As these things do, it all began with a tweet. Somebody named TheRealSheldonC (he seems to be a character from The Big Bang Theory?) posted an image from Google Street View that appears to show an image of a donkey dead in the middle of a road in Botswana, hit by the car of the Street View photography team. From there it went on to major news outlets such as Fox News, who remained convinced that Google employees had run over the donkey, even after Google released the before and after images to the media that showed the donkey getting up and walking away. The assumption was that the order of the photos did not make sense, that “[the] donkey would have had to have leapt at considerable speed to go from lying in the middle of the road to standing to the very left of the frame in the second shot.”
Google took to their blog today to explain what actually happened and put the pictures in the correct order. Upon inspection you can clearly see the donkey already in the middle of the road as Google’s car approached, and then get up and move off to the side of the road as the car got too close. Kei Kawai, Group Project Manager of Google Maps explains:
“Because of the way our 360-degree imagery is put together, it looked to some that our car had been involved in an unseemly hit and run, leaving the humble beast stranded in the road.”
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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She has also written for WORN Fashion Journal, Elevate, and Salon Magazines. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise.
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