< return to the brandensite

running commentary

The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.

#maps

2025

Fukushima’s umbilical cord 2025 Oct 10    amusingplanet.com
Linked is an Amusing Planet entry on Fukushima's bizarre umbilical cord border.
The borders of Fukushima, Niigata and Yamagata doesn’t meet at a tri-point as the zoomed-out map seems to suggest. Instead, you will see a very thin strip of land attached to Fukushima snaking into Niigata. This is called a salient. The Fukushima Prefecture salient —famously called the umbilical cord—extends about 8 km starting from the summit of Mount Mikuni, following the ridge of Mount Kengamine, passing through the summit of Mount Iide, and ending on the summit of Mount Onishi. At its narrowest, it is only about 35 inches across (90 centimetres).
The article explains how this came to be, which can be summed up as: the ridge of this mountain range is culturally important to Fukushima Prefecture, so much so that it was made to remain inside its borders even when the surrounding land was reassigned.

And the article has a map, but weirdly, no pictures of the mountaintop shrine in question. The one bland photo of the empty ridgeline they do have seems to be sourced from the Wikipedia article on the umbilical cord border, with the Wikipedia having no more photos or an article on the shrine itself. Or at least, the English Wikipedia doesn't. But the Japanese Wikipedia certainly does, along with many photos. Check it out for yourself, the shine so important it necessitated this strange salient.
Los Angeles has two conflicting street grids 2025 Mar 18    youtube.com
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 Canada 2025 Mar 17    newfoundlandlabrador.com
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.

2024

The border between California and Nevada is fuzzy 2024 Aug 28    en.wikipedia.org
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 exist 2024 Jul 26    en.wikipedia.org
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 Map 2024 Jun 13    trollmap.com
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.
Why Swiss maps are full of hidden secrets 2024 Feb 28    bigthink.com
This is a collection of curiosities drawn into the isolines on Swiss topographic maps.

2023

Ukraine Interactive Map 2023 Oct 27    liveuamap.com
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.
Barely Maps 2023 Mar 7    etsy.com
For the unusual map connoisseur in us all.