Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [133]
Travelers’ Century Club, 149–55, 158, 159–60
Travellers Club, 149
Treasure Island (Stevenson), 108
treasure maps, 62, 248–49
Trebek, Alex, 125–26, 129, 141, 143–45
after a few drinks, 147
civilian wardrobe of, 125–26
triangulation, 88–89
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, 69
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 14
turtles, 21–23
Ulmer, Dave, 187–89, 191, 194, 201, 202–3, 210
United States Geological Survey, 59, 60, 234
University of Miami, 32–36
upside-down maps, 52–54, 53, 140
Upton, Caite, 38
Useem, Ruth Hill, 30
Utopia (More), 119
Uttal, David, 17–20, 24–25
Vatican Museum, 136
Veley, Charles, 158–62, 164
Vermeer, Jan, 99–100
Vespucci, Amerigo, 75–77, 90, 240
Victoria Island, Nunavut, 2
video games, 112
virtual reality, 225. See also augmented reality
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 9
Wake Island, 152, 239
Waldseemüller map, 74–78, 76
Washington, D.C., navigating layout of, 18–19
Washington, George, 58, 82
Washington, Mount, 135
Waugh, Andrew, 89
wayfinding, 16–25, 51, 233. See also GPS
Wehner, Rüdiger, 23
Weil, Simone, 31
Weirton, West Virginia, 2
Wheaton, Wil, 193
Wheel of Time, The (Jordan), 113
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, 54
White, Andrew Dickson, 39
Wilder, Billy, 184
Williams, Kenneth, 39
Wilson, Howard, 39, 41
Wilson, Woodrow, 58
Win, Lose, or Draw, 38
Winter (Starbucks obsessive), 156–57, 164
World War I, 58, 175
World War II, 50, 58, 59, 60, 106, 169, 175
Wright, August Tappan, 105–7
Wright, John Kirtland, 107
Wright, Mary Tappan, 107
Wright, Sylvia, 106
Yang, Eric, 130, 137–38, 143–46
Young, Brigham, 247–48
Zapatero, José, 37
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* This “honor” is sometimes claimed by Vulcan Point, on Lake Taal in the Philippines. But point your Internet map of choice at 69.793° N, 108.241° W—the unnamed Canadian island-in-a-lake-on-an-island-in-a-lake on Victoria Island is much bigger.
* My personal favorite has always been Bir Tawil, a tiny trapezoid of desert on the border between Egypt and Sudan that, by international treaty, neither nation can claim. (For complicated reasons dating back to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899, both Egypt and Sudan would lose their claim to a much more attractive slice of territory called the Hala’ib Triangle if they were to call dibs on Bir Tawil.) As a result, Bir Tawil is one of the last remaining bits of terra nullius—land belonging to no one—on Earth.
† There’s a downside to this kind of fame, The Boston Globe learned in 2001 when it profiled Karen Keller, the lone resident of Hibberts Gore. The Census Bureau doesn’t release demographic information for individuals, but it does release average totals for all towns and cities, which means that Keller’s salary, for example, was published as the average household income for Hibberts Gore.
* Yassir Arafat once claimed that he spent an hour every day folding his keffiyeh head-dress so that it would resemble a map of his longed-for Palestinian state, showing everyone he met that Palestine was—literally!—always on his mind. I don’t think that the Thai people were always on Gorby’s mind, but that was the impression he may inadvertently have been giving map nerds everywhere.
* Hypsometric maps are also out of fashion with many cartographers, who find them misleading. Readers often assume that the hypsometric tints represent vegetation, not elevation. But the most barren desert might be verdant green on one of these maps, if it’s sufficiently low-lying. Conversely, lush highlands might be a lifeless beige.
* Part of the reason for the long gaps here is that many early maps, though widely used, haven’t survived to our day. The timeline is spotty and tattered for the same reason that, say, a Honus Wagner baseball card or a copy of Action Comics no. 1 is so valuable: