Luminiferous Æther

Ah geography, that long neglected subject of studying arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. The kids these days are horrible at it. Well, at least the American kids. According to CNN 87% of American high-schoolers can’t find Iraq on a map and 11% can’t find America.

Test your own geographic knowledge — or lack thereof — with this online killer quiz. Even for my native land, I scored only 85% (curse you, identical rectangle states!) and a slightly worse 72% for Europe (curse you, Eastern European countries! — except Bulgaria). As for the Africa quiz — I’ll only say that my first reaction was an embarrassing: ‘Holy shit! I didn’t realize there are 54 countries in Africa’.

[Click here to try the US quiz]

[Click here to try Europe quiz]

A political mashup that hits the nail on the head: Hillary Clinton as Tracy Flick.

Don’t forget to vote for Obama tomorrow.

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Story via Search Engine

Over at slate, Kent Sepkowitz wrote an article called ‘Eat Crap: Why Americans should ingest more excrement’ — and he means it. He lays out a funny and insightful argument about how American’s obsession with cleanliness is making us sicker. From the article:

Ever wonder why your dog can gobble, lick, and gnaw all he wants along the glorious buffet of a city street and (almost) never get sick? Your dog is used to eating shit. Americans, on the other hand, grow up eating almost no shit at all. Our food is hosed and boiled and rinsed and detoxified and frozen and salted and preserved. Recently, we have begun to irradiate it, too—just in case. As a result, when our bodies encounter the occasional inevitable bug, they’re unhappy

[Click here for ‘Eat Crap: Why Americans should ingest more excrement’]

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Header photograph by Cacetudo

I’ve often wondered what the United States would look like if it had developed into separate nations rather than the monolith it is today. Would it be a Europe, prosperous and independent, or an Africa, resource rich but exploited?

Matthew White, a diligent librarian produced a Balkanized, alternate-history map of the United States. He asks the question ‘What would America have looked like if every separatist movement in U.S. and Canadian history had succeeded?’ His map includes the obvious like The Confederate States of America breaking away from the US along with more obscure moments in history, like the Five Nations of the Native Americans and those wacky Mormons founding Deseret.

[Click here to see ‘North America: The Balkins Version]

[Click here for a statical analysis of the GPD and population numbers in the map]

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Story via Strange Maps