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Tommah posted:Missouri has a lot of weird cities. Here's a list of some: The best part of this is their pronunciation of the name: "ver-SAY-els" or something like that. I cracked up when I heard that from my in-laws.
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Nov 14, 2013 04:46
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Family Values posted:The best part of this is their pronunciation of the name: "ver-SAY-els" or something like that. I cracked up when I heard that from my in-laws. That's like Ohio and Cairo (Cay-ro).
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Nov 14, 2013 05:00
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Unreal_One posted:Gulf Coast is actually pretty closely integrated, culturally. Up until the southern Texas part, it's all variations on a French Catholic inspired theme. That region is the part of the US that cares about Mardi Gras, with Mobile and New Orleans having the oldest and best known parades, respectively. Sure, there are some scattered celebrations north of there, but almost every decent sized city from Pensacola to Galveston either has its own Krewe or is very close to a city with multiple Krewes. I wasn't saying it's not a well-defined region, I'm saying it's not a megaregion. New Orleans-Mobile-Gulfport-Pensacola doesn't really compare to Boston-New York-Philly-Baltimore-DC or San Francisco-Sacramento-San Jose or Dallas-Houston-Austin, etc. Not in terms of cultural contiguity but in terms of density - population and economic.
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Nov 14, 2013 05:10
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A Buttery Pastry posted:What I'm getting from this thread is that my map of a balkanized US + Canada is superior to this one. I like how completely (and justifiably) everybody tore apart that crappy map after I posted it, and how many times I've seen it on facebook with reverential commentary since then. We truly are the gold standard of parsing lovely maps from less lovely maps.
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Nov 14, 2013 05:16
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DrSunshine posted:What IS the deal with Pennsylvania?!
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Nov 14, 2013 05:20
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Family Values posted:The best part of this is their pronunciation of the name: "ver-SAY-els" or something like that. I cracked up when I heard that from my in-laws. There's one in my state right down the road from where I live, pronounced about the same way ("vur-SAILS"). My mom actually went to high school there. It was weird when I got a little older and discovered that that was not the normal pronunciation when talking about anything other than small US towns.
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Nov 14, 2013 05:36
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menino posted:I like how completely (and justifiably) everybody tore apart that crappy map after I posted it, and how many times I've seen it on facebook with reverential commentary since then. We truly are the gold standard of parsing lovely maps from less lovely maps. The one thing I've learned from all the balkanized US maps is that tomorrow's unavoidable explosion of the US will have the new national borders drawn along the lines of whether people call soft drinks "soda" or "pop" and how they feel about unions rather than irrelevant nerd poo poo like natural resources, support infrastructure, military assets, or foreign intervention. *draws another map giving literally 100% of our ICBMs and farmland to the token "assorted non-whites" nation because that's just flyover country*
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Nov 14, 2013 05:37
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There are a bunch of Cairos and also a Shanghai in West Virginia.
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Nov 14, 2013 05:57
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Kalos posted:The one thing I've learned from all the balkanized US maps is that tomorrow's unavoidable explosion of the US will have the new national borders drawn along the lines of whether people call soft drinks "soda" or "pop" and how they feel about unions rather than irrelevant nerd poo poo like natural resources, support infrastructure, military assets, or foreign intervention. Well yeah, I mean I don't wanna live with no stinkin popsayers and I sure as hell don't wanna share a new country with no coker. Soda Uber Alles
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Nov 14, 2013 05:59
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Badger of Basra posted:There are a bunch of Cairos and also a Shanghai in West Virginia. I'm from WV and where I'm from there's a Bethlehem nearby. I also know of a Palestine.
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Nov 14, 2013 06:16
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Tommah posted:I'm from WV and where I'm from there's a Bethlehem nearby. I also know of a Palestine. Yeah there's a Palestine in Texas too (pronounced Paluhsteen).
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Nov 14, 2013 06:16
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SurgicalOntologist posted:I wasn't saying it's not a well-defined region, I'm saying it's not a megaregion. New Orleans-Mobile-Gulfport-Pensacola doesn't really compare to Boston-New York-Philly-Baltimore-DC or San Francisco-Sacramento-San Jose or Dallas-Houston-Austin, etc. Not in terms of cultural contiguity but in terms of density - population and economic. That's very clearly Dallas-Houston-San Antonio  .
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Nov 14, 2013 06:22
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A Medina, New York not named after the Islamic city.
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Nov 14, 2013 06:26
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Bizmarck, North Dakota is my favourite place name that's taken from somewhere (well, someone) else, because they figured if they named it after the German Bismarck they would attract German investment.
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Nov 14, 2013 06:26
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Golbez posted:I think the geographic center is the point at which the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, would be perfectly balanced population-wise. So it's not just about numbers, but about distance from that center. The geographic mean is simply the point where exactly 1/4 of the population lives NE, NW, SE, and SW of it. The difference between the two is caused by the fact that the region between the Mississippi and California is very underpopulated, not to mention the distance of Alaska and Hawaii. Mean center is the average of all the points where people live (no idea where they compile this from). Median center is the middle of all those points, it's best to think of that as a giant list. Geographic is the middle of the land area. It's kind of dumb to include Alaska and Hawaii but whatever. Kinda funny this comes up, just took a test which mentioned these. A standard deviation ellipse would be cool to see, you could see directionality as to where everyone is located with the mean center as the center point of the ellipse. E: I knew Damascus was a biblical name for a nearby town for me but I was surprised Bethesda was, too. There's a bunch that seem obscure to me but I don't know much about biblical names. GreenCard78 fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 06:28
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 US mean center of population from 1790 to 2010, taken from Wikipedia Farecoal fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 06:36
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Hm, in the beginning, it used to be very close to DC. Makes sense.
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Nov 14, 2013 06:38
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Badger of Basra posted:Yeah there's a Palestine in Texas too (pronounced Paluhsteen). And Mecca, Iraan, Moscow, Italy, and Dublin. (Mecca is basically just a farmhouse)
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Nov 14, 2013 06:40
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blugu64 posted:And Mecca, Iraan, Moscow, Italy, and Dublin. (Mecca is basically just a farmhouse) Iraan, Texas isn't actually named after Iran, according to Wikipedia. 
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Nov 14, 2013 06:52
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blugu64 posted:And Mecca, Iraan, Moscow, Italy, and Dublin. (Mecca is basically just a farmhouse) My favorite is Edinburgh, Texas just because of it's location and demographics.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:02
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Phlegmish posted:If you look up any major European city on Wikipedia and then click disambiguation, you'll usually find a whole list of American towns. This makes some of my paperwork with the French government kinda funny. I was born in a town called Alma but a lot of French paperwork is not set up for federal states so some of it says "Alma, États-Unis". Wikipedia tells me there are 20 cities/towns in the US called Alma as well as a handful of townships.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:19
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HookShot posted:Bizmarck, North Dakota is my favourite place name that's taken from somewhere (well, someone) else, because they figured if they named it after the German Bismarck they would attract German investment. I have never heard this. There are a bunch of Germans in the region and I just assumed they named it after Otto von Bismarck.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:25
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Middle Eastern cities, too. I counted once, and while I forget the exact number almost three quarters of the states had a Lebanon in there somewhere. And yes, I know that's a country, not a city, but it illustrates my point. Connecticut has a "holy land" in the eastern end of the state, with Lebanon, Bozrah and Hebron. Bethlehem is clear on the other end of the state:  Probably every other town in the state is a knock-off of somewhere in England.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:28
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Rhesus Pieces posted:Connecticut has a "holy land" in the eastern end of the state, with Lebanon, Bozrah and Hebron. Bethlehem is clear on the other end of the state: Also Canaan, North Canaan, and New Canaan. Jesus.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:30
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Badger of Basra posted:Also Canaan, North Canaan, and New Canaan. Jesus. And Bethel. And Goshen.
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Nov 14, 2013 07:39
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Berlin, Wisconsin changed their pronunciation during WWI to something like BUR-lin.
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Nov 14, 2013 09:21
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texaholic posted:My favorite is Edinburgh, Texas just because of it's location and demographics. It is actually Edinburg, no h, so it is said like it is spelled here When I was in high school in SA, I had a friend that had a house in Iraan, her parents used to spend weekends there. She said it so many times, I just assumed it was normal to fly from San Antonio to Iran until I finally asked her one day why she was pronouncing it that way... that was the day I found out there actually was an Iraan, Texas, derp
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Nov 14, 2013 10:53
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Strange place names, you say? Germany has its fair share of weird names as well, including Kissing, Petting, Kaffeekanne (coffee can), Hurendeich (whore dike), Loch (hole), Katzenhirn (cat brain) or Hundeluft (dog air). One village is called Winkel (corner) and has a street named Im Keller (in the basement). A village close to where I grew up is called Sixtnitgern (Bavarian for "You don't like to see it") - the story goes that sometime in the Middle Ages, a local lord had some sort of dispute with the villagers. While he didn't get his way, he managed to change the village's name to that in a fit of pettiness. My favourite though would probably be Amerika in Lower Saxony, because it is only ten minutes by foot away from the village of Rußland (Russia)  In more serious map terms, have one map that really did change the world:  Wikipedia posted:[The English physician John Snow] was a sceptic of the then-dominant miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera and bubonic plague were caused by pollution or a noxious form of "bad air". The germ theory of disease had not yet been developed, so Snow did not understand the mechanism by which the disease was transmitted. His observation of the evidence led him to discount the theory of foul air. He first publicised his theory in an essay, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, in 1849, followed by a more detailed treatise in 1855 incorporating the results of his investigation of the role of the water supply in the Soho epidemic of 1854.[7]
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Nov 14, 2013 12:13
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I got all that "towns named after other towns" poo poo beat. Kosciusko County, Indiana was named after a revolutionary war hero from Poland. The county seat? Warsaw. edit: Indiana also has Ireland AND Holland so suck on that.
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Nov 14, 2013 12:44
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Phlegmish posted:If you look up any major European city on Wikipedia and then click disambiguation, you'll usually find a whole list of American towns. Not even major towns, my home town of Lancaster which nowadays isn't even the administrative centre of it namesake county has almost thirty communities names after it , or via the Pennsylvania Effect of the city named after it. Which also decided when remodelling its county prison in the 19th century to make it look like (the real) Lancaster castle which until a couple of years ago was also a prison.
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Nov 14, 2013 12:44
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Peanut President posted:I got all that "towns named after other towns" poo poo beat. Kosciusko County, Indiana was named after a revolutionary war hero from Poland. The county seat? Warsaw. I drive through Russiaville, Indiana a couple of times a year. It was pronounced the same as the country until the Cold War, when they decided to start calling it ROO-sha-ville. There's also Santa Claus, Indiana, which voted to change their name from Santa Fe because there was already another town with the same name.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:02
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Santa Claus has a huge post office too. Used to be if you mailed a letter to "Santa Claus" it'd go there, if you address it "North Pole" it goes to Alaska, iirc.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:07
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Peanut President posted:Santa Claus has a huge post office too. Used to be if you mailed a letter to "Santa Claus" it'd go there, if you address it "North Pole" it goes to Alaska, iirc. That's adorable. 
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Nov 14, 2013 15:20
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System Metternich posted:Strange place names, you say? Wetwang is also the site of a famous Iron Age cemetery - or more specifically, a valley to the north of the village is, known as 'Wetwang Slack'. Ooer indeed. quote:In more serious map terms, have one map that really did change the world:   Booth's poverty map of 1889, showing a London slum right behind a wealthy middle class street. It's easy to forget how jarring income disparity must have been with those at opposite ends of the income scale living so close to each other. On the plus side, it meant that issues such as sanitation couldn't be ignored. I'm not sure whether these maps are really political, other than in the broadest possible sense, but the Guardian currently has a gallery up showing the etymology of words for common items across Europe, it's pretty fascinating.  
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Nov 14, 2013 15:35
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Kegluneq posted:I'm not sure whether these maps are really political, other than in the broadest possible sense, but the Guardian currently has a gallery up showing the etymology of words for common items across Europe, it's pretty fascinating. I like how in Turkey the Orange is named after Portugal like how the Turkey is named (incorrectly) after a type of bird imported from Turkey.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:38
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Kegluneq posted:I'm not sure whether these maps are really political, other than in the broadest possible sense, but the Guardian currently has a gallery up showing the etymology of words for common items across Europe, it's pretty fascinating. Ha, they must have made the beer one first and then edited the bear one over it because the Breton word for bear is "arzh", not "bier". Also, aouraval is just literally "gold apple" and "oranjezenn" is just the singulative of "oranjez" whose origin should be clear. They didn't even bother to put the word for apple.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:48
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I like how the Caucasus is such a mess of entyomologies in almost every case.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:50
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Soviet Commubot posted:Ha, they must have made the beer one first and then edited the bear one over it because the Breton word for bear is "arzh", not "bier". Also, aouraval is just literally "gold apple" and "oranjezenn" is just the singulative of "oranjez" whose origin should be clear. They didn't even bother to put the word for apple.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:50
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computer parts posted:I like how in Turkey the Orange is named after Portugal like how the Turkey is named (incorrectly) after a type of bird imported from Turkey. Except the bird it was named after is actually native to West Africa. It's just that all trade from West Africa came through Turkey to get to Europe so Europeans assumed it came from Turkey. After the confusion with the American turkey the original turkey was renamed the guinea fowl under the new assumption that it came from Guinea, which is in East Africa. Still wrong, but at least they got right continent.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:51
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computer parts posted:I like how in Turkey the Orange is named after Portugal like how the Turkey is named (incorrectly) after a type of bird imported from Turkey.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:55
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