Category: Tools
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Duck
Several years ago, and I don’t recall exactly when, I wrote an entire Twelve Mile Circle article without using a single Google tool. I found it incredibly frustrating, nearly impossible. The article got buried somewhere in the archive and I don’t remember the title. Just trust me. I didn’t enjoy it. Apparently I didn’t learn…
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Five Years of Searching
Twelve Mile Circle featured an article with the curious title Search for Search and Other Tales about two years ago. This effort examined a year’s worth of search queries that people entered into the website. To be clear as before, these weren’t random searches from Google or other sources, these were actual words or phrases…
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States Based on Closest State Capital
Twelve Mile Circle receives a fair amount of reader mail and suggestions. Usually it leads to pleasant surprises and sometimes even an article. That happened recently with a map generated by Steve Spivey who graciously granted permission for me to share it with the 12MC audience. Steve had been combing through the very earliest days…
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Skewed Perspective
There was a time in the early days of Twelve Mile Circle when I used to devote entire articles to differences in distances that didn’t seem plausible, although of course the actual measurements didn’t lie. For example, sticking with the Twelve theme, the twelfth article I ever posted on 12MC all the way back in…
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Mapillary
I noticed a tweet from a Twelve Mile Circle reader a few months ago that mentioned Mapillary. I can’t recall who that was although he or she deserves my appreciation. Since then I’ve been watching Mapillary from a distance and I’ve become increasingly intrigued by its possibilities. 12MC almost never features individual websites. This is…
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Presidential Distances
Twelve Mile Circle talked about birthplaces and death locations of the Presidents of the United States. Now let’s finish this off with a comparison of distances between those two points. This involved a rather simple process of dropping the lat/long coordinates for each president into a great circle distance calculator and recording the results. Then…
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Presidential Death Locations
After examining birthplaces of the Presidents of the United States, I shifted gears and did the same thing for the places where they died. This became a little more problematic. Historians place more attention on exact places of birth, undoubtedly because it’s a more cheerful subject. I began with the shared spreadsheet compiled in the…
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Presidential Birthplaces
I’m not sure why I began to think about the birthplaces of every President of the United States. Maybe this might interest people, or so I considered. However I wasn’t fooling myself — I did it for me. Theoretically I could pass through one of these areas someday in the future and I might want…
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Dubious References
I don’t think of Twelve Mile Circle as a definitive source. I do my best to produce an acceptable level of accuracy. Admittedly, I’m not an authority on most geo-oddities even when I’ve been fortunate enough to visit them on the ground. It amuses me to find instances of Wikipedia citing 12MC as a footnoted…
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Starting Points
Preparing for a quick out-of-town jaunt to visit with friends living in the Twelve Mile Circle, the actual geographic quirk in Delaware for which this site was named, prompted me to plot a course designed to avoid the dreaded Delaware Border Tax. I succeeded in that goal by the way although that wasn’t germane to…