In ancient literature and maps the term Ultima Thule was used to describe the region beyond the known limit of the world.
The New York Public Library offers free tours of the library. One fascinating stop on this tour is of the NYPL’s Map Room which houses many historical maps, including how and where the City of New York grew and expanded over the years.
P.S., the tour is free. It’s one of the nicest free activities in NYC.
New Guinea is the second largest island in the world, after Greenland. It has an area of approximately 786,000 km[sup]2[/sup].
The Torres Strait separates New Guinea and Australia. At its narrowest point the distance between the two is only 150 km.
A certain Miss Coolidge, 3rd-grade teacher in a highly touted California school district, taught her students that Greenland, not Australia, should be called the seventh continent. That it is hugely bigger than Australia is plainly visible in many world maps.
That image and other map projections showing Greenland’s distorted size is often referred to as “The Greenland Problem.” A good rule of thumb when viewing a map is to remember that Greenland is roughly the same size as the Arabian peninsula.
The word ‘peninsula’ is derived from two Latin words: paene meaning ‘almost’ and insula meaning ‘island’.
The supervillain Syndrome’s high-tech hideout in the 2004 Pixar movie The Incredibles is Nomanisan Island, a pun on the famous John Donne quotation, “No man is an island.”
Nomans Land is an island off the western tip of Martha’s Vineyard, named for Wampanoag sachem Tequenoman, not because it is uninhabited. It contains a great deal of unexploded ordnance from its long service as a US Navy bombing range.
“Home on the Range” was designated in 1947 to be the official state song of Kansas. But even then, there was precious little range left in Kansas, and few Kansans had ever had a home on it.
A topological analysis by three geography professors revealed that Kansas is, in fact, actually flatter than a pancake.
The geographic center of the contiguous United States is located at 39°50′N 98°35′W, which is 2.6 miles (4.2 km) northwest of Lebanon, Kansas, approximately 12 miles south of the Kansas/Nebraska border. This measurement only takes into account the lower 48 states; if Alaska & Hawaii are included, the geographic center is actually very close to the Montana/South Dakota/Wyoming border.
Yellowstone National Park, which is now known to be one giant volcanic caldera which will someday erupt and destroy the western United States, is mostly in Wyoming but extends into Montana and Idaho as well.
The United States of America is not the only United States on the coneinent. Mexico is officially named the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), comprised of 31 states and a federal district. Ten states formed the original union in December 1823, and within a decade, ten more territories were granted statehood.
There are 83 licensed credit unions in Australia.
The members of the band KISS appeared in public without their stage makeup for the first time on MTV on September 18, 1983.
On 12 December 1983 the Australian dollar was floated, allowing its value to fluctuate dependent on supply and demand on international money markets.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Ohio has a children’s museum for kids to learn more about money and the economy. A short film there speculates that cows might have served as the first articles of currency in the earliest human civilizations.
Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia, has been a pioneer in the development of polymer banknotes. Other countries that now make use of polymer notes for their currencies include Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Western Samoa, Kuwait, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Romania, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Solomon Islands, Vietnam, Mexico, Nepal, Zambia, Chile, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Nigeria and Canada.
All banknotes in Thailand, including the special 60-baht banknote issued on the King’s 60th birthday, contain a portrait of Bhumibol Adulyadej. Bhumibol is the grandson of King Chulalongkorn and his half-sister Princess Savang Vadhana. (Chulaongkorn became King in his young teens as shown in a famous movie with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr.)
Since Chulalongkorn’s mother was also his own 1st cousin once removed; Bhumibol has three lines of descent from the founder of the Chakri Dynasty and the present capital, Chasyot Fa Chulalok the Great. The Queen also has three lines of descent from Chasyot the Great, so their children have six lines.
Thailand is the only country in southeast Asia that has not been colonized by Europeans. Its island, Koh Phi Phi Lee, was featured in the 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Beach.