Stray Hawkeye

Because:

1. I’m that much of a dork
2. It’s sort of fun to see how much you actually remember from geography class (see point 1)

Globetrotter XL has you try to pin point the location of cities around the world.  For each level you have to be a little more accurate to keep going.

Statetris is like Tetris, but instead of colored blocks, you drop states (up arrow to rotate).

Both are good reminders that I have no idea where anything is in Africa, and that Eastern Europe is pretty fuzzy in my mind.

1. NASA is apparently in the practice of dropping rubber duckies with Inuit tattoos into bottomless holes in the Artic.  It makes me laugh a lot that our national space agency, which sends people into outer space, uses rubber duckies to research glaciers.  (via Herd)
2. There is apparently also a bottomless hole at the end of half of a waterfall called the Devil’s Kettle, right here in Minnesota.  As much as I love scientific discovery, I also like the wonder from the fact that there are some really simple things like this that we don’t know.

I’ve found these all over the place as I read other things, and I’ve been saving them for a while to make enough of them for a post, so here you go:

• Bumpass, VA
• Truth or Consequences, NM – sounds like a pretty cool place
• What Cheer, IA
• Correctionville, IA – additionally interesting for the fact that it was named for a surveyor’s correction line.  Correction lines are the result of trying to divide land into perfect squares for surveying purposes and property rights, but it not working perfectly because you can’t map a square grid directly onto a sphere.  This is also why you see such, generally, perfect squares of fields on the ground when you’re in an air plane, which always strikes me as so unnatural.
• Holstein, IA
• Carefree, AZ
• Sleepy Eye, MN