What do you call fizzy drinks? Soda? Pop? or Coke? (I still don't understand the generic "coke" thing) Anyway, this popular survey has been conducted many times, proving to me that people really want geographic differences to matter, even if they are trivial. Either way, it's fun. The latest development is a county map of the US shaded according to preference. I've always lived in hard-core "soda" territories... What does it mean?... click for full size.

Among the adventures we had in Mexico was a successful visit to the exact confluence of 30 degrees north latitude and 111 west longitude, which happens to be in the middle of a mesquite bush.

Ever since stumbling upon "confluence.org" I have been fascinated by this project to locate and photograph the confluence of all the whole-number lines of latitude and longitude on earth using GPS devices. There's a game not only in finding them, but in being the first to do so, which we were!

[read all about it]

Woah! According to this website, 400,000 people have already bought deeds to lunar property. Are these people drunk? I better get on the bandwagon, like asap. Anyone want to by some martian property with views of Olympus Mons? $50 for 100 acres, you can paypal me.

Recognition of a user's geographic location has finally become common on websites. Despite the fact that this is a rather fascinating development, I'm finding it more and more irritating.
That aside, Google is doing a great job of taking advantage of geographic recognition by returning Google keyword advertisements that are specific to the user's location. That's great for everyone involved - higher relevance to users, better clicks for advertisers, and more money for Google.

However, I sincerely hope Google never changes their main search results to reflect geography unless users specifically pick a filter. (This is now possible at google.co.uk, .fr, etc...) Leave that to AOL.

Population statistics are among my favorites. According to this article, what was formerly known as the San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland metropolitan statistical area, is now known as the San Jose/San Francisco/Oakland metropolitan statistical area. Catch that? San Jose is now listed first, reflecting it's larger population.

Fair enough. The bay area is clearly a single urban entity, even if it is stratified in many ways. The naming conventions for such entities in the
United States dictate that the largest incorporated city in the area gets listed first. For example, DC's area is referred to as the "Baltimore-Washington" area.

Although this is probably really boring to most people, you can't help but recognize the psychological significance of this. While flying into SFO, if the pilot welcomes you to the "San Jose" area, it will certainly change people's perceptions of the place, to San Francisco's loss.

Given that San Jose is still little more than a bunch of parking lots with some office parks here and there, this is quite disheartening to those of us who have more refined urban interests at heart, and it's unfair to San Francisco (which is clearly a vastly more important city in almost every area). But so it goes with statistics. They key is to be able to see through them.

Before I bore you to death, allow my hometown pride to tell you that Milwaukee is almost twice as big as Boston, Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis and a host of other more famous cities, but what counts in that case is the metropolitan population, which Milwaukee lacks. Point is, San Francisco dosn't really have that much to worry about.

Anyway, none of this really matters when you think about it. I just can't help obsessing over this stuff.

More obscure thoughts... If you've ever looked at the back of a large ocean going ship, you may have noticed that more often than not, the ship says either "Panama" or "Monrovia" on it. (those being the capitals of the Republic of Panama and Liberia respectively). The ship will also fly the flag of it's country of registry even though the crew and owner are probably not from there. Here's a list (there are other popular countries too, but you don't see them as much).

The reason is that it's legally advantageous to register your vessel in certain countries, even if it's owned elsewhere.

I can understand stable countries like Panama or the Bahamas as places of registry, but how can a country as messed up as Liberia make this happen? Is there actually a functional Liberian shipping bureaucracy? Or is it just a bunch of people in Switzerland with "Liberia" on the office door? (the Liberian pitch) Then again, if you really want to avoid taxes, perhaps an unstable registry is to your advantage...

One of the main reasons Britain is reluctant to joint the Euro is purely psychological - people attach a huge piece of their national identity to their money. To account for this, each country inside the "Eurozone" prints its own coins with country-specific iconography on the reverse side. This is a great way of preserving some degree of national identity. I have no idea if each country prints the same amount or if it depends on population.

An interesting effect of this is that when you're in a Euro country, you tend to get mostly coins from that particular country. While in France last weekend, we counted up a pile of 30 or so coins and found only two that were not French. The question is: Is it simply a matter of time before the coins distribute themselves? Or are they deliberately collected by banks and sent back to their country of origin? Or are people deliberately hoarding their national coins as a matter of pride?

Speaking of French pride, here's an interesting piece of trivia: There's a map of Europe on the reverse side of the notes which has a tiny inset in the lower left corner. Often overlooked, this section of the map features French Guyana, Martinique, Guadelupe and Reunion. Four disparate overseas territories of France which also use the Euro.

The Degree Confluence Project is an attempt to collect photographs and descriptions of the world at the confluence of lines of latitude and longitude. It's completely arbitrary of course, but still pretty neat.

There are quite a few people out there trying to help complete the project, hiking to remote places with GPS devices to score their photos (some making quite a celebration out of it - dig the outfits). Still, the remotest areas of the world remain unphotographed.

Someone's put together a mosaic of the points so far collected: [click here] Quite cool.

Japan is supposed to look like a dragon. But, I've always thought it looked more like a seahorse. China looks like a big rooster with the Koreas as the gobbly bit. Burma looks like Gorbachev's birthmark. Hmm... I'll have to think of some others.

I've noticed recently that when I read CNN, the advertisements are directed at a UK audience and the spelling on the site is adjusted to UK style. I've been anticipating this, and it's quite interesting, at least from an advertiser's point of view. It's all made possible by a little program that figures out where you are based on your IP address.

Anyway, I was clicking around on someone's website and, trying to reach a page on the "Showtime" website, got this error: "Sorry: We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States." [link here - might only show error if you're out of the US]

Now that really irritates me.

There must be a way to mask where I'm coming from. The anarchist in me wants to defeat this system, despite my appreciation of its utility.

I read an interesting article in the latest Economist entitled "The revenge of geography". It's premium content, so you have to go buy the magazine to read it, but the main point:

"It was naive to imagine that the global reach of the internet would make geography irrelevant. Wireline and wireless technologies have bound the virtual and physical worlds closer than ever"

By associating users' IP addresses with geographic information it is possible to locate them physically with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and thus websites can decide which language to display, whether to allow people to gamble on casino sites, and most importantly, to target advertisments. Furthermore, websites that are mostly relevant to a particular city or region can be identified readily when conducting a search.

I found a rather neat resource called "GeoURL" which is a database of the longitue and latitude from which people maintain their websites. Click the little green box below to learn about websites geographically close to this one:

If you like subway maps, diagrams, and those route maps in the back of airline magazines, searching for "Route Map" on Google's image search is dangerously distracting. Everything from Airlines to High School X-Country Courses pop up.

US Zip Codes are organized geographically into regions 0-9. (the digit the zip code starts with) I searched the internet for 30 minutes and could not find a map that showed only the 10 zones, so, in the tradition of my geographically accurate tupe map, I created a regional US zip code map myself. Click the thumbnail below to view:

Phenomenal accomplishment this week! The classic London Tube Map, wonderful though it may be, is tragically flawed geographically. In fact, it's very hard to correlate places on it with their actual locations in London. So... I searched and searched for a tube map, that is drawn in geographic reality. After a long search I was unable to find one. So I made one myself! Here it is:

I created it by piecing together a massive map of london from streetmap.co.uk then drew the lines out connecting the stations. I have the original photoshop file, though it is 50 MEG in size. The map here is a very shrunk-down version without the city streets beneath.

Here's another neat link about the history of the London Tube Map.