Category: Cities/Towns
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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But It Used to be Jackass Junction
Yeehaw Junction, Florida: right near… nothing; in the middle of… nothing. It’s nearly an hour inland from the sea. It’s also an hour south of Orlando. So it’s nowhere near the two most common reasons anyone would ever visit Florida. Set among drainage canals and swamp, Yeehaw Junction exists as little more than a rest…
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Rambling Along the Taylor-Rose Segment
I derive inspiration from odd places. Recently I stumbled across a simple notation on a chart, no more than a throwaway comment really, and it fascinated me. I noticed a brief history of Highway 183 on the US Highways website,(1) “Since 1930; original route North Platte, NE – Dresden, KS, extended north to Vivian, SD…
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Today, a Town Dies
Tuesday, September 1, 2009. Picher, Oklahoma died. Rest in peace. We’ve all heard of ghost towns, those places of lost hope and faded glory, of abandonment, dejection and crumbling ruins. It’s not merely a relic of a distant past. Modern day ghost towns also join the spectral realm while their inhabitants scatter for safer harbors.…