Medium / Phases chart FTW

There are 102 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh and 71 Bangladeshi ones inside India, with a combined population between 50,000 to 100,000. Inside those enclaves are also 28 counter-enclaves and one counter-counter-enclave.[1]

Excerpt from the end of his speech to the 1952 Republican National Convention:

"We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans:
'My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrims' pride,
From every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!'
That's exactly what we mean—from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for the persecuted of Europe, for the rejected of Asia, disfranchised of South Africa and for the disinherited of all the earth—may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, 'LET FREEDOM RING.'"

Gerard Houckgeest
Ambulatory of the New Church in Delft, c1651

Mapping wikipedia based on an XKCD comic. Lovely.

Highest point on Long Island

everything has a name

@nvalvo Komarov's story remains the most poignant space death, since he certainly know he was done for

yay internet for learning about awesome/random historical characters

Kind of like the Pruitt-Igoe of the UK, except with a gas explosion and partial collapse, instead of demolishment by dynamite.

Lots of NAPLs in the Gowanus.

One of the reasons a census was initiated in the UK: "the life insurance industry would be stimulated by the results."

Some guidelines to prevent the spread of noxious weeds are:
Avoid driving through noxious weed-infested areas.
Avoid transporting or planting seeds and plants that one can't identify.
For noxious weeds in flower or with seeds on plants, pulling 'gently' out and placing in a secure closable bag is recommended. Disposal such as hot composting or contained burning is done when safe and practical.
Using only certified weed-free seeds for crops or gardens.

Secret nuclear disaster in 1957: The cooling system in one of the tanks containing about 70–80 tons of liquid radioactive waste failed and was not repaired. The temperature in it started to rise, resulting in evaporation and a chemical explosion of the dried waste, consisting mainly of ammonium nitrate and acetates. The explosion, estimated to have a force of about 70–100 tons of TNT...  released an estimated 2 to 50 MCi (74 to 1850 PBq) of radioactivity.The radioactive cloud moved towards the northeast, reaching 300–350 kilometers from the accident. The fallout of the cloud resulted in a long-term contamination of an area of more than 800 square kilometers, primarily with caesium-137 and strontium-90. This area is usually referred to as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace (EURT). 

geographer and "father of the quadrangle"

First great American mathematician, despite being English. Coined the term 'graph.'

"study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt"

"A calendar effects is any recurring pattern particularly in stock markets, which appears to be directly related to the calendar." E.g. January Effect, July Effect, Eternal September

23, but includes only two in Jamaica Bay.

If only I'd known graph coloring was so cool!

one of the "big 3" mexican muralists. museum of his work to open in LA in 2010

the "Overcoat Development Corporation" is a New York State Agency

"S.N.P.J. stands for Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednota (Slovene National Benefit Society), a fraternal society and financial co-operative based in Imperial, Pennsylvania.
The society applied to have their 500 acre recreation center in western PA designated as a separate municipality in 1977 so that the society could, among other things, get their own liquor license.
S.N.P.J. once had the distinction of being the least-populated borough in the state until a mine fire beneath Centralia made that borough unsafe to live in."

Who knew? "Under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, over 11,000 Germans and German Americans were selectively detained and interned at the start of World War II. In addition, over 4,500 ethnic Germans were brought to the U.S. from Latin America and detained." (as comparison, 10x as many Japanese-Americans were interned)

1848 - Cataldo Mission. Built by Jesuit missionaries and the Coeur d'Alene tribe without a nail. Chandeliers made from tin cans, etc

"The shared rules, customs and conventions specific to the United States." There are 7 apparently: Cooties, Dibs, Five-second rule, High five, Padiddle, Punch buggy, and Riding shotgun.

"The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system is a grid-based method of specifying locations on the surface of the Earth. It is used to identify locations on the earth, but differs from the traditional method of latitude and longitude in several respects.
The UTM system is not a single map projection. The system instead employs a series of sixty zones, each of which is based on a specifically defined secant transverse Mercator projection.
The Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system was developed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s.[1] The system was based on an ellipsoidal model of the Earth. For areas within the conterminous United States, the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid was used. For the remaining areas of the Earth, including Hawaii, the International Ellipsoid was used. Currently, the WGS84 ellipsoid is used as the underlying model of the Earth in the UTM coordinate system."

maybe because he thought the mass of the neutrino was too miniscule?

"It is also possible that all structures will be destroyed instantaneously, without any forewarning."

"Stevin's goal was to bring about a second age of wisdom, in which mankind would have recovered all of its earlier knowledge. He had deduced that the language spoken in this age would have had to be Dutch, because, as he had showed empirically, in that language, more concepts could be indicated with monosyllabic words than in any of the (European) languages he had compared it with."

dutch wikipedia article on normaal amsterdams peil

regional government in NL

probably the classiest map

depictions of romantically overgrown ruins earned him the nickname Robert des ruines

There are remarkably few constructions of aperiodic sets of tiles known, even forty years after Berger's groundbreaking construction.... The undecidability of the Domino Problem ensures that there must be infinitely many distinct principles of construction, and that in fact, there exist aperiodic sets of tiles for which there can be no proof of their aperiodicity!

Landscape writer & early critic of Victor Gruen, apparently. To read

"barge that became infamous when it went over or through a levee and landed in a the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina."

random signals: white, pink, red, gray.

"Dismissed from Penn in 1915 because of his public opposition to child labor." Radical & public intellectual (1883-1983)

molly's mom

Mixed black/white/Indian groups in Appalachia. aka tri-racial isolate. Both possibly offensive terms. Also mix of unwritten history and fabulous myth

oh fuck me

UP: Finnish

Staged train wreck, 1896. 40k spectators, 2 killed. crushilepsy!

reclaimed island located in Kaafu Atoll, Maldives. New land mass required to meet the existing and future housing, industrial and commercial development demands of the Malé region.

"Campanella's aim was to establish a society based on the community of goods and wives ... he foresaw the advent of the Age of the Spirit in the year 1600. Betrayed by two of his fellow conspirators, he was captured and incarcerated. Feigning insanity, he

"Soul City, North Carolina is a planned new town first proposed in 1969 by Floyd McKissick, a civil rights leader and director of the Congress of Racial Equality."

the last castle to be built in England

capital of Desolation Island

The girl who named Pluto.

"Two consecutive integers (eg 714 & 715) for which the sums of the prime factors of each are equal. Named for Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron bc. Ruth's career regular-season home run total was 714, a record which Aaron eclipsed"

streetcar/bus service, elevated service 1901-87.

love the self-referential wikipedia lists.

can one get tired of these zany wikipedia categories?

"3 major alignments were the Lower Post Rd (Rte 1 along the shore thru Providence), the Upper Post Rd (US 5 & US 20 from New Haven via Springfield) & the Middle Post Rd (Hartford diagonally to Boston)"

"The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains."

sounds like: "constant intro shots to a sitcom before anyone tells a fucking joke ... a porno, but nobody takes off their clothes ... a blacked out movie ... a book without words."