The following is probably good advice for today, but in a year or so it will be quaint old-hat silliness. By then it will be last year’s foolish way of doing old-fashioned things like reading a paper book. I am now reading Dan Brown’s Inferno, because several of my friends insisted that I must do so. They know of my interest in the population explosion and my thoughts on trying to find a reasonable human — and humane – way to end the soon-to-be disastrous problem. Unfortunately, the villain of the story, who emerges halfway through, sounds rather like me, with the exception of his methods for reducing the human population. It appears he wants to use Mother Nature’s methods of massive slaughter of an overabundant species to forcibly trim them back to a more equitable relationship with their native environment.

My goal is the long-term health of our species which brings about the maximum of human happiness by people getting opportunities that they enjoy exploring. The villain wants to reduce the population to four billion, the 1975 number via slaughter, and I want to reduce it to much fewer, about a hundred million, but by the people of the future deciding how many they want and then voluntarily limiting the number of births that will maintain that number. Natural methods, when the world is filled with H-bombs and designer diseases and desperate people, are just too horrible, needlessly painful, stupid, and unnecessary. A better method is to have happy, healthy, fully informed people making agreed upon choices intending a stable society.

That said, and I am only halfway though the book, I was enjoying Dan Brown’s romp through Florence, Italy, and his verbal visits to some of the places I and my spouse visited when there. But there was a problem, since we hadn’t gone to many of the sites he enlivens with words, and thus hadn’t viewed some of the key locations that make his story intriguing.

Sooo, Google Earth to the rescue. We fired up our computer and followed our heroes’ chase scene through the huge and spectacular Boboli Gardens, past Braccio di Bartolo, see a naked dwarf sitting on a turtle, run across the Arno river on the upper level of the Ponte Vecchio, inside of the Vasari Corridor and on into the Vecchio Palace where we examine some famous paintings in search of clues which supposedly make the whole story meaningful.

Google Earth makes all of this spectacular by providing an abundance of photos taken by tourists visiting these places. The whole experience becomes appallingly ornate, filled with painted scenes and world famous sculptures, and ornate buildings done by the best artists and craftsman of the day. It is humiliating to a modern artist to see what these Florentines did with simple tools to raw stones.

The internet and Google Earth make paper novels come alive with visual details.