Greenland looks on maps to be much larger than it is due to the Mercator Projection.
According to an arbitrary convention.
There are even palm trees in the far northwest of Scotland, at the sheltered harbour of Plockton.
Indeed, got there before me. It was an oddity used on a science programme in the UK to illustrate the effects of the Gulf Stream.
And I had to check Googlemaps (quicker and dirtier than GoogleEarth) to see about the Edinburgh/Liverpool oddity.
From another thread on the effects of nuclear fallout, I couldn’t beleive that the Phillipines were north of the equator :dubious:
EDIT: To those who can’t beleive there are palm trees in Ireland, they are indeed all over Belfast in the cold 
north. But from another thread, I beleive they are a sort of “fake” palm.
Similar to Delaware’s circular border are two borders defined by offsets from rivers:
The eastern boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire is displaced 3 miles north of the Merrimack River.
Much of the boundary between Gambia and Senegal is defined by the longest distance a shell from a British warship (at the time of definition) could be fired. That distance is measured from the Gambia River and is around 10 miles.
One of my favorites ever since ABC news got it wrong:
When the Tire Tread Separation scandal started, it was reported that Venezuela in South America was the first country that complained about the tires, ABC news then reported:
Trouble bellow the equator…
:smack:
Venezuela is above the equator!
This one may not be odd, just interesting, some parts of my state, Maryland, are closer to Pittsburgh than Baltimore.
Since nobody’s mentioned it yet, the “Eastern Shore” of Virginia sits on the end of the Delmarva Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Virginia. They have a tunnel that connects them to the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, but aside from that, it’s a pretty long drive thru Maryland.
I was just looking at Carter Lake on Google Maps, and noticed that the state border doesn’t exactly follow the line of the old river - it’s a series of straight lines that actually clip the edge of the land and divide houses.
I wondered if this was just low-res mapping from Google, but the USGS topo maps agree.
So what happens when a state border runs through somebody’s house? Does it cause problems with tax, etc? More to the point, how are houses permitted to be built straddling a state line?
What’s odd about either of these facts? By definition, any bounded territory is going to have a lot of places that are closer to the boundaries than to places on the far end of the territory.
And Virginia? I wasn’t aware that the state’s motto was “entirely east of Detroit, Michigan.” What exactly does this factoid refute?
I suspect this is just sloppy line drawing on Google’s part. I am pretty sure that the territorys’ (which became states) line and property lines were made to correspong to each other so that a piece of property couldn’t be divided by a political boundry line. This site gives a pretty good history of the initial survey of the land west of Ohio. Adjustment of property and political boundries to meet local needs is not uncommon and continues to this day.
What do ANY of the “factoids” here “refute”? They simply are examples of geographical truths that, if you asked most people they would not know to be true. For example, Reno is west of LA in longitude. Who ever said it wasn’t? :rolleyes:
Miami Beach is slightly west of Pittsburgh, Pa.
There’s a rock formation on Maui that’s billed as being shaped like JFK, but I honestly could not see the resemblance myself.
But the topo map also shows the boundary cutting off the very edge of the land. You’d think they’d move the state line into the middle of the lake, rather than having a few yards of shoreline being part of a different state. Whether or not Google is strictly accurate having the line running right through the houses, it’s indisputable that the bottom end of the gardens, on the lakefront, are in Nebraska while the road is in Iowa.
According to an article in the Charlotte Observer a year or two ago, taxes are paid to the state which has most of the property in it. So if you owned a tract which was comprised 1.16 acres in North Carolina and 1.15 acres in South Carolina, you would pay property tax to the NC county and NC income tax.
They were refuting the UL that you pay tax to whichever state your bedroom is in.
Edited to add: They interviewed tax assessors in North and South Carolina who both agreed, and noted that for the most part it works out in the end.
One that was particularly wierd during the Cold War: Vienna is east of Prague.
Most people wouldn’t guess that Amsterdam is further north than London.
And parts of Michigan are further south than parts of Indiana . . . thanks to the fact that the northern borders of Indiana and Ohio don’t exactly align. Does anyone know why?
Malin Head, the most northerly part of Ireland, is not in Northern Ireland but the Republic.
Since when is this thread about “refuting” anything?
( :rolleyes: )