This is true? - Geographic oddities that defy conventional wisdom

[chays]

Key West, FL, is further south than Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

[kphoger]

I remember when my parents would write down phone numbers like this:  Mary: 3820.  John: 1105.  Because they were local friends and it was known that they were in the 468 exchange, so no reason to write down the full 7 digit number.  And the area code?  It was rare someone had to call someone long distance...and the rates to do so were incredibly expensive.

I'm only 35 years old.  When I was in fourth and fifth grade, we only had to dial four digits to call someone in town.  For example, to dial the hospital, all I had to dial was 3211.  My phone number was 3129.  It was only in 1992 or so that they started making us dial all seven digits.  Back then, too, you could call from the northwest corner of Kansas to Kansas City as a local call, because both places were in the 913 area code.

[Max Rockatansky]

Key West, FL, is further south than Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Here is one for Key West.  The southern most point isn't actually at the buoy on Whitehead Street anymore, it's actually somewhere near the radar tower within the air station right next to it.  BUT all that air station land is actually fill from dredging so the buoy is accurate if you account for only national land formations. 

[empirestate]

Key West, FL, is further south than Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Here is one for Key West.  The southern most point isn't actually at the buoy on Whitehead Street anymore, it's actually somewhere near the radar tower within the air station right next to it.  BUT all that air station land is actually fill from dredging so the buoy is accurate if you account for only national land formations. 

And in either case, these are only the southernmost points on that one cay, not in all of Florida (let alone the U.S.).

[bing101]

http://roadtrippers.kinja.com/welcome-to-americas-smallest-city-dont-worry-theres-1505997771

Monowi, Nebraska. I had no idea you can incorporate a city of 1 person. What!!!

http://www.bitrebels.com/lifestyle/smallest-town-in-america-population-one-person/

I had no idea that's even legal to make a charter city or a general law city and incorporate it with 1 person. I thought you need the voters of a county or a state in some cases to make it legal and a state and a state congress to ratify that. Also the budget would be a big deal in all of this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibberts_Gore,_Maine.  Another city with one person included.

[Max Rockatansky]

Key West, FL, is further south than Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Here is one for Key West.  The southern most point isn't actually at the buoy on Whitehead Street anymore, it's actually somewhere near the radar tower within the air station right next to it.  BUT all that air station land is actually fill from dredging so the buoy is accurate if you account for only national land formations. 

And in either case, these are only the southernmost points on that one cay, not in all of Florida (let alone the U.S.).

I want to say it's Ballast Key that is actually the southern most out in the Mules.  I'm not even sure if you can even legally land there at all these days, the only one that I remember ever spending some significant time at was Boca Grande.  Wasn't Ballast for sale at some point recently?

[8.Lug]

I'm only 35 years old.  When I was in fourth and fifth grade, we only had to dial four digits to call someone in town.  For example, to dial the hospital, all I had to dial was 3211.  My phone number was 3129.  It was only in 1992 or so that they started making us dial all seven digits.  Back then, too, you could call from the northwest corner of Kansas to Kansas City as a local call, because both places were in the 913 area code.

Probably because you still had a manual switchboard in your area.

[empirestate]

http://roadtrippers.kinja.com/welcome-to-americas-smallest-city-dont-worry-theres-1505997771

Monowi, Nebraska. I had no idea you can incorporate a city of 1 person. What!!!

http://www.bitrebels.com/lifestyle/smallest-town-in-america-population-one-person/

I had no idea that's even legal to make a charter city or a general law city and incorporate it with 1 person. I thought you need the voters of a county or a state in some cases to make it legal and a state and a state congress to ratify that. Also the budget would be a big deal in all of this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibberts_Gore,_Maine.  Another city with one person included.

Not a city, though, and not legally chartered/incorporated. It's a county subdivision with no established government.

[GenExpwy]

Georgia has 159 counties, the second-most of any state, but none of them have a county seat with the same name as the county. (Variant names, such as Douglasville, Douglas County, do not count. Names of other counties, such as Douglas, Coffee County, do not count.)

The only other states without a same-name county/parish/borough seat are:
- Delaware (3 counties)
- Maine (16 counties)
- New Hampshire (10 counties)

In contrast, South Carolina has same-name seats in 31 of 46 counties.

[GaryV]

Back then, too, you could call from the northwest corner of Kansas to Kansas City as a local call, because both places were in the 913 area code.

You may not have had to dial the area code, but didn't you at least have to dial a 1 before the 7-digit number?  Else you could inadvertently make a long-distance call, that cost you.  I'm sure the whole state wasn't local.

[kphoger]

Back then, too, you could call from the northwest corner of Kansas to Kansas City as a local call, because both places were in the 913 area code.

You may not have had to dial the area code, but didn't you at least have to dial a 1 before the 7-digit number?  Else you could inadvertently make a long-distance call, that cost you.  I'm sure the whole state wasn't local.

No. Everything in the 913 area code (half of Kansas at that time) was a seven-digit dialing pattern.

[SP Cook]

Telephone ramblings.

- I am a bit older, but I certainly can remember when you only had to dial 4 numbers (BTW neither a phone nor a TV  nor most radios have a dial any more but we still use the term). 

- A reference to the original 1947 area code map is as good as any about the move of this country to the Sun Belt.  The only arguabably southern state with more than one AC was Texas. 

- Also, if you consider how a dial works, which place got which AC was by design.  The shortest possible was 212 (New York City).  The heartland and Canada got the ones with all the 8s and 9s.

- As noted long distance used to be d***ed expensive.  That was the way the pre-break up (huge mistake, IMHO) Bell System worked.  They wanted most everybody to have a phone, so local service was really not that big of a money maker.  But they made it up via long distance.  Which, if you look at it, meant that businesses and wealthier people subsidized poorer people. 

- Back in the day, rural people did get squeezed because the phone company was allowed to charge "mileage".  That meant that if you lived in the town the exchange was in, you paid $X, but if you lived out in the countryside, you might pay 50 cents or $1 more just to have a phone.

- About 20% of the country, mostly rural but not always as GTE had several significant cities, had non Bell phone companies.  GTE was the largest and then there were two dozen more.  It seemed that GTE was eternally 10 years behind Bell in technology and then the others were 10 years behind that.  I can remember working in the Bristol VA-TN area, which was a company called United, in the late 80s and it was still dial pay phones and you had to call the operator for long distance. 

[bing101]

Tokyo is halfway between Sacramento and Los Angeles.  Also when you travel west from Sacramento directly you can reach the 38th parallel at the South Korea/North Korea border.   go west in a straight line from San Francisco you reach the city of Seoul, South Korea.

[SP Cook]

Roadgeek aside re:  the WV Turnpike has a sign marking the 38th Parallel as a memorial to Korean War veterans.  I have never seen it marked anywhere else.  They put it up maybe 5 years ago and I really had no idea  that that line passed through the area. 

Marked anywhere else?

[jeffandnicole]

For whatever reason, most cell phone exchanges in my area were Vineland based, which meant it was a local-long distance call from my area.  Back in the days when there were no anytime minutes, every time I made a call or someone called the phone, I was charged since those calls were almost always from outside that local area.

In my area, I was on the edge of what was considered the local calling area.  The next town over to the east was a different zone, and we were charged for those calls even though it was just a few miles away.

When I first went to college in Delaware, I was amazed that their local area included a section of PA.  Even though they had to dial the area code to call into another state, they weren't charged for the call.

At my grandmother's funeral last year, one of the stories I told was about the rotary phone she had in the house until she moved out to a nursing home.  The last two times I used it, I mis-dialed the number.  I never used one since! :-)

[empirestate]

Tokyo is halfway between Sacramento and Los Angeles.  Also when you travel west from Sacramento directly you can reach the 38th parallel at the South Korea/North Korea border.   go west in a straight line from San Francisco you reach the city of Seoul, South Korea.

That all seems perfectly expected to me; doesn't seem to defy conventional wisdom whatsoever.

[bing101]

Tokyo is halfway between Sacramento and Los Angeles.  Also when you travel west from Sacramento directly you can reach the 38th parallel at the South Korea/North Korea border.   go west in a straight line from San Francisco you reach the city of Seoul, South Korea.

That all seems perfectly expected to me; doesn't seem to defy conventional wisdom whatsoever.

A better example Shanghai is south of Los Angeles. And Atlanta is south of Los Angeles.

[paulthemapguy]

There's a thread going around about making a new I-20/I-30 connector across west Texas or something...and I was surprised to find that Las Cruces is pretty much due west of Dallas.  And Phoenix is actually NORTH of Dallas 

[bing101]

Chicago is north of New York


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

[hotdogPi]

Chicago is north of New York


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

That's not surprising. I would have expected them at almost exactly the same latitude, with margin of error possible in either direction.

[empirestate]

Chicago is north of New York


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

That's not surprising. I would have expected them at almost exactly the same latitude, with margin of error possible in either direction.

Yeah, and I'd expect Chicago to be farther north, since, like Upstate NY, it is on the Great Lakes. NYC, on the other hand, is on the Atlantic seabord, which is essentially the "south" coast of NYS.

[23skidoo]

Chicago is north of New York


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

That's not surprising. I would have expected them at almost exactly the same latitude, with margin of error possible in either direction.

Not all that weird to me. What I find really weird is that Chicago is at the same latitude as Rome. Seriously. For example, the Colosseum is at the exact same latitude as Navy Pier. Given that Rome's January is 22 F (12 C) warmer than Chicago, that's incredible.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Heck, my latitude is North of that of Chicago, and yet we have way warmer Winters than Windy City (But we still get temps below freezing every Winter).

[Scott5114]

Ocean currents are a hell of a thing, aren't they?

[english si]

Rome is pretty insulated from the North Atlantic Drift!

That said, the Med is a lot bigger than Lake Michigan, and so the neutering effect of large bodies of water (takes longer to warm/cool than land) is more present (see that Rome is 8.1F (4.5C) cooler in summer, on average, than Chicago).