Meet Terrapattern, Google Earth's Missing Search Engine

Golan Levin, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested. I was looking at a satellite image of the school's campus in Pittsburgh, embedded in the home page of Levin's latest online project, Terrapattern. "What you should immediately see are all the most tennis-court-ish patches of Allegheny County," he said. With gratifying speed, the right-hand side of my screen filled with dozens and dozens of tennis courts--solo or in pairs or in clusters of six, white on green, purple on green, green on red. A confusingly painted parking lot ended up in the mix, too.