Geography

RealLifeLore pumps up, then quickly deflates every state in the U.S. with this look at what each state statistically does best and worst in the country. And here we thought Alaska would be a nice safe place to live.

If you think being governed by one nation has its challenges, imagine what it would be like if for half the year, we were ruled by one country, and the other half by another. That’s what you’d have to deal with if you lived on Pheasant Island. Half as Interesting explains.

Did you know that for a brief period of time, there was actually a small nation that sat between the U.S. and Canada along their Eastern border? Half as Interesting offers a brief history of the Republic of Indian Stream, why it existed, and what happened to it.

We’ve all gotten so used to seeing maps of the world in cylindrical and pseudo-cylindrical projections, that our sense of where things are placed and their sizes is pretty distorted compared to reality. RealLifeLore explains many misperceptions of our nation’s geography.

In 1992, 12 containers fell off of a ship in the Pacific Ocean. Among the lost cargo – 29,000 rubber duckies. But those ducks would serve a greater purpose, helping oceanographers map currents based on where they washed ashore. Half as Interesting explains.

Despite the crowds, costs, crime, and other drawbacks of big cities, people flock together in densely packed areas, leaving vast areas of the world undeveloped. Wendover Productions looks at the reasons that over 50% of the global population occupies just 1% of the land.

RealLifeLore ponders what is a fairly simple question to answer – what’s the farthest point away from you on Earth at this very moment? Our antipode is far off the coast of Perth, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Find your opposite spot here.

AlternateHistoryHub teaches us that there’s actually already a place that could have qualified as another continent, though the one big problem is that the majority of Zealandia sits underwater. He then imagines what might have happened if it hadn’t been submerged.

“The surface of a sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion.” That pretty much sums up the fact that there’s really no way to accurately represent the earth in flat maps, as Vox explains. After you stop saying “Winkel Tripel,” go play with this.