The ten most common place names in the country are, in descending order of frequency, Greenville (49), Franklin (30), Clinton (29), Springfield (28), Salem (25), Fairview (24), Washington (24), Madison (23), Georgetown (22), and Arlington (21). Hawaii is the only state without a Greenville. →
Tag Archives: geography
Links for November 30th
Christian Science Monitor: Way cleared for horse slaughter to resume in US after 5-year banCongress has passed a bill, and the president has signed it into law, that re-legalizes the slaughter of horses for human consumption. Banning that practice was a huge mistake, for reasons that were obvious at the time, but it took a …
Links for October 19th
Frontline: The U.S. Immigration Detention BoomThis map of the growth of immigrant detention facilities is a great—and alarming—illustration of the rise of these ever-larger, often private facilities. Wikipedia: Northwest AngleInsufficient understanding of North American geography in the late 1700s resulted in the Treaty of Paris accidentally assigning a notch of land in Canada to the …
Links for August 11th
Wikipedia: Ellis IslandThe waters around the Statue of Liberty are owned by New Jersey, but the land on which the statute sits is owned by New York. The adjacent Ellis Island is largely owned by New Jersey, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 has the right to all parts of the island that were …
Links for February 24th
MySQLTunerThis is a clever little program that examines your MySQL databases and makes recommendations about how to improve your database's performance in light of the reality of your data. I'll be spending some quality time with this on a few of my websites. Wikipedia: Enclaved countriesThere are only three countries that are completely surrounded by …
Can you identify these Virginia locations?
Because I’m a big dork, when I encounter Virginia place names that I’m not familiar with, I like to look them up on Google Maps and see how many times I have to zoom out until I recognize what part of the state that the place is. Sometimes there’s a highway or a river that …
Continue reading “Can you identify these Virginia locations?”
It’s all X
to me.
In English, when we want to describe something as incomprehensible, we might say “it’s all Greek to me.” From the always-excellent Strange Maps comes a diagram of what language people use in place of “Greek” depending in their native tongue. Romanians say “it’s all Turkish to me,” while Turks say “it’s all French to me,” …
Obama wins the loamy soil vote.
The counties in the southeast that voted for Obama are the counties with the most nutritious soils. Consequently, they’re where cotton was once grown and, also consequently, they’re where the bulk of the region’s slaves were held. I love these interdisciplinary mash-ups. (Via Kottke)
The Denton Valley offset explained.
Lloyd Snook has solved the mystery of the missing hunk of Virginia, which turns out to be known as the “Denton Valley offset.” My neighbors at Castle Hill are the source of the trouble, and it took 150 years of arguing and the Supreme Court to settle the debate. I’m glad I asked.