Most of us think of international borders as invisible, but clear-cut lines: stand on one side, and you’re in one country; stand on the other, you’re in another country. But here’s a list of five international borders that, for one reason or another, are not quite that simple.

1. The Indian Exclave in Bangladesh That Contains a Bangladeshi Exclave (Which Contains Another Indian Territory)

The Cooch-Behar District, nestled between Bangladesh and India, is one of the most confusing border zones in the world, with 102 mini-exclaves belonging to India splattered on the Bangladeshi side of the border, and 71 exclaves belonging to Bangladesh peppering the Indian side. To further confuse things, inside many of those exclaves, there are other, even smaller exclaves belonging to the other country.

For example, take the Indian region of Balapara Khagrabari. It’s an Indian exclave on the Bangladeshi side of the border, and contains inside of it, a Bangladeshi exclave, which, in turn, contains yet another Indian territory—like a doughnut inside of a doughnut inside of a doughnut. In Bangladesh. Or in non-pastry terms: Balapara Khagrabari is the only place in the world where an exclave contains another exclave that contains yet another exclave.

So why’d the border get drawn like that? It can all be traced back to power struggles between local kings hundreds of years ago, who would try to claim pockets of land inside each other’s territories as a way to leverage political power. When Bangladesh became independent from India in 1947 (as East Pakistan until 1971), all those separate pockets of land were divvied up. Hence the polka-dotted mess.

As of last month, the Indian and Bangladeshi governments signed a treaty that will get rid of all the exclaves soon, draw a nice clean line between the countries, and allow people living within the enclaves to choose which nationality they’d like to have.

2. Closing Time at the Dutch-Belgian Border

Image credit: Jérôme

Any border buff worth his salt will tell you about the little town of Baarle, which straddles the Dutch-Belgian border. The Belgian portion of town, known as Baarle Hertog, is not so much a hunk of territory as a smattering of tiny exclaves inside of the Netherlands town of Baarle-Nassau. As in Cooch-Behar, many of those Belgian exclaves also contain Dutch exclaves, making a map of the whole town look like one of Jackson Pollock’s crazier designs.

The official border between Belgium and the Netherlands runs through living rooms, yards and cafés, so it’s possible – indeed, it happens more often than you’d think – to sit across a table having a cup of coffee with someone who is actually in a different country.

For a while, a Dutch law requiring dining establishments to close earlier than they did in Belgium laid the foundation for an absurd, nightly charade in some Baarle restaurants. At closing time in the Netherlands, patrons would have to get up and move tables, over to the Belgian side. Like in Cooch-Behar, Baarle’s complex borderline has to do with how regional lords and dukes divided up their land hundreds of years ago.

3. The Little Hunk of Land That Nobody Wants
In 1899, when the British Empire controlled Egypt and Sudan, the Brits drew a little map. They said that Sudan would get all the stuff south of the 22nd parallel, while Egypt would get all the stuff north it. It would have been simple enough, except three years later, a different group of Brits drew a different map, which mostly followed the 22nd parallel, but not exactly.

The 1902 map gave Sudan an extra chunk of fertile territory, known as the Hala’ib Triangle, north of the 22nd parallel, while allotting the Egyptians a rather useless chunk of desert, known as Bir Tawil, south of the parallel. One hundred and ten years later, the border is still in dispute.

Not shockingly, the Egyptians insist the 1899 map shows the “real” borders, while the Sudanese say the 1902 map is more accurate. Both countries claim the fertile Hala’ib Triangle, while neither country—or anyone else, for that matter—claims the Bir Tawil.

4. The American Town That’s Really in Canada

In 1787, the Treaty of Paris basically laid out which British territories would go to the freshly victorious American rebels, and which would remain part of British Canada. The treaty said that the Americans would get all the British territory “through the Lake of the Woods, to the northwestern most point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi…” The only problem was, the map they were using wasn’t quite right.

They didn’t know at the time that the source of the Mississippi was actually farther south, so if you follow their instructions to a T, you get this funny, 123 square mile blip of Minnesota up in the middle of Canadian territory, which still exists today. It’s called the “Northwest Angle,” and can only be accessed from the U.S. by land by crossing into Canadian territory first.

The citizens of the tiny Angle Township must check in via videophone to the Canadian customs authorities when they want to leave their village, and with the American customs authorities when they want to come back.

5. The Island Where You Can See the Future
There are two islands — known as the Diomedes, about two and a half miles apart — right smack in the middle of the Bering Straight. One of them, Little Diomede, belongs to the U.S., and has a hardcore, weather-bitten population of about 150. The other island, Big Diomede, belongs to Russia and is uninhabited. The space between these two islands marks not only an international border, but the International Date Line as well, making it possible for the folks on Little Diomede to wake up on a Sunday, pour themselves a cup of coffee, and peer across the water to Big Diomede, where it’s already Monday.

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The black swallower might not be the best known undersea creature, but it might be one of the most abhorrent. That’s because scientists have only ever seen them after they are dead—often after they have attempted to eat a fish so large that its meal eventually killed it through indigestion.

While scientists have never actually seen the fish eating, they speculate that it grabs its prey by the tail and slowly starts swallowing it whole, as its dinner rolls into a circle in its belly. Unfortunately, the black swallower is not too selective about the size of its prey, which often results in dinner starting to decompose before it can be digested. The resulting gas build up leaves the black swallower to float to the surface.

A word about the North American shopping malls to those who are unfamiliar: they are ginormous. In India, it is advisable for family members to have a unique identifiable family song which the children can learn at an early age in case they are separated during melas. In the United States, such songs might be required prior to visits to malls, which in many cases larger than small towns.

What? No more Toblerone?

Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media, are drawing the attention that the ‘old’ blogs once commanded. Moreover, these social networks allow people to talk directly to one another rather than in the more random method that commenting on a blog post allows; why wouldn’t you prefer to carry on a one-on-one conversation with a friend rather than hoping someone reads a comment you’ve added to a blog post, number 59 out of 159?



As much as I like reading comments on mine or any other blog, Khoi Vinh is right not only about the changed convenience but also the utility of your comments/feedback on others' opinions.

He should have clicked on “Publish” instead of “Save.” 

We should have lived like we were dying.

A much shorter read compared to other links on this blog but well worth it.

Ayn Rand was out of her Vulcan mind.

This is a simple fact that can be verified by anyone with even minimal Google skills. She was the Albert Schweitzer of Selfishness and the Mother Theresa of Greed all rolled into one. This, naturally, makes her a hero to the Right and qualifies her for sainthood. Too bad she was an Atheist.

And to think that I considered 'The Fountainhead' one of my favorite books in college. Now, of course, I know better.

You explained to us that several other parents were going on the trip.  Therefore, we could too.  Chaperones, we explained.  They are chaperones, and we are not.

“So just be a Sharpertone,” you said plaintively.  I will concede this was where I too detected the slightest hint of whininess, which I attributed to a justifiable Fear of the Unknown.

Timely advice for us.

“Merry Christmas, sir!” a 10-year-old boy told me. “Would you like some weed?”

I wanted to leave within a week of getting here. Let me rephrase that: I wanted to leave and start a campaign to stop tourism in Nepal. There was no redeeming value. It was soulless, corrupt and destroying everyone that touched it. Not something I want to be supporting, in reality or my dreams.

Things look much worse from when I visited way back in 1996.

What a reviewer needs to do, first and foremost, is communicate his experience of the film. What did you feel when this happened? What did you feel when that happened? Did this bring back memories from childhood? Did that scene remind you of a breakup, a child’s first smile, a bout with a near-fatal illness? If you’re honest with yourself, if you don’t seek to soar over the film with a bird’s-eye view, if you burrow into it instead and monitor the minutiae, even your one-time viewing will provide a prism with which to view the film.

There is no better movie critic than Baradwaj who can comment on the demands of reviewing movies day in and out without repeating yourself or simply calling a movie 'nice', as most of us do.

"When one writes about Apple, it nearly always appears to the reader that they are either a massive fanboy or a massive hater. There appears to be no middle ground when discussing Apple and their products. Even simple news reporting comes across in one of the two mentioned camps. Our research shows that most bloggers skew towards massive fanboy which helps drive pageviews even further.

When the blogger posts his or her Apple story, it’s like an alarm goes off across the Web. If the story is deemed as a fanboy story, the haters swarm and leave comments regarding the author’s fanboy status. Naturally after the haters swarm, the fanboys must counter-attack the haters in the comments. This leads to even more pageviews because comments are where the pageviews multiply. Each comment leads to at least one additional pageview and typically the commenter will return multiple times to the blog post to see if anyone has replied to him or her. This “pageview compounding” is what makes Apple so wonderful to write about"

Exactly. You see so many tech blogs writing about Apple when clearly most of them care less about the brand, the company, or its products. But the pageview factor dominates what most tech blogs will write about. It is an intensely competitive field with blogs like Gizmodo going to the extent of buying stolen property for a scoop on Apple. Others are bound to emulate. Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration is one of the bloggers who has stayed true to his original style and continues to produce the genuinely helpful posts in the tech world. No wonder Lifehacker links him every alternate day. They should in fact hire him and compensate him for syndicating his content. Elsewhere it is just a mad rush to get pageviews and one look at the comments is enough reason to believe what this article talks about.

How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up their page views by exploiting women's worst tendencies.

The importance of a unique, memorable and well designed blog, especially within the design community, should not be underestimated – First impressions will always count and your blog gives you an opportunity to showcase your skills and highlight how professional and serious you are as a designer.

If only architecture magazines had such interesting captions

What do you get for Bill Gates, the richest person in the world? How about a little free SEO advice for his new blog? It could use some.

As if he would be mistaken for someone else. And even if he was, so what?

Smashing Magazine network members regularly contribute a wide range of high-quality content to the web design community.

"The nostalgic Doordarshan clips from the olden days"

What one designer envisions whenever he sees the new Pepsi ads.

A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. Sounds interesting but I'll wait for it to get out of alpha.

Text can be as beautiful as images.

Makes me wanna be a designer again.

Facebook is, by nature, far more interactive, and given that many personal blogs are aimed at people the writer knows, it’s hardly surprising that the social networking site is winning.

Notice how many gossip blogs find a place in this list

Amazing indepth analysis of the world's biggest blog.

Jazz up your Google Reader

And frankly it doesn't take much work to achieve that. But I'm sure you don't want to.

There are plenty of things wrong with 'enforcing' this.