Tag: District of Columbia
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National Mall Flood Plan
The Washington Post featured an interesting map of the 100-year flood plain in the vicinity of the National Mall in Washington, DC, accompanying the article, Flood plan proposed to protect Washington Mall. It discusses a construction project that’s just about underway. When completed, it will keep a large crescent of land dry if the Potomac…
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American Meridian Gathering
I draw your attention to a comment from faithful reader “Craig” on my recent Third Anniversary announcement. I know a lot of you use RSS to skim through the articles so you probably didn’t catch it. He said, “Maybe we should have a Twelve Mile Circle Happy Hour to celebrate” and he even offered a…
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Virtual Traffic Circle
Traffic circles or roundabouts are a common design that circulates traffic safely and efficiently through intersections. They are a primary choice in many parts of the world. Nonetheless, they are much less common in the United States. Many American drivers tremble in fear when encountering one. That is the exact situation experienced this week by…
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Playing Both Sides of the Street
Dinosaur that I am, I still get a print copy of the newspaper each morning. We’ve laughed about that before. However, it’s an old-school habit I’ll likely not break until the publisher itself gives up on the media. I’m no Luddite and I’ve left behind a huge digital wake as I’ve cruised the Intertubes. Nonetheless…
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Charting the Split
I recently recorded a question of amazing specificity, what I’d call a hyper-local geographic oddity that’s probably of interest only to a handful of people. Fortunately I’m one of those very few souls and maybe you are too. I’ll tie it in with a little history to widen the audience just a bit, so stick…
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Let it Snow!
It’s snowing here in the Washington, DC area today. Already they’re calling it the snowpocalypse, the snownami, and of course “The Blizzard of 2009”. People around here tend to overreact when it snows because we don’t generally get large accumulations. Naturally everyone stripped the grocery stores bare of milk, bread, and toilet paper as it…
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The Danger of a Small Sample Size
Fair warning, little geographic content makes it onto Twelve Mile Circle today. Mostly I’ll focus on statistics. No, no, don’t go running for the door quite yet. It will be fun and actually the statistical slant will be relatively mild, grossly overly simplified with sweeping generalizations and involve no actual mathematics. I went to a…
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American Meridian
The international community recognizes a prime meridian that runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in southeast London, England. It serves as a reference point for universal time and distance. However, that has not always been the case. Latitude is easy. The equator divides the planet into northern and southern hemispheres quite logically. Longitude is…
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Just How Wide is Hudson Bay, Really?
Everything about Canada is larger than life. It’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around its incredible breadth and scale. I came across a tantalizing fact that I thought might help conceptualize its vastness. Actually it’s a clever little illusion, some geography-slight-of-hand. In fact I think it’s more enjoyable as a mind-bender than as a trivia…
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A Capital Fourth
A Rare Opportunity Something awesome dropped into my lap a few days before the July 4 Independence Day celebrations. My family and I received an invitation to view the fireworks on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The vantage was a rooftop balcony only two blocks away from the action. A lifetime can pass without…