One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic.

The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.

Sometimes, taking a neutral point of view causes its own problems. Border issues are about as old as international or inter-tribal disputes get, and nations are no less passionate about them than they've ever been.

There's nothing remotely even-handed here, but it's interesting to see scientific principles and arguments laid out as comics. All things being equal, novelty does have its value.

Nothing practically useful about this, and no hovercrafts in our near future (unless we magnetize all our roads, I suppose), but it's awesome to watch.