Tag: geography

  • Daylight Savings Time

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    You clearly didn’t miss this story from two weeks ago, because we all had to change our clocks. But, you might not have thought much about it. Which is fine, because I think there was an election or something a day or two later. Or was I dreaming/nightmaring? Thankfully Andy Woodruff did think about it…

  • Pennsylvania’s Polls

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Again, the election is next week. And since I have moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, I now find myself in a contested state. This piece comes from the New York Times and explores the polling results across the blue-leaning-but-still-a-swing-state. I find it particularly interesting just how much red and purple there is in the suburban…

  • Covering Terrorism

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week we witnessed the lorry attack in Nice, France. This week we have the axeman attack on a German train. Does anybody note, however, the recent terror attacks in Dhaka, Bangladesh? Probably not, according to this insightful piece from FiveThirtyEight. They took a look at journalism’s coverage of terror attacks and whether there are…

  • Mapping a New America

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    The United States of America consists of 50 states and hundreds of cities. In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times Parag Khanna argued for the switch of priority away from the state-level and to effectively the city-level. We have clusters of cities that dominate and drive the national economy. The classic case-in-point is Bowash,…

  • Living on the Grid

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s post relates very much to yesterday’s post. But this one is from the New York Times and uses aerial photography to showcase how the Jefferson grid system works in reality after it was implemented as shown yesterday. Credit for the piece goes to the person behind the Instagram account @the.jefferson.grid

  • Organising Western Lands

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    A few weeks back I looked at my ancestral family’s land grant in Wisconsin. Unlike land on the East Coast that was surveyed and organised by pioneers in different colonies using different sets of rules, after the formation of the United States, surveyed land was organised into townships that had subdivisions. In this blog post…

  • What Time Is It?

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    North Korea Time! But no, seriously, North Korea announced this past Friday that it is placing itself inside a new time zone. This Washington Post piece has a graphic that looks at just how weird the new time zone is in relation to the rest of the region. Credit for the piece goes to the…

  • MH370 Found?

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last night (Central Daylight time), news broke that what might be part of the wing of a Boeing 777, which is the same type of aircraft as the missing Malaysian Flight 370, washed up on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The Guardian was following the story last night and one of…

  • Your Average Daily Sunshine

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    (Hint, it’s not me.) I was talking with someone the other day about how I dislike warm weather. Give me nice, cool, crisp weather any day of the week. And also how I am okay without sunshine—a cool, misty, grey day is lovely. Much of weather, of course, is determined by sunlight, energy, hitting the…

  • Water Level on Lake Michigan

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s a little piece for those of you who follow me from the Chicago area. It turns out that in the last 30 months, the water level of Lake Michigan has risen three feet. Despite what some people think, Lake Michigan is not an ocean—I have overheard conversations in my neighbourhood about people who went…