The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
#maps
2025
Los Angeles has two conflicting street grids2025 Mar 18
This 16-minute YouTube explains how Los Angeles came to have two conflicting street grids defining its streets 45-degrees offset from one another, and the history of how the city came to be placed where it is in the first place.
Part of Europe is in Canada2025 Mar 17
The islands Saint Pierre and Miquelon are 20km off the coast of Newfoundland and 4000km off the coast of France, but part of France they are. You can spend your Euros visiting this distant part of the European Union and the 5000 Frenchfolks living there in a day trip, but official advice is to "take your time," and be sure to bring your Passport, as the islands are not part of the Schengen.
The border between California and Nevada is fuzzy2024 Aug 28
Applying specific geographic coordinates to specific landform features seems trivial today, what with GPS in our pocket telling us the precise spot we're at. But GPS only goes back a generation, and the border between California and Nevada predates that by a large measure, to a time when meridians and coordinates were a touch trickier to determine. And it mattered, specifically around Tahoe, where mineral rights were being bought and sold at a furious pitch. While this dispute has mostly petered out by today, this petering is remarkably recent, with gunfights and legal disputes continuing up into modern times.
This river doesn't exist2024 Jul 26
Early in the days of European exploration of America the surveyors hoped for and desired for and even drew onto maps a great river running from the Rocky Mountains and out west into the Pacific Ocean. A river such as that would've been very useful to their goals of providing easy transport to settlers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. They even named this river: the Buenaventura.
But the map, clearly, is not the territory, and the Buenaventura as we now know does not exist. As the many, many expeditions sent to find it proved, The Great Basin exists, the Great Salt Lake, while big, is not actually the Pacific Ocean, and the Sacramento, while mighty, flows only from the Sierra Nevada.
It took intrepid explorer and asshole John C Fremont himself to talk President Polk out of this riparian denial, that drawing lines on a map cannot simply conjure up a river. Although all this desire to get people going west did inspire Fremont to invest heavily into railroads... which would have made him rich, had he speculated on the correct railroads.
Troll Map2024 Jun 13
Thomas Dambo is covering the land in giant trolls. Here's where they are, at the moment, along with who they are and what they do.
Ukraine Interactive Map2023 Oct 27
What's going on in the Ukraine-Russia conflict? Here's a map showing exactly that answer. Also has tabs for some other ongoing conflicts.
This 16-minute YouTube explains how Los Angeles came to have two conflicting street grids defining its streets 45-degrees offset from one another, and the history of how the city came to be placed where it is in the first place.