There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow
According to Microsoft Streets & Trips, Pakistan has no Capital. Islamabad should be right there, next to Rawalpindi, but it’s not. You have to zoom way in before it becomes visible. In defense of MS Streets & Trips, the symbol allocated to Islamabad indicates that, yes, it is the national capital, however given that Islamabad …
Continue reading “Pakistan has no Capital -or- Why GISs need to be Tweaked”
Once upon a time, a long long long time ago (2001) I discovered this Geocaching* thing. It sounded cool, so I bought a global positioning system (GPS) receiver and went looking for the nearest cache to me, which at the time was 45 miles away in Plainview, Texas (looking today, I see there are now …
Matt Rosenberg alerts us that the Fujita Scale, used to measure the intensity of Tornados (F0 through F6), has been superceded by the Enhanced Fujita Scale.
Would you like to see what the continents looked like while T.Rex was eating things? How about when the explosion of lifeforms in the cambrian occurred? Maybe what the earth looked like when the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub impact at the end of the cretaceous? If so, be sure to go to …
German tourist destined for Sydney, Australia ends up in Sidney, Montana, USA! Hey, it’s winter out there, folks! Gacked from Matt Rosenberg
Here are some history and details about the Gregorian Calendar, brought to you by Matt Rosenberg, friendly neighborhood provider of weekly emails concerning geography. The most interesting thing (to me) in this article is that it took 170 years to propagate the calendar change throughout all of “western” Europe. That’s a long time for neighboring …
I’ve been hearing a lot of press recently about the Canary Isands being the port of harbor for African illegal immigration to Europe. The geography makes good sense. The Canaries are only 150 miles (give or take) off of Morocco. Not entirely dissimilar to the Cuban and Haitian boat refugees trying for Florida. However, this …
Continue reading “Asia -> Spain: Holy Crap that's a long way!”
Over at About.com, the geography man Matt Rosenberg has caused a bit of a rucus in the comments of this post. Do you think the Mexican flag should be displayed with “equal promininence” to the US flag in an American Classroom? Go! comment on Matt’s entry.
The BBC has published an interactive online map to demonstrate urbanization trends of the past 50 years. Rolling their cursor back and forth to watch the asian urbanized centers pop up and grow, then shrink back to nothing, is curiously fascinating. The feature shows N.America as (2005 numbers) 80% Urban population. That makes me wonder …
National Geographic released a survey of 18-24 year-old Americans, testing their geographic knowledge. The results, as usual, depress me. The summary of results from the website says: Only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map—though U.S. troops have been there since 2003. 6 in 10 young Americans don’t speak a foreign language …