Feb 20, 2016 21:05
- blogTO notes some interesting-looking apartment complexes scheduled to be built in Toronto.
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- The Dragon's Gaze notes that the Hubble telescope directly imaged gas giant 2M1207b, determining its rotation about its brown dwarf primary.
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The whole agricultural Midwest has this one-mile grid of plots overlaid on it, of course, and there are roads like these that follow the grid lines. But North Dakota seems to have the most uninterrupted, regular naming system for them, and instead of calling them (foo) Road it's got this macrocosmic streets/avenues theme. The avenues go north/south and the streets go east/west, and they're numbered from the geographic center of the state with quadrant names (NE, SE, NW, SW) just like streets in Washington, DC. The system gets interrupted by the analogous grid systems of streets in individual towns, but go far enough outside the town and the state system resumes.
Even better: at the very center of the state in each direction, there's a "Main Street" and a "Center Avenue" going all the way across North Dakota. And the grand intersection of Main Street and Center Avenue for the entire state is... in a completely nondescript spot right in the middle, near McClusky. The roads are dirt roads. There's nothing there but somebody's house, and a few prefab huts and grain-storage bins.
The area for a few miles around there in Google Maps has a number of phantom place markers for businesses that don't exist; I suspect they were accidentally displaced from the identically-numbered streets in some town or other.
Other Plains states have similar systems but they don't take them quite as far. South Dakota also has the streets and avenues, but not numbered from the center (which would be at or near the capital, Pierre): the avenue numberings seem to begin in the western part of the state that has no avenues in it. The streets seem at first to just be continuing the North Dakota grid, but actually the numbers just begin at 100, whereas following ND's grid would have them begin at 102: ND's 101st Street SE/SW is followed by SD's 100th Street. The origin for South Dakota's streets seems to actually be in North Dakota, but two miles south of ND's origin just to be contrary.
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