Month: March 2015

  • Highpoint to Lowpoint Revisited

    The recent Highpoint to Lowpoint article generated more interest than I expected. I wanted to go into more detail when I wrote it but it got unwieldy. Unfortunately I didn’t get an opportunity due to various time constraints back then. The details would have required a lot of manual effort and I didn’t really want…

  • Savages

    I continue to make progress with the logistics supporting my recently-revealed 2015 Travel Plans. First on the docket will be a 150 mile (240 kilometre) bicycle adventure along the Great Allegheny Passage trail. That one runs between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. I’ve been scoping the route and noticed a peculiarly-named town on the Maryland…

  • Highpoint to Lowpoint

    Twelve Mile Circle received an intriguing question from reader “Cary” a few days ago. Cary, a professional mapmaker, noticed something interesting while conducting research: the amazing proximity of Minnesota’s highest point of elevation to its lowest. This led to a natural question. Was this the shortest distance between a state highpoint and a lowpoint? I’d…

  • Cornfield

    I wouldn’t quite call it a groundswell. However, more than one hundred different people searched for “cornfield” on Twelve Mile Circle over the last five years. So obviously readers want an article based on cornfields and I shall oblige. Never say that 12MC doesn’t respond to its loyal fans. I interpreted cornfield to mean Corn…

  • Five Years of Searching

    Twelve Mile Circle featured an article with the curious title Search for Search and Other Tales about two years ago. This effort examined a year’s worth of search queries that people entered into the website. To be clear as before, these weren’t random searches from Google or other sources, these were actual words or phrases…

  • Shortest Town + State Combo

    I wondered what town and state had the fewest letters in its collective name. For example, my hometown of Arlington, Virginia had 17 letters. That wasn’t very short. Why would anyone care? I don’t know. Maybe someone had a job where they had to write down their town and state repeatedly to the point where…

  • Nestling Newark

    It began as a simple enough proposition once I noticed Newark, Ohio on a map. Was it related somehow to the Newark in New Jersey, and what about the Newark in Delaware? Did they all intertwine in a way? It sounded like a mystery that I needed to solve. Newark, New Jersey I noticed Newark,…

  • Lake Neusiedl

    All that talk of endorheic basins in County Divided got me wondering about similar conditions in other unexpected places. It seemed farfetched to find an area lacking natural drainage to the sea on the Great Plains of North America. So did a similar condition in central Europe. I searched around and the largest place in…

  • On the Steps

    I clicked through television channels aimlessly the other day, a boredom-induced activity of mine. Then I came across a famous a scene from one of the Rocky movies. The hero Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) started running up the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (map). You know the scene I’m talking about.…