11 ms·
A Map of Places in the US with the Same Name
- asdfasvea 4y ago[flagged]
- jll29 4y agoPlace name ambiguity was my Ph.D. dissertation topic (Toponym Resolution in Text, University of Edinburgh, 2007): It is a challenge for humans (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name) and even more for machines (going only by the string, all 1627 ¨Santa Ana¨s look the same to the machine). I know live in Coburg, Germany, and googling for ¨pizza coburg¨ I still get pizza places from Coburg, Victoria, Australia in my result page as of 2023.
- schoen 4y ago> (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name) I've imagined this might happen with Ontario, CA, and Ontario, CA (ONT vs. YYZ, maybe), or Portland, ME and Portland, OR (PWM vs. PDL), or maybe Vancouver vs. Vancouver Island (YYJ instead of YVR?). Or San José, Costa Rica (SJO) instead of San José, California (SJC)??
- xvedejas 4y agoI've heard of a mishap involving Granada vs Grenada
- Quikinterp 4y agoI hope nobody managed to mess up Georgia the state and the country
- mixdup 4y agoIt has happened between Birmingham, Alabama (BHM) and Birmingham, England, UK (BHX) https://www.cbs42.com/news/alabama-welcomes-british-couple-after-they-booked-flight-from-wrong-birmingham-airport/ https://www.cbs42.com/news/alabama-welcomes-british-couple-a... Obviously people don't pay attention to flight times, it should've been obvious when the trip was 9 hours shorter than it should've taken
- schoen 4y agoIf I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX). This is also a consequential mistake, but one that initially meant that the purchased flight couldn't be used, rather than that it took the travelers to an unexpected destination. (But according to the story, people then bought an additional BHX-BHM flight for these travelers as a gift so that they could visit the other Birmingham and apparently then make use of the mistaken flight.)
- mixdup 4y ago>If I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX) Yes, but it should've been obvious when the flight to Las Vegas was 4 hours instead of 12
- schoen 4y agoOh, I see, you mean the length of the flight displayed when booking it, rather than the length experienced when sitting on board it!
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI wonder how many times per day a little pizza store in Coburg VIC gets random calls in German? "Sorry mate, you're a bit outside our free delivery range."
- askvictor 4y agoI live in Melbourne, and once had Linkedin feed me a job in Coburg, Germany (upon where I learned that Backend Entwickler means backend developer in German)
- billforsternz 4y agoAustralian place names often follow a slightly dysfunctional pattern IMHO; X Victoria, or Y New South Wales will 9 times out of 10 mean X is a suburb of Melbourne or Y is a suburb of Sydney. The same (albeit slightly weaker) pattern applies to Brisbane/Queensland, Perth/Western Australia, and Adelaide/South Australia. In my humble opinion they botched this, and they should have designed the system so that Coburg, Melbourne, Australia is the canonical form instead because it is much more informative (Coburg is a classic inner city suburb, a quick tram ride from the Melbourne CBD). The underlying reason for this is that the Australian population is usually clustered around the five largest cities in general, and the two largest cities in particular.
- function_seven 4y agoI tried looking up "Hollywood" and apparently the entire country assumes this to mean Hollywood, FL. I assume this means that intra-city place names aren't considered? Another anomly is comparing "Moscow" and "Cambridge". Most places consider "Moscow" to refer to the Russian capital, but consider "Cambridge" to refer to the city in Kentucky. I would have assumed the UK city would get the win here, but the nuance is that when people use this name, they're almost always referring to the university, and not the town it's located in. For the dozen or so other cities I tried, it all seemed right to me. "Springfield" and "Portland" in particular. This is neat!
- alexjplant 4y agoWhen I lived in California, MD I went to Hollywood Elementary School a few miles down the road in Hollywood, MD which is also home to Middle Earth, MD. I can't make this stuff up.
- rascul 4y agoWestern Maryland has an Accident.
- stronglikedan 4y agoFunny, I grew up in Hollywood, FL, and have always had to tell people I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, lest they though I meant California. Unless, of course, they're Canadian, in which case they all seem to know the Florida city very well. Also noticed the "Every place named Hollywood, ranked" section doesn't even mention Hollywood, CA, so that may be why the map is skewed. Upon further investigation, it turns out Hollywood, CA isn't a city, but a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles, so it's all starting to make sense now.
- tshaddox 4y agohttps://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/ https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/ They list their main data sets, which looks to go down to Wikipedia’s lists of incorporated and unincorporated communities. Hollywood, being only a neighborhood, doesn’t make this list. That said, they are also routinely adding new places manually.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoFinally found out where the Simpsons most likely live. Springfield...MA.
- function_seven 4y agoThey revealed it in an episode. It's "Springfield, Oh Hi, Mom!"
- rascul 4y agoIs that the one west of Cambridge?
- divbzero 4y agoThis is pudding cool but the heuristic might need greater weight on proximity, especially at close distances. For example, Bingham County, ID [1] currently yields… Rank #1 Springfield, MA Rank #2 Springfield, IL … but residents would more likely be referring to the local Springfield, ID [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_County,_Idaho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_County,_Idaho [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Idaho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Idaho
- josephscott 4y agoNow I'm curious to know what is the most common city name in the US.
- sillypuddy 4y agoFranklin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._place_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._p...
- cellularmitosis 4y agoI'm really shocked they didn't think to make a sorted list of the most common city names available -- seems like that would be everyone's first question.
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoIn another life I was a truck driver. I was shocked by how many states had a town called Bowling Green. It seemed like every state I drove through would have one.
- Imnimo 4y agoThis is an interesting concept but I feel like the formula needs tuning. There is no way a person in Boston who mentions Baltimore is most likely talking about Baltimore, Vermont a town of 200 people.
- upheaval7276 4y agoPleased to see this goes further than just accounting for city names that are spelled the same. I often travel to Portland for work. First time I was asked by a number of employees "Where are you from?" Answering "Milwaukee" eventually resulted in a follow-up: "...but you flew here?" That puzzling question lead me to realize that everyone thought I was from "Milwaukie, OR", which is quite close to Portland. Pronounced the same as "Milwaukee", different spelling. Looking at the map in this thread, indeed "Milwaukee" means Milwaukee, WI everywhere in the US except for a subsection of OR.
- midwesternerer 4y agoI thought the map for "Portland" was going to be an interesting split between the city in Oregon vs the city in Maine, but it didn't even recognize the city in Maine. I think it showed up fourth on its list losing out to two cities in Midwestern states.
- sillypuddy 4y agoIt would be cool if it could handle "the city"
- js2 4y agoIt dropped me into Denver, telling me that as a resident of Wake County, NC, I'm mostly likely talking about Denver, NC. I've lived in Wake County since 2004 and literally never heard of Denver, NC before today. Oh well. NC does have a town named Climax and apparently it's town most people in the US are thinking of when they're thinking of Climax.
- dwighttk 4y ago“Every county on the map above gets a score for each place based on a combination of proximity, population, and Wikipedia article length, then normalized by share.” This score does not tell you “what place someone is most likely referring to, depending on where they are.”
- cjensen 4y agoYep. Love the idea, but the score is pretty wrong. E.g. Fremont. According to the map, there is a large area north of Sacramento for whom "Fremont" refers to an unpopulated place in Yolo County[1] rather than the city of a quarter million a in the Bay Area. That seems.... unlikely. [1] Railroad sidings have names and end up in geographic place lists. Looks to me like Wikipedia has filtered out many siding names but not all of them. I suspect this particular "Fremont" is a siding name.
- junar 4y agoAlso, in the Seattle area, "Fremont" likely refers to its Fremont neighborhood, and not, as the map claims, a place in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont,_Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont,_Seattle
- rsclient 4y agoWeirdly, it doesn't handle unique placenames. So if I say my mom is from Huntertown, where do people think she's from? No answer, and it won't even try. That's because there's only one Huntertown.
- virtualwhys 4y agoThe top Cambridge listed is Cambridge, KY, which is bizarre. I'd have expected Cambridge, MA, or Cambridge, UK, far and away the most well known towns of this name in the world, but they're far down the list. Algorithm could use some fine tuning :)
- pimlottc 4y agoI imagine it varies greatly depending on social-economic class too. I would guess that people who didn't go to college are less aware of Cambridge, MA, since it's perhaps best known for its famous schools.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoYeah but socio-economic class has no part in the methodology used here, which seems entirely based on population, proximity and Wikipedia article size.
- pimlottc 4y agoRight, but the HN demographic is probably more college-aware than the population at large, so that may explain why Cambridge, MA ranked lower than virtualwhys expected.
- AbsoluteCabbage 4y agoDoesn’t load.
- verytrivial 4y agoLet the explainer[1] explain why this really doesn't make all that much sense: "We chose to blend three properties to match our perception of how this plays out in reality: Distance: the proximity to a place. Population: the size of a place is a pretty good indicator of its importance. Wikipedia article length: an extra layer of nuance for the cultural importance/awareness of places that may not have a large population." [1] https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/ https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/
- oxfeed65261 4y agoI tried Carthage and Troy. Neither are handled well, despite lengthy Wikipedia articles and calculable distances. Maybe a current population of zero results in exclusion.
- cglong 4y agoAs someone who's lived in both Atlanta, GA and Seattle, WA, I've never heard of Washington, GA :)
- mikelward 4y agoPortland is interesting. It ranks Portland, Tennessee and Portland, Indiana above Portland, Maine. https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/?place=Portland https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/?place=Portland Weighing wiki length more heavily seems to produce better results. Aside: there are several Portlands that don't seem to be ports (they're not on oceans or rivers)?