The world as we once knew it

See the world as history’s cartographers once saw it. A new batch of Google Earth overlays covers the globe with richly detailed historical maps.

The Rumsey collection includes 16 maps. Among them you’ll find a 1790 world globe, a 1680 map of Tokyo and an 1814 map spanning the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi – courtesy of Lewis and Clark.

To view them, you’ll need the latest version of Google Earth (use the program’s check-for-updates feature if you’re not sure you have it). In the layers section, select All Layers, then look for Featured Content Rumsey Historical Maps. Find Google Earth at http://earth.google.com/.

Airports of yore

Did you know that Curlew, Wash., once had an airport? So did Northport, Wash. Both are listed on a Web site that catalogs the nation’s “abandoned and little-known airfields,” at www.airfields-freeman.com.

The site is the brainchild of pilot Paul Freeman, who says abandoned airfields have always been a personal interest.

Site offers classics in bite-sized pieces

Do you carry around a tattered scrap of paper listing books you should have read by now?

DailyLit ( www.dailylit.com) offers an easy way to get that reading done. Sign up for the free service and they’ll e-mail you the text in bite-sized pieces that take less than 5 minutes to read.

There are hundreds of titles to choose from, including classics, mysteries and romance (although that’s defined as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, not Danielle Steele and the Collins sisters).

The small excerpts are perfect for hand-held PDAs, but be forewarned, they tend to drag out the amount of time it takes to read a book. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” for example, would take 37 weeks to finish if you read one part per weekday.