One thing I like to do is go to this one online site that shows you the spot on the opposite side of the world from where you are, (or any other place you select. If you are in North America you are going to come up in the Indian Ocean. There is very little US territory that comes out on land. I think if you are in Hawaii you would be opposite Botswana.
Always loved them. When I travel, I use GPS, but I hate that it tells you where you’re going but not where you are. My dad and a friend and I designed and published a map of Eureka Springs, Arkansas which featured all the abandoned trails and streets.
Upthread, I linked to a list I’d compiled of online reference map services other than Google. One I’d like to call special attention to is CalTopo, which (see upper right) lets you choose to view quite a variety of different maps, including USGS topos, NOAA marine charts, National Park maps, and even FAA sectionals.
There are some patches of land in north-eastern Montana and southern Alberta that align with some islands northeast of Heard. Also, some of far northern Alaska would align with parts of Antarctica.
My cousin just gave this to our son — a puzzle globe: https://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-3D-Earth-Puzzleball-Piece/dp/B000UEL05U
We’ll put it together some snowy day in a few months.
Fantastic.
Looks like a great gift idea!
The only books in my house were a set of Britannica Encyclopedias. In about the first grade I became fascinated with the global maps. I would find a little obsolete country and learn everything I could about it. Much in the same way kids study baseball cards. That persisted until puberty then something else caught my attention. The information I garnered about economics, exports, agriculture etc would help me for many years to come.
I was always thrilled by maps and globes. Tonight, sitting on my front porch before the light failed, I went through some favorite parts of a 20 year old map book of Limestone and Madison counties, and parts of eastern Lauderdale and northern Morgan counties as well. Recommended is http://cartocraft.com/index.html.
Yes, include me among those who’ve always loved maps, especially historical maps. (And I have very poor sense of direction so often want to look at a map to figure out which way is which when driving.)
I’m also a fan of trivia (Geography was always my best topic in Trivial Pursuits); most of you have herd of the Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island but how many know the place where to just go around the block legally requires traveling on seven different streets?
Is that not just about all over the place? If you have a standard one-way-street grid and want to go around an opposed block, traveling on every street along that block, you would have to use several other streets to complete the circuit – seven looks like a rather normal number for that.
Isn’t it normally exactly four streets to go around a block?
Suppose you’re parked in front of your apartment (X), drive away and immediately realize you need to return to that parking spot. Or, more plausibly, you see a parking spot when returning home, optimistically pass it by hoping for a better spot, find that there is no better spot and now want to go “around the block” to take that first parking spot you saw.
In the example I’m thinking of, the minimal legal journey (“around the block”) from point X back to point X requires travel on seven distinct streets. This is the same journey whether “minimal” is defined as minimal distance, minimal time, or minimal number of streets. Can you find a similar point X where 7 or more streets are minimal?
HINT: There was a six-street solution if I traveled illegally wrong-way for a very short distance. Sometimes I did that. You had to commit before the illegal leg, which meant that if opposing traffic arrived, you’d need to switch to a ten-street journey :eek:.
ETA: Checking my example just now with Google Maps I see that some of the one-way directions in question have reversed in recent years! (Perhaps traffic authorities became aware of the silliness.) I wonder if I’d be able to find an old city map depicting the old one-way directions which comprise the puzzle’s solution.