Phantom Settlements: The Places on Google Maps that Don't Exist
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- Опубликовано: 27 сен 2024
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The first few lines sounds like a normal night out in Rotherham.
Episode suggestion: the assassination of Huey P. Long. Many speculate that Carl Weiss was framed for the murder, and it really was a plot to bring down his political career
because of are copyright laws every "major" media company is trying to start there own cause they own rights to there shows other streaming places like Netflix will have it taken off.
A Big fuck you to its US people is Disney as any "not family friendly" content is pushed to Hulu, but ONLY IS THE US.
so... only a 6 hr long limited time offer for the vpn sponsor
The transition to the atlas ad was so seamless I didn't realize we were off topic for over a minute. Well done.
Hello, I'm the "blogger Mike Nolan" you mention! I'm 95% sure the original source of the error was an old paper gazetteer printed in a weird font that had a load of errors when run through OCR. As well as Argleton (Aughton) there was also Downhollnad (Downholland) and Mawdesky (Mawdesley), all roughly within West Lancashire. Tele Atlas were almost certainly responsible for sourcing the data and added it to their database incorrectly but it's unlikely to be a copyright issue as the gazetteer would be either public record or out of copyright. Anyway, it was a fun to watch Argleton still knocking around almost 15 years after my first blog post about it!
Thanks for submitting this! Watching the video (i.e., before I looked at the comment section), I was quickly onboard with Simon's hypothesis that Argleton is a "paper town."
Thank You Mike Nolan.
To quote Simon “Legend!”
Legend
Woah how did you come across this video?!
Simon and or editor: the -kill designation on rivers in the mid-Atlantic US is actually a holdover from when the area was colonized by the Dutch. The -kill suffix is an anglicization of an old Dutch word for river or channel. Since many of the rivers here had been mapped and named by the Dutch, this appears quite often. So the Beaverkill is actually from the Dutch words for “Beaver River”. The most interesting example of this is actually Delaware’s Murderkill River. Over time, many stories about a massacre have cropped up as the history of the name, but they’re all false. The truth is much more tame. It was originally named Morder’s Kill, which was old Dutch for “Mother’s River”, because the explorer who named it wanted to name something after his mom.
Presumably tho, beaver river would have been named so because of the potential for killing beavers for fur there, at the time, right?
I live right near a Murder's Kill and a Murders Kill Road in the Upstate NY close to the Hudson River.
Thanks, Internet stranger, for this tidbit of info! I appreciate it!
That’s a nicer reason then murder. I like it.
@@tomorrow4eva it has to be a human to be murder. When it is a beaver or something it is predation. All animals do it.
For someone from the UK living in the US, the sheer scale and remoteness of the country can really do your head in. Everywhere in the UK has road signs and mile markers. You can get lost but not for long. In the US I’ve had situations where I’ve been on a road for an hour and it just ends. No buildings at the terminus, it just stops. And there are plenty of places on the map that have a name, but there’s nothing there - one house if you’re lucky. A bogus village in the UK will quickly be called out, but in the US and Canada I could easily imagine a fake town being undiscovered for years.
You haven’t been to australia yet have you?
Dude, don't dis Woolworth. When I was a kid one day I bought candy, a live turtle, and discovered the club sandwich at their lunch counter. Magic. Allegedly.
I recently moved to Germany from Mexico and to your (and my) surprise Woolworth is alive in both countries. Independent of each other though...
Meanwhile in Australia where woolies is still super common
So it's Walmart... yet eurotrash acts like Walmart makes America bad somehow. For people with 2k years plus of atrocities, you guys sure are finger pointers.
Simon, Michiganders have a penchant for odd names for towns. Some can be ascribed to the fact that early settlers tended to clump together and adopt names from their native tongues. Ypsilanti, Dowagiac, and Hamtramck can be blamed on Welsh, French, and Polish settlers, respectively. But there are no shortage of whimsical and lazy township appellations, like Christmas, Hell, and Square Lake. My favorite is Novi, which was the 6th stop on the railroad going North out of Detroit (French). Novi was voted in by the locals primarily because it would be cheapest to change the signs at the railroad station from No. VI to Novi.
How about Pompeii? Pronounced “POM pea eye,” as one does. 😉
I'm from Michigan, and grew up near Ypsilanti. It's, "Ip-sil-an-tee," 😂.
An old Michigan joke: two friends were on a trip, traveling through Ypsilanti and hungry. They debated back and forth on how to pronounce the name. They stopped at Burger King for a bite, and after ordering, one decided to ask a clerk how to pronounce the name of the town.
"You know, we have been debating back and forth on the right way to pronounce this place. Can you please lay it to rest for us?" The man said.
The clerk leans over the counter and says, "BUR-GER KING."
Fun Fact: There was a book of trivia that intentionally included a fake question in attempt to thwart plagiarism. The game Trivial Pursuit included this question assuming it was real. When the writers of the book attempted to sue the makers of the game, they lost because as the game's lawyers argued, the information was presented as fact, and you can't copyright facts.
Nice 😁
I vaguely remember this. It was in all the papers at the time.
I can sort of see the point. Like Trivial Pursuit workers would have to provide sources and proof that they in fact never read or heard the information everywhere but came up with it by themselves (which is obviously how facts for trivia don't get born) to avoid the source trying to sue them. "Original facts by Trivial Pursuit" sounds as trustworthy as all those magical diet product ads.
@@Yupppi Exactly. The copyright is in the conjecture, opinion or explanation of the fact, not the fact itself. The question asking for the fact may be copyrightable, so, as long as Trivial Pursuit didn't ask the exact same question, but re-worded it, they would be in the clear.
@@magic8ball1982 if they'd added related jokes or commentary maybe they would've had a case for copyright infringement or plagiarism or whatever
"-kill" is Dutch for "stream" or "creek", and New York used to be New Amsterdam, so a lot of place names and river names there are still Dutch. So it was called "Beaver Creek" by the first European settlers before the English took over. There are A LOT of rivers in New York state with "kill" in their names, as well as the Catskill mountains.
That's really interesting, thanks for sharing
Ok I know so much random stuff in general. I'm rarely surprised in any "facts you didn't know" videos. I had no idea about this though. Thank you!! I have a new rabbit hole to dive in to.
Freshkills Park, NY.
Name/word origins are cool & fun, imo. 🙂 I was today years old when I learned why those names exist and their proper meaning. Thank you for sharing! ❤️
I've lived in New York my whole life and never knew this. Thank you for sharing.
Its funny, I live in the Hudson Valley, so it's just kind of something I've known forever. When he didn't know it, I was like "Really? Oh well, it's probably only around here....."
I literally just finished writing a final research paper on historic map making and let me tell you, there is sm weird lore that you would never think about
Would love to learn more about that. Any recommendations? You tube or books or articles. Thanks!
Any way to read your research paper? I'm intrigued about local type lore
Woolworths was great! You could get a parakeet, or walk out with an ice cream cone! :)
Mungo Park sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse character.
"Jeeves, Mungo is going to lose his stipend from his aunt unless he can prove that he's been exploring in Africa..."
Back in the 90's my dad had planned a boating vacation for our family. He proudly plotted the course and was so happy with the route he had found that would have saved us hours by cutting though a canal that would have taken us only a few miles from our destination. When we got to the "canal" we discovered that it was a smaller creek and the canal that lead to our destination never existed. Some kind people allowed us to use their dock for the night and gave us directions to a local store we could walk to that had a proper map.
As a child, i had an old map from like the 50s or 60s of el dorado county, california (where i grew up in the 80s and 90s). It had the names of all the creeks and ponds and stuff. I thought it was pretty rad, so i hung it on my wall. There were all these towns detailed on it that i never heard of. In my teenage years as my friends and i started driving, we started going to these unknown towns to see what was there. Most of the time we found foundations from old mining towns that had long since been abandoned (after all, el dorado county was where the gold miners went for the 1849 california gold rush). There was one that always confused us though, Spreckelsville. See... we went out there and there was nothing but a several acre mudflat/seasonal pond. No foundations, nothing. Just 4-5 feet of muddy water in the rainy months, and dry cracked earth in the dry season. Later on the internet became a thing. I looked into it, and apparently back in the '20s there was a sugar processing plant out there and tons of housing for the workers. I call BS because a settlement as large as that would have left foundations. I thought maybe the foundations are under the mud, but we used to sink our trucks several feet into the mud out there and nobody ever found so much as a rock or chunk of concrete.
I love stories like this so so much. What a treasure to find such a map and to explore bits of it with friends! Thanks for sharing
Spreckels did make beet sugar in California, and they were located in Salinas, which means "salt marsh" in Spanish. Salinas is in Monterey County.
Im aware that they had sugar operations in salinas. Salinas is not in el dorado county.
I believe there was also a factory owned by Spreckels in San Francisco sometime in the early 20th century.
TFS. I love stories like this.
Simon, it's a good thing you live in Prague, because in the American West, blindly trusting Google Maps or Sat Nav is the way several people a year die of hypothermia bogged down in the snow at the dead end or the locked gate of a logging road that they were SURE would take them around the Interstate closure. Sometimes they're not found until spring.
Yes, it IS a good idea to know the roads, to check on their condition and the weather, and to possess both common sense and a sense of direction.
True story that one! I often think of that poor family! And logging roads may be improved/paved, or not and necessitate a four wheel high clearance vehicle. Greetings from Oregon!
The opening bit reminds me of an incident that happened to me back in 2002. I went out drinking in Mexico one night and woke up the next morning in the United States with my right foot completely broken in half (the pain of which was masked by a pounding headache until I jumped out of my rack about 1.9 meters off the ground). To this day I can't drink tequila (20 years later). I simply woke up with no clue how I got back across the border or what happened to my foot. To add another twist to the tale, I was on a military base and I had no clue how I got through base security. Luckily, I was in the military at the time and I was stationed at the base I found my way back to so I was where I needed to be (along with all my possessions), but I was over 500km (300+ miles) from where I started the night. And yes, I'm being intentionally vague about where I started the night, the military base, my branch of service, and a few other details.
...allegedly.
El Paso?
Such bullshit
I've definitely gotten pretty far without remembering any of the journey, but 300 miles is a hell of a trip!
This is why MFs aren't allowed to go to Mexico, now 😂
Danny is the best! You really should let him out of the basement more often.
The basement is where Communists belong ☺😊😀😁😂
GPS tends to cause problems here in Brazil... Sometimes it sends you on your last trip. 😬
(It basically sends you to REALLY unsafe neighborhoods, let's say...)
Iwas thinking that you were heading towards a different story. In the United States there are stories of people driving their cars into lakes or off cliffs following Google Map directions. I've had Google tell me to turn onto non-existent streets or make U-turns where it wasn't allowed or completely unsafe. I wasn't stupid enough to follow those directions.
@@michaelb1761 eeek how dumb do you have to be to drive into water lol
@@michaelb1761 Yeah, I believe I've heard about things like that as well... But I've never heard of them happening here.
Go figure.
“You are on the fastest possible route!”
It does that in the US, as well.
The "Mountains of the Moon" are the Rurenzori mountains at the border of Uganda and the DRC (formerly Zaire) I used to live there.
I worked in the printing and graphic arts industry back in the 80s-90s, Printed maps usually had map traps where they would intentionally misspell a name or place a curve in a road where there was none so they could catch other map makers that sold maps you could buy in gas stations and charge them with copying their maps and have that product removed.
As useful as an ashtray on a motorbike! Hahahaha! That's hilarious. Also, this made me think of where I live now. It's not exactly what you're on about here, but it's almost the reverse. I live in Tbilisi, and my apartment isn't on GPS. This is one of many, MANY examples of the randomness of where I live. This is easily the most random place I have ever lived. My example here is my apartment's absence from GPS. I can only have deliveries or call Bolt cars to meet me at a nearby Spar shop. And when I get a car to take me home, the driver gets close-ish, but I then have to give directions. I haven't got into a cab completely shitfaced, and that's largely because I'd have no way to get home without giving coherent directions (made more difficult by my utter inability to speak Georgian or Russian).
I know for google maps, you can suggest an edit. Maybe see if that’s an option for you? When a newly built bakery first opened, they didn’t have google maps set up correctly and it was an issue for them - people kept going to the wrong place. I suggested an edit on google maps, and a few other people in the shop did too. Because multiple people told google it was real, it was successfully confirmed on the map.
@@gobsofgabs7379 No, man, you don't understand. At or in my apartment, GPS is blind to me. I don't show up as a blue dot in the middle of nothingness. I am utterly invisible to it. Google can't do anything about that.
Reminds me of a site from the dawn of the internet that detailed the locations of entrances to hell. All very dull things like drainage ditches & underpasses, but it was weirdly convincing to younger version of me.
There's a mystery local to my hometown I think would be great for this podcast. In Daly City, a U.S. Navy blimp crashed due to deflation but when the craft was recovered the crew were nowhere to be found. Also, the doors to the cabin were latched shut which is something that should have only been possible from the outside. Did the crew jump ship? Were they teleported off by aliens? A lot of theories have sprung up about this over the years and I'd love to hear your take on it.
I think the general consensus on that one is that one crewman fell out of the door and the other also lost his footing trying to save him. It was spotted very close to the water so its probable one man was in the water and the pilot was attempting a rescue. They probably both drowned as the blimp drifted away from them. It then drifted into some cliffs which punctured it.
@@meetoo594 So rather than vanishing into
thin air, they found themselves in hot water?
That does sound a lot more down to earth,
so I would say you're on fire with that idea!
Daly City is a weird place too. Just a strange vibe no matter where you're at.
it being locked from the outside isn't weird, if it was locked from the inside and nobody from the crew was on that would be weird
you could get out of something and then lock from outside, and just walk away, not as much of a mystery
i kinda thought daly city was a fever dream i had on a long road trip. my fiancé insists it’s real and i bought a slurpee there. sounds fake but okay
Back around 2001 or so, I had a science teacher that once told us that if we looked at the right map, that there was a town called "Lamb" that was next over, even though there wasn't a town there. It was a spot on the interstate that had a couple businessmen and a trailer park, but was generally buried as being part of Fort Morgan. Ever since I tend to notice when there is a "town" on a map that isn't really there.
In the US, stores that sell random crud are all the rage, and have been for years. Some examples include: Dollar store, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Best, Discounters/Liquidation stores/outlets, and don't even get me started on bodegas!
In the area I grew up there are several areas that show on maps as different names. These are hold overs of old towns that existed prior to the incorporation of the predominant town. Once this happened, businesses "moved to town" and the other areas faded into history to only be known as areas in the county with names but not belonging to or looking like a town.
Also, why have we not gotten a yeti episode? It would be smashingly entertaining to see Simon have to go down that rabbit hole. Lol
In the mid 1970, I was working for a small company that used a computer sold by a company called Computer Automation Inc. Our applications required a plug-in board that would hold many more memory chips that the one they sold. We were developing our own PC board that would meet our requirements and were copying the circuitry used to control the chips. Embedded in their artwork was a circuit that did absolutely nothing. It was not even attached to anything.
Now the Simon is in flight school he's probably learning that every type of navigation going back to the 1930's is still being used because they never seem to get completely rid of it. So, even though everybody uses GPS now , you're still responsible to know Amelia Erhardt era tech to get yourself a private single engine license
Also thankfully for him the International language for aviation is English. Most times..if fact boy didn't have his wife there in the car accident... Hopefully he knows enough Czech to BS his way through
A Decoding the Unknown script written by Danny is a brilliant birthday present, thank you!
Happy Birthday, Izzy!
You actually nailed it, Simon! The pronunciation of Ypsilanti. I lived east of there, in White Lake, Michigan, for 35 years.
thanks for dropping all them videos back to back so I got something to watch while my hotel neighbours are throwing a party and are keeping me awake 🙃
(nope, nobody cares to make em shut up)
Woolworths is one of the 2 biggest supermarkets in Australia, it is a company owned by a company in the USA. They own a lot of slot machines and at least one of the major alcohol distribution companies here... Oh and Australia also still has pay phones, they have free local calls, you still have to pay for long distance calls from them....
I love that Michigan got a call out lol Michigan has a lot of culturally named cities. Escanaba, Mackinac, Cheybogan, Paw Paw... Ypsilanti is pronounced: ip-suh-LAN-tee Shout to my fellow Michiganders! Hello from the Mitten State!
Mackinac. It’s the Michigander’s shibboleth.
And Pompeii.
I got curious about the Soviet Union top level domain thing, because it never occurred to me that they might have had one until now. Turns out, the Soviet Union was issued the ".su" top level domain on September 19th, 1990. Although the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, Russia wasn't issued ".ru" until April 7th, 1994.
Danny has done a great job with these scrips
F.W. Woolworth was a department store during the days when a department store catered to the home. Departments such as Haberdashery, notions, foundations, shoes, women's wear, linens, drapers, toys, clothing for various family members, housewares and kitchenware.
Woolworth is closed.
Another great episode! 🎺👏💜 It would be fun if you did the Mandela effect. Such a weird topic, but it feels like you opened the window with this one. These must go hand in hand with it.
Yes! I agree! Either Nelson Mandela died twice, or someone found a way to exploit human memory and make it seem true for millions of people around the world, myself being one of them.
@@brandonzilka1274 🤣🤣🤣 No doubt!
It's funny. Just an hour ago I was remembering when I got super drunk in Shanghai and almost died. And ended up lost for more than 16 hours. Good times!
23:07 From someone living in Michigan, congrats on pronouncing "Ypsilanti" right on the first try!
Nice to hear the Uni I went to mentioned where I studied Geography in the early 00’s. There wasn’t an Argleton around then either.
I drive to a lot of country towns for work. These aren't just remote, they're "Rural Australia remote" - you're a 16 hour drive from the nearest town with a population of a thousand people.
I'm continually seeing little town names on Waze that I don't recognise, even when I am in areas I ostensibly know quite well. I've often wondered if these are "towns" with no town centre - just the roughly middle point of collection of farms with no other businesses - or if Waze is just chock full of paper towns.
There are also town names that pop up on Waze in the middle of state forest, where there are definitely no standing buildings, but I did once investigate one and found signs of an old building - stone and concrete supports, and an acre or so of non-native plants. This begs the question, did ways use some 1930s maps?
I wonder if larger area labels get anchored to a particular coordinate. But I’ve also noticed driving in Brisbane Google follows the “state route” number instead of the street name. I got really confused one day because “met road 5” was not on any street sign (the 5 was, but who looks for that?)
Ah, maps are fun. I remember visiting Israel a few years back, I was staying at a hotel that is literally adjacent to an IDF facility - it was fun getting directions to the pubs I was meeting friends at, as that IDF facility is simply not on any map whatsoever, so the locals usually just told me to "go to the base's main entrance, then head west to the shopping mall... it's the city block on Google Maps that's empty"
You can find it by looking where it’s not…
Yes -- 33:55 -- when you call 112 (emergency number) in Europe your phone can send GPS information along with the call using an SMS or data channel alongside the call. If your phone does this, it can come up on the operator's screen within seconds, and can be very accurate (within a few metres) especially with GNSS. If your phone doesn't send this data, your location can still be triangulated from cell-IDs, but that will only place you to within a few hundred metres.
Beaverkil actually draws upon the dutch word “kil” which roughly means riverbed/water channel! So basically it was a creek with a lotta beaver lol
A lotta places in NY have blank-kil names bc of the Dutch!
The Schuylkill in Pennsylvania makes more sense now...
There technically are still some Woolworths, although they aren't in the uk or usa, they are Southern Africa and in some parts of Australia and apparently they are 2 different market chains that just have the same name. And there are a few scattered over Europe.
"Random shit stores just don't work, do they?"
Answer:
Dollar General
Dollar Tree
Bi Mart
Walmart
Target
Go Blue!
Try looking up Agra, California, on Google maps. It always comes up, but there is NOTHING there. Someone claims that they found it on a map from 1948, but even a 1981 satellite image shows no buildings. It is on Camp Pendleton, but when you pass it on I-5, the only hint of it is a small sign on a bridge with the name.
"Simon Attempts to Pronounce American Midwest Towns" is my favorite meme.
His handling of "Mequon" and "Oconomowoc" made me giggle.
Hate to bust your bubble but it really helps to plot out where you want to go the old fashioned way. My brother puts way too much trust in the GPS he uses and it's forever taking him on strange little side trips. And if that's not bad enough I can recall talking to a couple that came really close to driving off a cliff because their computer aided driving directions told them to go that way. Not withstanding changes in the roads that simply haven't been updated. And there is the annoying bits too. Google has a major road going through my neighbor's shared driveway. That's a gravel drive with no outlet. So many people keep driving down their drive that they had to put up keep out signs in an area where only the survivalist put up keep out signs.
Yeah it really does espicially at night if there are deer google will send you into the backroads full of deer to save a couple miles to your journey.
I love that you have 2 of your channels on both RUclips, and Spotify
Random villages remind me of Mielec in Poland. Trying to ask for a taxi there and most people never even heard of the place
As someone who has lived in Ypsilanti, hearing Simon attempt to pronounce it made me happy. He should look up the Ypsi water tower. Maybe do a Side Projects about the World's Most Phallic Building competition.
27:00 I've got a better one of those for you. "About as useful as an ashtray in a Mormon Church.
Fun fact, I grew up Mormon and in first grade, for some reason, though my mother didn't smoke, I made her an ashtray. I suspect it was my teacher, though I don't remember it (it was 46 years ago) my mother and my 1st grade teacher were friends for years even before I started first grade, and they were always playing jokes on each other. I think my teacher convinced me to make an ashtray for her as a joke.
In any case, my mother still had it many years later when, as an adult, I was helping my parents move. I found it and that's what sparked the memory.
About the police asking if you are at a specific, very accurate location: I can't speak for CZ, but in the US, your GPS signature is sent along with your video signal when you call Emergency Services.
Fun fact: there's a supermarket chain in Australia, and one in the US too, but they are not affiliated with each other or the now-defunct chain in the UK - the only link is that they were all founded by men named Woolworth.
Regarding Beaver Kill: New York used to be a Dutch colony and 'kill' is an Old Dutch word for 'riverbed'. There are lots of things in NY with the 'kill' ending, such as Catskilland Fishkill. So, Beaverkill is the Beaver River.
I lived in the mountains until 2015. There was many times google maps sent people down non existing roads, a couple times I caught it before driving off the edge of a cliff, and one story of someone driving by google in fog, over the cliff and surviving.
Until all the aqua ducts, levees, and dams, there was indeed a sea between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the California Coast ranges. It was (is) called Tulare Lake. It's made a reappearance this year (23) after all the precipitation we've had. It's only the first week of April now, Tulare Lake may make a larger comeback as all the snow melts in the next few months...
Oh my, I almost forgot about TomToms. We had one, and my mom hated it because it was almost always innacurate, and she knew how to navigate traditional paper maps really well. So she just yelled at the device calling it stupid in the car. To her credit it did try to get us to turn into a literal river once or twice 😂
Danny?! Get back to Business Blaze!
He's escaped the Blazement!
Business Blaze?
Never heard of it.
@@DannySalter haha, you bastard! It was an unappreciated gem of business facts that slowly devolved into tangents and madness. I miss it every day.
@@DannySalter Oh no, Simon has tortured you so thoroughly that you've forgotten where you came from... 😱 Danny, noooooooo!!!
Did it have something to do with business?
That's not ringing any bells.
I lived in Ypsilanti for years! Most folks locally just call it Ypsi (ip-see).
I grew up in New Orleans. Years ago, when I still lived there, my car broke down and I had to call a tow truck. I was at the corner of Magazine and Peniston, Peniston being a side street that no one really considers the name of. I called angrily hours later, and was told that the tow truck driver they had sent was not originally from New Orleans, and thought that the street name Peniston was fake. I was not amused. When he finally showed up, he spent all the time making excuses on why he couldn't be blamed for not thinking the street name was real because, he kept saying, that in North Carolina where he was from, "They don't give streets stupid names." I was still not amused.
I love it when Simon throws shade at Dan Brown.
As a displaced Michigander, I can help with Ypsilanti, The Y and I are pronounced with a sharp I. A lot of cities get their names from France and the Native Americans. Look at Detroit, Charlevoix, Grosse Ile, Grosse Pointe. Those aren't the only ones and that isn't even including streets.
Interesting, Simon. I'd heard of these 'traps' years ago, but this is the first time I've seen a number of them detailed.
I think I ran across one quite a while ago, here in western NYS; I ran across a small town on a map in an area I knew *very* well because I used to just go on drives, exploring various places, even dead-end roads. The map showed a small village (which are sometimes referred to as 'hamlets') that was (supposedly) on a little side-road. But I had been down that side-road and there was no such hamlet! I told my step-father about it, showing him the map, and he said that he'd heard that map-makers did this sometimes in order to catch folks who plagiarized their maps.
So when I heard about these traps a several years later I was like, "OK, I guess he was right!"
BTW ... your 'Ordnance Survey' maps sound like our U.S. Geological Survey maps. U.S.G.S. maps are *amazing!* The maps are available down to a scale of *1500:1* - so they show _every_ *little* detail, every little building (even if it's just a little cabin that's thousands of feet [1 km.] away from any road)! This does make me wonder if the U.S.G.S. puts in 'traps' - like a little cabin that's far enough away from a road, that you can't expect to even *see it* from the road! - to catch folks trying to 'swipe' all the work the government put into making these detailed maps? Wouldn't surprise me!
To me their most useful maps are either their State-level maps (which show all the significant roads, and any town you might normally look for), and their "Half-degree Maps", which are, as you might expect, a half-degree on a side. They show even minor side-roads, and even the _smallest_ villages/hamlets! They don't show the little dirt roads, but do show almost *everything* bigger!
Woolworth's was the 5 and 10 cent (nickle and dime) store. They were American but we had them in Canada too - sort of the cheap version of a department store.
"Are they looking at the GPS in your phone?" Yes. When you call emergency services, they can ask the phone company to ask your phone to tell them where it is. Here in North America, it's called E911 (Enhanced 911) and, in Europe, it's apparently called E112.
If you are pushed to which emergency service you need, it'd be coastguard or fire BTW.
When you phone emergency services on a mobile it can send something called an AML (that’s what we call it in the ambulance service at least) it’s like a text message that contains your location. It comes through to our system and shows your location. If your phone doesn’t send one and you don’t know where you are then the signal towers around you automatically triangulate your location and give us a probability that you’re within a certain area, depending on how many towers are in range and the signal strength
23:05 did you just dump on my hometown? The name is Greek! It's named after a military general of Greek descent, and it has been here for a long time, in fact we are going to celebrate our bicentennial in a few days. The original settlement in what now is Ypsilanti was called woodruff's Grove it's just around the corner from me. My house has been registered with the city of Ypsilanti for over 100 years! We are adjacent to Ann arbor, hence wolverines
I'm shocked, you got Ypsilanti correct! We fought a war over Toledo, and we still aren't over it.
A friend bought an established map company and his life is now basically suing entities that copy his maps for their flyers or websites. It's a lot of money but I wouldn't want to live like that
In regards to emergency services such as 911 or 999 having access to a mobile phone's GPS receiver, this has been in place since at least the early aughts. When the emergency number is dialed, the phones automatically take a reading and send it along with the phone number of the device calling.
‘Jesus and Guns’
The unintended irony in that is so dense it’s in danger of collapsing into an ideological black hole.
You said "caught it a trap" and I started singing Elvis in my head. Thanks Simon
I used to live in Ypsilanti. Bravo, you got it right. Apparently it is named after someone Greek.
On the reverse side the little town in Texas I grew up in was left off all maps for many many years
Simon: "how the hell do I pronounce Ypsilanti!?"
Then proceeds to nail it.
You legend.
Just would like to add as a citizen of southeast michigan, Simon said Ypsilanti perfectly, could not have said it better for someone just reading the word!
This is why I learned my area's county roads and state routes. Even if I am lost in a rural area I can find civilization as soon as one of these signs comes up. Or I can head in a vague direction and know I will eventually hit a route.
GPS helped me realize that depending on the direction, I-5 is located on completely different pieces of roadway in downtown LA.
at our local roundabout, people trying to get onto the interstate count the parking lot entrance as a "road" . this causes them to take wrong turn- ending up on a deadend road paralleling the highway. They have to turn around and head back. Even semis!
Hearing Simon be stopped in his tracks by Ip-sah-lan-tea was my favorite thing ever?
I watch a few of your other channels but this one takes the biscuit! 😆 I love your humour in these videos!
32:39 We have heaps of payphones in Australia. They're all free wifi hotspots, can make landline calls for free anywhere in the country and can call mobiles on that carriers network (Telstra) for free too. You can also put cash in and call any other phone number as per usual.
In 2008 we already had plenty of smartphones. One of the earliest ones was the Nokia communicator.
integrated GPS came later than the first smartphones. But there were portable GPS devices.
Woolworths is still very much a thing in Germany. Source: My town has one. :) EDIT: The officially assigned domain for the USSR was .su, IIRC. It just got used very, very little between being assigned and 1991.
OSU supporter here and I find the beatosu story hilarious. I had no idea that happened and I applaud the perpetrator’s brilliant and silly sense of humor. It hurt no one and played along with an entertaining sports rivalry.
Re the Beaverkill River , it dates back to the time of Dutch colonization. "kille", & "kil" = stream , or creek. There's many such names in NY . They've been anglicized to "kill".
Two stories from 30 years ago, one was my sister who got an very drunk guy entering a gas station she worked at 30 km north of Oslo Norway.
His "friends" had sent him on an plane From Narvik to Oslo or 1400 Km, he would get married the next day.
Second and a bit more innocent was sending an friend to Trondheim with train in an sleeping cabin rater than paying for hotel or have the police deal with him.
Now removing his wallet and his clothes and put them in an deposit box was an bonus.
Sandy Island sounds like something straight out of *Crash Bandicoot* , and I'm here for it! 😁
Apparently Simon doesn't remember doing a video about this on Today I Found Out which includes that many of these little imaginary towns are the result of either copyright, copying from older maps when there was something there, or copying from older maps where someone had said "the town of X is over by Y' and the mapmaker took their word for it and the person was either wrong, confused, or both.
While at university I dated a girl from New York. On one trip up while in Pennsylvania we got off at an unmarked exit. We stopped at a grocery store for deli sandwiches. Didn’t think much about it till we were back on the highway when I girlfriend asked if that town felt a little odd. Thinking back everyone was all smiles and everything looked brand new even the old stuff looked brand new. For the next 4 years we tried to find the same town and it’s like it never existed. Sad as that was by far the best deli sandwiches ever.
Sounds like a fbi or cia type thing
Yes, emergency services uses the GPS on your phone. In the US it’s called ANIALI - automatic number information automatic location information. Because in reality, most people don’t know exactly where they are.
When I worked a 911 call center in the US a decade ago most cell phone calls we received from phones under maybe 8 years old could be located fairly accurately via triangulation using cell towers. In fact, as I picked up the call I was given a map location in most instances or a small area if the system couldn't fully locate the call. Sometimes the results were dead on, most were within maybe 50 yards. We still asked what the location of the emergency was when we answered just in case the data was incorrect on our screen or the physical location of the emergency wasnt where the cell caller was and the call dropped quickly, but we often knew where the caller was within a very small radius.
in the US they arent cockups. some locations are incomplete roads, roads cut off by fencing, or empty fields. they were at some point part of a planning project, or perhaps suffered a mix of changing hands where land ownership impacted the locations in a myriad of ways. so what this means, for the sake of accuracy via state planning offices, these types of locations are left on maps as part of mapping because the locations then refer to land ownership and their boundaries rather than points of accuracy on a map compounded with the costs of heading up more current surveys and printing of resulting mapping. this is also why GPS is only accurate within 3 miles of any location as those that create the map arent always able to be exact due to various impedance.
Simon, we used to have Woolworth in the USA.. Infact in NYC , the Woolworth Building as once the largest skyscraper in the City
Hearing Simon try to pronounce Ypsilanti made my whole life
Simon I freaking Love the work that you contributed to all of us over the years…
You are simply the best best ☺️
A few years ago in Australia, a bunch of merchandise that featured an outlitne of the country got printed up, and they left out poor little Tasmania
I woke up in the middle of nowhere many times after getting wasted 🤣 when I couldn't find my way home I just slept wherever I was at the time. In a dirt hole covered by a wheelbarrow, in a wheelbarrow, in the bed of a construction truck...