a choice of viewing

A while back at work a Flash quiz thing did the rounds in which the participant was required to stab the mouse at the point on a map of the world closest to the country or province or city or landmark requested with points accorded according to the relative proximity of the chosen point to the real location. It wasn't massively helped by the extremely small scale of the map and the clumsy bulk of the cursor but was mildly diverting for a few minutes at lunchtime. Much better would be a version able to be played on Google Earth where the resolution can be adjusted and the large-scale physical appearance of the target area can be used to assist a guess. Back when it first appeared (and there was no point attempting to look for local things as the resolution of Edinburgh was still fairly low) I would look for popular physical features of the world and attempt to pick a spot from afar and then zoom in. Some things were surprisingly easy to pick out but (especially on a slowish connection) it could take a couple of minutes of searching to find something like Mt Everest or the Nazca lines. Nowadays there are far too many layers of irrelevant (unless you're on the ground and trying to find a petrol station) information for pleasant viewing but it's still vaguely educational to set the view to spin slowly round and watch the labels for places appear and disappear. If the old-fashioned rotating BBC globe had been produced by a slightly more advanced technology it could have done something similar.