Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Author: Twelve Mile Circle

  • I Just Liked the Photo

    I take lots of photographs, not that I’m any good at it. I’m entirely a point-and-click photographer devoid of technical expertise or serious artistic talent. Sometimes I surprise myself. The stars and the moon align on rare occasions and I actually capture an image that speaks to me on a personal level. I’m sure any…

  • Fictional Geo-Marathons

    I know someone who wants to run a race in each of the fifty United States. This is a notable goal both for its endurance and its geographic sweep. I thought perhaps I could help out by putting my unusual geo-perspective to good use . Maybe I could design race courses that clip multiple states.…

  • Gate Splits Border Community

    This is just a quick post for the morning. I wanted to alert the audience to a news article in case you haven’t seen it yet. It said: Gate splits border community, unites it in disdain. This relates to the historically unimpeded border between Derby Line, Vermont, USA and Stanstead, Québec, Canada. Split Apart The…

  • The Danger of a Small Sample Size

    Fair warning, little geographic content makes it onto Twelve Mile Circle today. Mostly I’ll focus on statistics. No, no, don’t go running for the door quite yet. It will be fun and actually the statistical slant will be relatively mild, grossly overly simplified with sweeping generalizations and involve no actual mathematics. I went to a…

  • American Meridian

    The international community recognizes a prime meridian that runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in southeast London, England. It serves as a reference point for universal time and distance. However, that has not always been the case. Latitude is easy. The equator divides the planet into northern and southern hemispheres quite logically. Longitude is…

  • Corona’s Corona

    Many of my posts start off something like this: “I was looking at this map and I noticed something odd…” Right, that’s how it’s going to go today too. In this instance I was geo-tagging a pile of old photographs I’d scanned and loaded into iPhoto. Then I stumbled upon a perfect little circle of…

  • Palau Checks In

    Twelve Mile Circle isn’t one of those sites that uses a lot of exclamation points. However, today I am bestowing that rare honor. I got my first website hit from Palau! And it wasn’t one of those phony accidental hits either. Actually, this visitor from Palau remained on the site for a solid couple of…

  • Gerrymandering

    There are topics so intuitively obvious to those of us who appreciate maps that I figure I must have discussed them previously. Gerrymandering is one of those. However, as I go through the site’s Complete Index, it’s doesn’t appear. I won’t be making any value statements in this article. Rather I’ll focus on the weirdly…

  • National Capitals Closest Together

    Which two national capitals are located closest together? This is another one of those tricky trivia questions designed to fool people into overlooking the obvious. Doubtless they probably think about places where countries pack tightly together, maybe Western Europe maybe Central America, perhaps forgetting about all the tiny micro-nations because those tend to fade into…

  • Hier Wird Deutsch Gesprochen

    In Belgium, ongoing tensions between Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia receives a lot of attention. However, there’s actually a third distinct Belgian linguistic community, the German-speaking people of the East Cantons. This community represents approximately 70,000 people, or a little less than one percent of the nation’s population. It retains a level of political independence…