9 ms·
Map Data: False Assumptions
- polemic 4y agoAnd all that map data sits on geodesy which come with their own bucket of false assumptions.
- Freak_NL 4y agoThe example of the Netherlands is a good one. When people say or think 'the Netherlands', most of the time (about 99%) they mean the country on the European continent in the Schengen area bordered by Belgium and Germany, but there is also a bit of colonial legacy lingering in the Caribbean in the form of overseas territories that are formally part of our kingdom: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/47796 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/47796 So if you say 'all Dutch addresses have a postcode', then this is true for 99.999% of the addresses in the country proper (100% for all formally defined addresses), but you won't find any in the Caribbean island of Saba which is part of the kingdom.
- j16sdiz 4y agoIs Alaska part of America? How about Hawaii?
- zinekeller 4y agoNo, this is not the equivalent question. The more appropriate one for US is Puerto Rico or even US Virgin Islands.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoOr Guam, among others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_St...
- JJMcJ 4y agoEach of the territories have slightly different statuses. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is "closer" to being like a state than any of the others.
- JJMcJ 4y agoLearned that during the GW Bush administration, the Federal Government was ordered to interact with the government of Puerto Rico, as much as with possible, in the same way as an equivalent interaction with a state government. So it is closer.
- afiori 4y agoA discussion of all the various territories of the US https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASSOQDQvVLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASSOQDQvVLU
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI think Greenland is part of Denmark. Don’t forget administrative districts, like Guam, or Puerto Rico. Tokyo has a “grid-based” street addressing system, that I never fully understood. There are streets with no name, there (wasn’t that a U2 song?). I find that long/lat (don’t forget the Southern Hemisphere) is about the only universal constant. If I am writing software that has a focus on just one nation, that helps a lot, but I need to keep in mind, that I may want to expand it. Normalizing time, across the International Date Line, or Prime Meridian, is also fun (Daylight Savings makes this fun. India has a time zone that has a 30-minute component).
- a_c 4y agoRegarding japanese addresses, you can either see blocks as unnamed spaces between streets, or streets as unnamed spaces between blocks. https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_differe...
- JJMcJ 4y agoGreenland now has a semi-autonomous status under the Danish monarch, so not part of Denmark. So it is similar to the former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean in that respect. And there are also +45 minute time zones. Not just India. Including one zone in Australia, and Newfoundland in Canada. Here is a map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png/1200px-Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/So... Look at it and tremble.
- apendleton 4y agoAs in the article, I think it depends to some extent on what question you're asking. "What is the population of the US?" is almost definitely intended to include Alaska and Hawaii, but if someone asks "what is the geographic center of the US," they probably intend for the answer to be something in South Dakota, not the point off the coast of British Columbia that you get if you include Alaska and Hawaii, or the point out in the middle of the Pacific if you include Guam, etc.
- JJMcJ 4y agoPolitically they are two of fifty states of the United States, and on an equal footing with the other 48. Geographically, Alaska is part of North America, and Hawaii isn't.
- jorams 4y agoAnd depending on what you care about, this gets even more complicated. Some of the territories in the Carribean are part of the country of the Netherlands that you linked to (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba), while there are others that are separate countries part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten). Some things are matters of the kingdom, while others are matters of the country. For example, those other countries are not part of the European Union, but their citizens are citizens of the European Union since that's a matter of the Kingdom.
- eesmith 4y agoA couple of years ago I wondered if any chocolate was made from EU-grown cacao, since French Guiana in South America is part of the EU. Wasn't really able to find any. Some asylum seekers go to French Guiana hoping to get to France that way. It's not an easy option - https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/28188/french-guiana-a-new-migrant-gateway-to-france-buckles-under-pressure https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/28188/french-guiana-a-n... and https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/photo-feature/2021/2/3/french-guiana-cuba-migrants-EU-asylum-life-in-limbo https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/photo-feature/2021/2/3/fr... . ("Rent is high, and most food and basic necessities are imported from Europe, at a price.") Not easy reads.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoThe Netherlands has a more fun example: Baarle Nassau. Which is a weird city where parts of the city are Belgian enclaves. It even has nesting of exclaves and enclaves. And of course some houses have doors in multiple countries, which makes delivering mail and figuring out taxes interesting.
- Freak_NL 4y agoHe shows that in the article too, but it's really just a historical curiosity with little impact on day to day living beyond a few trifles. Mail and taxes have been solved long ago; all dwellings have a 'main' front door which determines which country's laws and taxes apply — it's not something that changes arbitrarily. It's reportedly great for tourism though.
- freyfogle 4y agoYes, lots of geoweird things about the Netherlands. See: https://twitter.com/OpenCage/status/1511722717476700163 https://twitter.com/OpenCage/status/1511722717476700163
- DoreenMichele 4y agoYou may be tempted to think that at least within a country, the administrative division should follow a homogeneous structure. However, you would be wrong again. In the US, 48 of its 50 states have counties. Louisiana has parishes, which are essentially counties by another name. Alaska has boroughs which are distinct from counties: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_areas_in_Alaska https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_...
- apendleton 4y ago48 of 50 states have a thing called a "county," but they're not all necessarily the same concept. In many states, counties are the division below the state but above cities, and have edge-to-edge coverage (all points in the state are in a county). In some states, however, counties and at least some cities are peer administrative entities (Virginia is an example), so there are some locations that are only in a county but not a city, some locations that are only in a city but not a county, and some locations that are in both.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoThank you. There are also some city-county consolidated governments: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_city-county https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_city-county
- avidphantasm 4y agoIn a similar vein, I used to think that counties contained cities, but then in college I met someone from NYC who correctly pointed out that cities can contain counties.
- jherskovic 4y agoThere's several cities within Harris County (Houston, Texas), and the Houston area -which some people will refer to as "Houston", "Greater Houston", or "the Greater Houston Area", overlaps several counties. There are also several cities wholly contained within the City of Houston itself. West University and Bellaire come to mind; there's probably more but I can't be bothered. It's a mess to someone who likes things neat :)
- bluenose69 4y agoThis is an intriguing site, part of a series that is also intriguing. One thing I hadn't noticed before (see https://solutionspace.blog/2022/05/13/map-data-i-its-all-about-relations/ https://solutionspace.blog/2022/05/13/map-data-i-its-all-abo...) is that openstreetmap gives a lot of digits on coordinates. I see 45.6684436 listed as a latitude. If that last digit were changed to a 7, the location would shift by about 1cm. In lots of places, plate tectonics is moving things by about that amount per year. I wonder whether openstreetmap is automatically shifting things in its database, using a tectonics model. I also wonder why they are giving so many digits for user-entered data. Can a person buy an affordable GPS that gives centimetre resolution?
- adrianN 4y agoUsers might enter data from different sources than their own GPS. I don't think that 1cm resolution is possible with GPS (the signals can have systematic errors for example caused by reflections).
- severak_cz 4y agoI don't think OSM data are actually that precise. Also - I think moving data with some model is highly impractical. Location shift of 1cm is very small - things can move this small for various reasons - erosion, wear of material or construction nearby.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y agoOSM internally stores lat/lon in integer columns in a Postgres db, where the stored value is lat*10000000 (and lon*10000000). There is no tectonics model applied.
- Pinus 4y agoSomebody noticed (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/StephaneP/diary/390290 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/StephaneP/diary/390290) that OSM isn't even consistent about which datum it uses. (Discussed in HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20460596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20460596 ). (Though to be fair, the datum error is probably smaller than e.g. GPS error in most cases.) As for the "why" bit, the answer is probably "store and report whatever the user reports".
- rob74 4y ago> There are areas in the world that are simply no man’s land. (Terra Nullius if you want to sound smart at the next cocktail party). Bir Tawil is an interesting case to study: This area between Egypt and Sudan is claimed by neither of the two bordering countries. It is the only geopolitically disputed area on earth in which both parties state “Nah, this is not mine, it’s yours!”. In case you're not familiar with this particular quirk, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil) explains it better than I could: "Its terra nullius status results from a discrepancy between the straight political boundary between Egypt and Sudan established in 1899, and the irregular administrative boundary established in 1902. Egypt asserts the political boundary, and Sudan asserts the administrative boundary, with the result that the Hala'ib Triangle is claimed by both and Bir Tawil by neither." So because both countries claim the Hala'ib Triangle (which is much larger and has sea access), neither claim Bir Tawil (which is smaller and in the middle of the desert).
- mdp2021 4y agoAnybody in to create a physical HN community? Be bring soil and protect it regulating the sun through elevated solar panels; solutions for irrigation are an open question. We get satellite connectivity and sell services to the neighbours and more. Since we get free land before full maturity of inflatable oceanic land... Well, one can dream.
- eesmith 4y agoSeveral have already attempted that. All hail Princess Emily of the Kingdom of North Sudan. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jul/15/claim-piece-africa-for-daughter-princess-emily-sudan https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jul/... Or is that the Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil? https://birtawilgov.weebly.com/ https://birtawilgov.weebly.com/ Or perhaps the The Emirate of Bir Tawil? https://emirateofbirtawil.blogspot.com/ https://emirateofbirtawil.blogspot.com/ Or the Grand Dukedom of Bir-Tawil? http://www.chiefacoins.com/Database/Micro-Nations/Grand_Dukedom_of_Bir-Tawil.htm http://www.chiefacoins.com/Database/Micro-Nations/Grand_Duke... The Emerite of Bir Tawil - https://www.prlog.org/11294860-emirate-of-bir-tawil-is-formed.html https://www.prlog.org/11294860-emirate-of-bir-tawil-is-forme... The Confederated Empire of Bir Tawil and Territories - https://www.facebook.com/The-Confederated-Empire-of-Bir-Tawil-and-Territories-103972474859469/ https://www.facebook.com/The-Confederated-Empire-of-Bir-Tawi... The United Lunar Emirates - https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/accept-united-lunar-emirates-to-be-member-of https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/accept-united-lunar-emir... Whatever you do, watch out for bandits.
- mkl 4y agoThere's an even more fundamental false assumption: that the ground doesn't move. Earthquakes can displace large areas with respect to each other. E.g. https://www.otago.ac.nz/geology/news/archive/2010/darfield-EQ-9-2010.html https://www.otago.ac.nz/geology/news/archive/2010/darfield-E...
- DoreenMichele 4y agoContinental drift, subduction, new volcanic islands being born, long run out landslides, meandering rivers....the list is much longer than just earthquakes.
- iso1631 4y agoMan-made islands were mentioned in the article. This is better presented that those arrogant listy things about dates/names/etc though, and certainly doesn't claim to be a complete list.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arethuza 4y agoMy favourite: post glacial rebound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
- jillesvangurp 4y agoMore interesting is regular continental drift is a thing as well. Up to several centimeters per year depending on where you are. The Greenwich meridian is no longer running through the dotted line they have there, for example. It's about a hundred meters away from there. That's a couple of hundred years of continental drift and some other corrections.
- eesmith 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian_(Greenwich) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian_(Greenwich) > The actual reason for the discrepancy is that the difference between precise GNSS coordinates and astronomically determined coordinates everywhere remains a localized gravity effect due to vertical deflection; thus, no systematic rotation of global longitudes occurred between the former astronomical system and the current geodetic system. Cites https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00190-015-0844-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00190-015-0844-y which breaks down the reason for the approximately 102 m difference ("In Sects. 2 and 3, the authors show that the deflection of the vertical (DoV) can account for the entire longitude shift at Greenwich.") and some of the alternatives. For example: > Crustal motion from plate tectonics is also much too small to explain the observed longitude difference. Britain and most of Europe are moving toward the northeast at about 3 cm/year (a longitude change of 0.1 arc-second/century) with respect to the WGS 84 terrestrial coordinate frame (Altamimi et al. 2012). The accumulated effect relative to other monitoring stations amounts to only a few meters since its designation as prime meridian in 1884.
- iso1631 4y agoOne fun example of the changing boundaries not mentioned is Pheasant Island This changes country between France and Spain every 6 months https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42817859 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42817859
- iso1631 4y agoI note the page didn't specifically mention disputed territory (only in passing). Crimea, Western Sahara, Israel and that area, Navassa Island, etc. What country does your program display for Tiraspol? Jericho? Jerusalem?
- Lex-2008 4y agoI'm not sure if your question is rhetoric, but somewhere I've read that some map providers show it depending on what country the user (website visitor) is in - so users in country A see the disputed territory as belonging to country A, users in country B see it as belonging to their country, and everyone else sees this territory as "disputed between A and B". Governments of both A and B might have opposite demands from the same map-making company and threat it with legal consequences. Also, in recent news: https://yandex.com/maps/ https://yandex.com/maps/ decided not to show country borders at all: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/09/yandex-maps-no-borders/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/09/yandex-maps-no-borders/
- fatnoah 4y agoThis is how things were handled at Facebook. Your view of a disputed border depends on your country. i.e. You'll see whatever borders are favorable to your own country's interpretation.
- fleddr 4y agoIn Google Maps, when reverse geocoding a point on the map that is disputed, the result will not return any country identifier. They base this logic on the UN list of disputed areas.
- dme1 4y agoHi, author here. Thanks for reading my stuff! :-) I did not go into details of geopolitical issues because I covered that in an earlier article: https://solutionspace.blog/2022/05/23/map-data-ii-the-role-of-geopolitics/ https://solutionspace.blog/2022/05/23/map-data-ii-the-role-o...
- llamajams 4y agoOh boy, my current project is all very related to this and some other cases that havent been covered. It would be an interesting case study to cover in detail if it weren't for IP confidentiality. My favourite one is of the arch team having not accounted for continental drift, which is leading to massive field issues with bad map updates. Another fun anecdote regarding addressing. In my childhood my dad moved us to a remote village on a tiny island, no house numbers , no road names. Our mailing address was something like; "Mr Jones, village on the west side of Island, behind Mrs. Smith's convenience store" we weren't really behind the store and there was a half dozen neighbors. I got a nice kick when we got our fancy immigration papers...and that scribbled all over the docs. There were other people that had to reference creeks, trees, or various parts of a mountain
- enobrev 4y agoThat reminds me of a friend's address in South America, which is "1200m up from such and such cemetery" (up as in above).
- wodenokoto 4y ago> It is the only geopolitically disputed area on earth in which both parties state “Nah, this is not mine, it’s yours!”. I thought this was the same for Liberland, but apparently it was Croatia asserting that Serbia owns Siga, while Serbia makes no claim. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
- n4r9 4y ago> Assuming That The Road Network Is A Connected Graph This is a really interesting issue in routing problems. Given the start and end coordinates, the temptation is to "snap" them to the closest edge of the road network. Of course, when presented with real world data, one or both coordinates might unintentionally be close to a road that's part of a closed circuit (think race track or airport runway), or within a weight-limited set of roads that the vehicle cannot access etc... . So before running any kind of search algorithm, you have to have a pre-processing step that figures out the transitable component of the road network for that vehicle, and snap the coordinates to the closest edge on that component.
- madamelic 4y agoHere's how to make sure you parse emails, addresses, names, anything user entered: use the info to verify. Don't write a regex, don't try to check if _you_ think it is valid. If you need it to be valid, (e)mail them something at that address and get a verification code back. The amount of times I've been told 1/2 addresses aren't valid (technically, in the US, an address can be any fraction [0]), any address over 30 characters, domains that have tlds longer than 3 characters, domains that have tlds shorter than 3 characters, domains that aren't gmail.com, on and on and on. Just stop. Stop trying to fit user-entered content into your tiny conception of what is "valid". Your user knows better than you and there is zero chance you'll write or should write a mega regex to determine validity. [0]: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28ape_004.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28ape_004.htm
- chickenWing 4y agoNot only that, but don't rely on third-party services to do your validation for you, and yes, that includes the US Post Office, if you're looking for a physical address. There are many physical addresses in the United States that the Post Office doesn't deliver mail to, and yet people live there. I know because I live in one of those places. UPS and Fed-Ex have no problem finding the address, but for regular mail I have to use a PO Box. It is frustrating when I don't know which method an online store will use. It is also frustrating when a site repeatedly tells me my address doesn't exist.
- mauvehaus 4y agoWe're in the same boat, and it gets worse than this. Our local post office asks that when addressing packages to be shipped by UPS or FedEx, we include our PO Box as an apartment number. The reason for this is that parcel services sometimes have agreements with USPS to hand off last-mile delivery to USPS. Which means USPS is stuck trying to figure out how to deliver a package to an address they don't serve. Adding the PO Box number as an apartment number gets them over this hump. Needless to say, it causes absolute havoc with address validation. All of the humans locally involved in delivery know what's up and it all just works, but getting an address following this convention past the computers can be a special kind of hell. It also turns out that at least one validation service thinks our street address is in a different zip code than it actually is. Having to fudge the address with merchants using such validation services sometimes ends with a trip to the wrong post office and profuse apologies while they rummage through the back looking for a package that's genuinely misaddressed, but wouldn't have been shipped otherwise. Please, please give your users an escape hatch to use the address as entered, even if it doesn't validate.
- usrbinbash 4y agoIt's mind-boggling that we, as a species, can; ...on the one hand; send probes to outer space, people to the moon, research how to implement fusion-based power plants, do genetic engineering, reason about black holes, build the Large Hadron Collider, and connect billions of people to the largest repository of information available by means of battery-powered devices so tiny they fit in a pocket; ...but on the other hand don't implement a common baseline for how to organisationally subdivide and address areas of land.
- otabdeveloper4 4y agoYes, resource allocation is a much more difficult problem than resource consumption. Why is this mind-boggling?
- Karellen 4y agoBecause the problem of resource consumption initially appears to be a subset of the problem of resource allocation. You are generally not permitted to consume resources that your peers have not agreed to allocate to you, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth if you do. Therefore, if resource consumption is occurring, some set of resource allocation strategies should already have been agreed upon.
- usrbinbash 4y agoAll the more reason to make said allocation easier to handle. A unified system of land organisation, subdivision and addressing would make it easier to determine/refine/update which land is allocated how, similar to how unified systems of measurment made trade easier a long time ago. Even for entities in conflict over what land belongs to whom, such a system would simplify the formulating and argueing of their respective claims.
- jlangenauer 4y agoHere's another one: assuming that each point on the surface of the earth belongs to exactly one region. An example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinst%C3%BCcken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinst%C3%BCcken Steinstücken was an exclave of West Berlin located in East Germany. It turned out to be inconvenient for the residents to cross borders to get to the rest of Berlin, so a land swap deal was arranged for the road linking Steinstücken to the rest of West Berlin to become part of West Berlin, and some other land elsewhere was given in return. This road, however, crosses a railway on a bridge, and the East Germans didn't want their railway to pass through West Berlin. So the border actually runs under the bridge and above the railway, and if you stand on or underneath the bridge, the actual region you'd be standing in depended on your altitude, even if the latitude and longitude was the same. This is still true today - although the regions are the Bundesländer of Berlin and Brandenburg.
- eCa 4y agoA similar example is[1], an island that every six months switches ownership between France and Spain. So which country it belongs to depends on when you look at it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheasant_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheasant_Island
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI was hoping the wiki article would explain why France and Spain have this arrangement but the only treaties mentioned are the ones signed on the island itself. It seems like something that would be trivial to resolve, but I sense the novelty of the situation is more valuable than any hassles that arise from the peculiarities of the situation.
- dopidopHN 4y agoIt’s a small river island … at this point it’s quaint enough to keep as is.
- hinkley 4y agoThe Citibank building in New York leans over a church that the developers bought the rights to do. The church owns the land but there's a easement that allows the skyscraper to occupy the air beyond some elevation above it.
- greggyb 4y agoOne of my favorites on this topic is US ZIP codes. Most people tend to think that ZIP codes are contiguous geographic subdivisions. Most people also tend to think of a ZIP code as a contained part of some administrative boundary. To grossly oversimplify, ZIP codes are essentially mail delivery routes. They are paths, not borders. My ZIP code is serviced by the post office of a neighboring town. Almost every single online service I interact with that needs my address refuses to accept my actual town in my address, but instead replaces it, based on the ZIP code, with the neighboring town. The same is true for most GPS navigation.
- arethuza 4y agoCan ZIP codes change? I found out on a project a few years back that the postcodes of UK properties can change.
- freyfogle 4y agoyou may enjoy: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-think-about-postcodes-and-geocoding https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-think-about-postcodes...
- eesmith 4y agoYes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#Division_and_reallocation_of_ZIP_Codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#Division_and_realloca...
- HelloNurse 4y agoItalian fiscal codes are usually mishandled in a similar way: rare unfortunate citizens have the same computed code as each other (close name and surname, same sex, same birth day and same birth place), the government issues them special numeric codes, but clever websites insist on computing the code from personal information and rejecting numerical codes.
- jcrawfordor 4y agoAccording to USPS, every ZIP code has a "recommended" or primary city name. This is typically the city of the post office that serves the zone. USPS address validation tools will always replace the city name on an address with the recommended city name for that ZIP code. However, USPS also maintains in their addressing database a list of "recognized" or secondary city names for a ZIP code. For ZIP codes that span multiple towns this list can be fairly long. As far as USPS is concerned these city names are not "recommended" but nonetheless interchangeable, so you can e.g. write the name of your town on mail to the nearby town containing the post office. It's also common for the "recognized" list to include special cases like "Campus" if there's a university or sometimes names of large corporate facilities. This is all just to solidify the point that, as far as USPS is concerned, ZIP codes are the organizational unit on which mail is routed and town names are only for human convenience. Ultimately this convention extends to each house since the 11-digit ZIP+4+DP (included in the IMB barcode) should uniquely identify a physical location at which mail is delivered.
- abruzzi 4y agoMy favorite is a fun little time thing--Arizona, somewhat famously does not recognise DST, unlike surrounding states, so in the summer it is no longer mountain time. inside AZ, is the Navajo Nation (which is also in the three other sourrounding states.) The Navajo Nation does recognise DST, so in the summer, if you're driving through AZ, and head northeast, you'll have to change your watch befroe you leave the state. Then, completely surrounded by the navajo nation is the Hopi Nation. the Hopi do not recognize DST like Arizona.
- stonemetal12 4y agoIn Indiana DST observation is decided at the county level, so it isn't uniform across the state.
- JJMcJ 4y agoGood article - just wish it had followed the canon and been titled "Falsehoods Programmers Believe . . .". Hats off to patio11 for that title. The Bay Area was mentioned. There's plenty of chaos there as, for example, school districts don't follow city boundaries, and names are confusing. For example, the Fremont Union High School District serves Sunnyvale mostly, not Fremont. Also note the "Union" in the name. That's different than "Unified" which means the district administers both the high schools and elementary schools. Because after all the Fremont Unified School District serves Fremont. Part of the reason was that the districts were formed before the area was fully urbanized and the annexation boundaries didn't match the district boundaries. Got all that?
- Gordonjcp 4y agoStreet numbers might not be unique, or continuous, on a given piece of road. Dumbarton Road in Glasgow is contiguous with Dumbarton Road in Clydebank, but somewhere along the line where one becomes the other the numbers reset. So, there are two 181 Dumbarton Roads, a few miles apart, as I found when I worked in a shop there in the late 90s.
- madcaptenor 4y agoI seem to recall this also happening across the Cambridge-Somerville border in Massachusetts, maybe on one of the streets that runs from Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge up towards Davis Square in Somerville, although I'm having trouble finding it now.
- madcaptenor 4y agoFound it! Google Maps walking directions from 38 Cameron Avenue, Cambridge to 38 Cameron Avenue, Somerville: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/38+Cameron+Avenue,+Cambridge,+MA/38+Cameron+Ave,+Somerville,+MA+02144/@42.3990736,-71.1303421,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e3771c6d03b453:0x56bbc210b2076366!2m2!1d-71.1288362!2d42.3983958!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e3771c390b68e7:0x9b1f4243ea4952d8!2m2!1d-71.1274405!2d42.3996922 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/38+Cameron+Avenue,+Cambridge... If you zoom in it looks like both cities start numbering from 1 at the "beginning" of the street with numbers going up until they reach the city line.
- loudmax 4y agoThe street I used to live on in the suburbs of Portland, OR was not contiguous. To get from one part of the street to the other, you had to drive down at least two other other streets. Or another way to look at it was that there were two distinct nearby streets with precisely the same name. At least the house numbers were unique. This was a source of frustration and confusion, especially before GPS's became common.
- madcaptenor 4y agoThis is common in Philadelphia. There's a roughly square grid of streets, but then some parts of the grid are subdivided with north-south streets and some are subdivided with east-west streets, and which ones are which seems to be random. Streets that are in the same position in the street grid will have the same name, even if not contiguous. Various segments of Camac Street (which runs between 12th and 13th, roughly where "12+1/3 street" would be) are a good example: https://goo.gl/maps/eKGrA1ByHAbmWSx16 https://goo.gl/maps/eKGrA1ByHAbmWSx16