Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial

I bookmarked this site a while ago. Since many people cannot go to Washington, DC to look at the Wall, this is a nice alternative. It also gives you features -- e.g., searching -- that is not available when you look at the monument itself.

The facts about the interactive Wall are fascinating (quoting):

• We found 58,320 names inscribed on The Wall.
• There are about 70 names which are duplicates or misspellings.
• 8 names are women.
• 2,056 are listed as "body not recovered."
• Average age is 22.8 years old.
• 6,301 images were photographed by Peter Krogh
• Darren Higgins used six computers to stitch 1,494 images into a single 5 gigapixel image of The Wall.

70 are duplicates or misspellings...I expect that the list was heavily proofed before the Wall was done, but mistakes happen. Being able to look at the list electronically allowed them to find this errors.

BTW when I copied the list above from the web site, then looked at the HTML, I saw a bullet point that had been commented out. I wonder if it was commented out because it wasn't correct or needed clarification? Would it be better if they had deleted the line totally, rather than leaving something on the site that shouldn't be there? (The comment says 26 names are listed as "not killed in action".)

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Technorati tag: Digitization