Ramses II
As hard as it is to imagine, this was what the reign of Ramses II was like, 3,286 years ago, back in 1279 BC.
Ramses II lived into his 90s, back when the average life span was a third of that. Most people who lived under Ramses II rule knew only Ramses II. When you put it into modern terms and calculate that someone now would have had to live for 240 years or so to have lived as long, relatively speaking, as Ramses, you see where our magical, imaginary analogy is going.
Although our real George never became king or emperor (and, in fact, vocally rallied against the notion), there are some interesting true parallels between Ramses and our own GW.
What’s now called the 19th Dynasty started with the first Ramses (creatively known as Ramses I). Ramses I is believed to have been born to a family near the former Hyksos, capital of Avaris. He wasn’t of royal birth.
Next up was his son, Seti, and after that, Ramses II, who was the grandson of Ramses I. Seti was a soldier who took over as Pharoah after Ramses I died approximately 17 months into office.
Although George’s parents Augustine and Mary Ball were wealthy, they weren’t particularly big names. As a young man, George fought to prove himself by exploring the unknown territories of what would become the United States. He also, pretty much single handedly, started the French and Indian War. Pretty much by accident. Major George Washington was young, only 21 at the time. Stuff happens. What were you doing back when you were 21?
Anyway, although George eventually grew up and became President, he wasn’t from a line of national leaders.
Neither Seti nor Ramses II were of royal birth either, having been born before Ramses I came to power. By the time Ramses II walked like an Egyptian to the Pharoah’s throne, he was not yet a "god". He was, however, trained to be a leader by Seti and was definitely down with the mass media of the time: carving into the sides of buildings and erecting statues.
We know so much about Ramses now because he conducted so many enormous self-promotion projects throughout his reign. He even chipped off the carvings that extolled previous rules (including Papa Seti and Grandpa Ramses I), and made the carvings about himself so deep that to remove them would damage the structural integrity of the walls and columns into which they’d been carved.
Every schoolkid knows about the Washington Monument, the 555 foot tall marble, granite, and sandstone obelisk, erected in 1884. What most people don’t know is that the Washington National Monument Society and Congress examined numerous designs and although they prefered a design by William Wetmore Story, they eventually settled on an obelisk modeled on those in ancient Egypt.
Of course, our parallel is that Ramses II erected obelisks outside the Luxor Temple (in what was Thebes back in ancient times), although his were only 85 feet tall. That was ok with Ramses, because he also built six gargantuan statues of himself. Not shy, our Ramses.
Once you start looking, commonalities between George and Ramses II can be found everywhere, but we’ll end our examination with just one more example. Early into his Presidency, George Washington was named the "Father of our Country". This is particularly ironic, because evidence indicates that George was infertile. He and Martha were never able to have children.
Ramses II, on the other hand, was pretty darn literally the father of his country. Researchers Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton now believe there is monumental evidence that "seems to indicate that Ramesses II had around 110 children — 48-50 sons and 40-53 daughters."
All accounts show that Ramses was a successful, popular leader, with a country that was prosperous throughout his reign. That, of course, is where he got the loot to pay for all those erections…of statues.
So, Ramses II lived three times longer than anyone else and was a stud to boot. Why do we care? And how could this possibly be relevant to what we cover here in Computing Unplugged?
.H1 Moving a statue (with a little help from satellites)
It’s all about backstory. This has all been a lead-up to the story of moving a 125 ton statue of Ramses, shown in Figure A, about 22 miles from downtown Cairo to the Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Gaza Pyramids.
.FIGPAIR A This big beast is getting a new home (photo courtesy AP).
The statue was originally found in Memphis (no, not that Memphis), back in 1954, where it was chopped into six pieces and lugged to downtown Cairo and reassembled. Unfortunately, like pretty much everything else in the world, Cairo’s become pretty crowded in the last 50 years and ol’ Ramses II’s statue, having survived more than 3,200 years, couldn’t endure 50 years of our modern world’s corrosive pollution.
So it needed to be moved. The problems were epic. First, officials have been arguing for more than a decade about where it should wind up. Gotta love bureaucrats — they’re the same world-over! Anyway, once they decided on the Grand Egyptian Museum, the trick was to move this monster through the crowded (massive understatement) streets of Cairo.
Back in August, teams of contractors encased the statue in a steel cage, secured it with steel beams, and packed it onto two flatbed trucks, as seen in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B All dressed up and 15 miles to go (photo courtesy AP).
Most of our readers are happy to let me meander all over the planet, pretty much writing about whatever I like, knowing that most of the time I’ll run reviews of silly iPod add-ons, or explain the inner workings of surprisingly interesting technologies like RFID. But there’s always a few readers who get indignant if they can’t see why a story we cover is related to, well, computing.
Fine. For you readers, I’ll actually get to the point.
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.H1 Using Google Earth to plot a route
Cairo is a lot like the game of Adventure, full of twisty-turny passages, all alike. Just how do you go about finding the best route for moving a 36-foot tall, 125 ton stone behemoth through the narrow streets of Cairo?
In this case, some engineers working for the transportation contractor used Google Earth and came up with the route shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C Cairo’s grown up around the statue. Moving it took a complicated route.
If you’re not familiar with Google Earth, you’re in for a treat. First, the program’s free. Second, it’s amazingly comprehensive. You can set the altitude of the eye in the sky to as close as 700 feet (and make out individual cars in their spaces) or as far out as 40,000 miles and see the whole Earth as a small sphere.
In addition to being able to stream satellite imagery from a top-down perspective, Google Earth offers a unique 3D perspective, which allows you to get in and see an area from a different angle, as you can see in Figure D, where we’ve looked at the statue’s route from a different angle.
.FIGPAIR D By rotating and angling the map, different options become apparent.
With the ability to quickly zoom in and see a street up close, pull back and see the big picture, rotate to see various perspectives, and tilt to get a better view of the angles, Google Earth proved amazingly valuable in moving the statue to its new home.
If you haven’t played with Google Earth, you should. As long as you’ve got a reasonably capable computer with reasonably capable graphics, it’s an easy and safe download. Google Earth could prove incredibly valuable if you have your own 3,200 year-old, 125 ton statue to move.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Google Earth, visit http://earth.google.com.
To download the route of the journal in Google Earth’s .kmz format, visit http://services.google.com/earth/kmz/ramses_move.kmz.
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