well if they faced directly upwards or even outwards, it would be an injury risk, this way it's a lot harder to injure yourself while walking around it
As someone who’s from DC and is piqued by its history here’s some more information: Before Congress declared Washington to become its capital it was initially Philadelphia until a local militia stormed an insurrection demanding back pay from the revolutionary war. Our capital moved around from Princeton, Annapolis, NYC, and back to Philly before Hamilton and Jefferson compromised that the nation’s capital should be in the middle of the north and south and independent so that no state had leverage over congress. This was also done so that the US treasury was also created to incur the debt of all states rather than 13 separate states debt. So they decided to plot our capital on a literal swamp (look at pictures of dc before it became our capital) from land between Maryland and Virginia. However one major area was particularly divisive amongst the northerns and southerners. Alexandria while under Virginia’s domain was the second largest slave port town outside of Richmond and many questions whether or not it should be justified to ratify slavery in our nation’s capital at the behest of the largest slave port in the area. Decades go by and when the issue was brought up again realizing the political tides have changed for that issue Virginia, Congress enacts a gag order halting the issue to further proceed. By 1846 the Virginia General Assembly finally passed a retrocession and Congress backed up the legislation. If you’re even remotely interested check out this link www.virginiaplaces.org/boundaries/retrocession.html#:~:text=The%20white%20political%20leaders%20in,significant%20number%20of%20local%20jobs.
They mainly did this so that the capital sole function would be for the workings of the federal government rather than it being a major city for domicile and commerce. If you look at what DC was before it becoming a capital the land was literally a swamp lol.
Do not rule out too early the hypothesis that the U.S.A. has a different sized metre to the rest of the world, idiosyncratically defined perhaps as a tenth of a D.C..Or maybe 1729 fluid ounces. (-:
It's even more impressive that they told him that he could have 100 square meters a year before the meter was originally defined. (It was actually "ten miles square", or 100 square miles.)
Thank you for this fun tour of the edge of our home state! (Speaking optimistically.) If you haven't already, look into fellow mathematician Benjamin Banneker, hired for his astronomical expertise in determining the founding marker at Jones Point. Wherever you land on the judgment of "only helped a little" vs. "helped a lot but was undercredited" on this one project, his life's work is pretty impressive.
The reason Washington D.C. isn't a perfect square (rotated 45 degrees to be what some would call a "diamond", as in baseball) is because the 18th-century surveyor James Parker (Matt's ancestor) didn't properly envision a tilted square on an ideal sphere (with an Equator and Poles). He felt that if you picked the center-location of the square, and went North and South (along a longitude-line) by "x" degrees of longitude to plot the Northern and Southern corners (respectively), and then went East and West of the center also by exactly the same "x" degrees of latitude to plot the Eastern and Western corners (respectively), the result is the corners of a sphere's version of square, which is true only if the center-location was on the Equator. Otherwise, you end up with a Parker Square, not a true square. Another shape (on the surface of an ideal sphere with an Equator and Poles) sometimes called a "Parker Square" is a region wherein (a) the North and South boundaries are lines of latitude, (b) the East and West boundaries are lines of longitude, and (c) the sides are fudgingly asserted to be "equal" because the degree-measure difference between the two latitudes is equal to the degree-measure difference between the two longitudes.
It was a perfect square as far as the methods available at the time of surveying that land in 1792. Also the Potomac has shifted slightly since its original surveying.
Matt at 1:47: "You can't actually walk exactly along the border the whole way, it's not publicly accessible" GeoWizard, Archie and Adam Fieldhouse, Marcus the Chess Teacher: "Challenge Accepted!"
Realtor: "And this lovely 3 bedroom colonial house comes with your own personal cornerstone of American heritage. Enjoy paying the taxes of two different 'states'... and the random UA-camrs in your yard"
0:06 As a Virginian I’m happy that you came to pay us a visit. As your biggest fan I’m sad to find out you didn’t give me a shout while you were in town
15:13 It's definitely pronounced "Potomac," not "Potomac." Uh.. I mean, it does not rhyme with Atomic. Puh-TOW-mack is the official pronunciation since 1931. It used to be called Patawomeck, and I don't think there's any surviving record of the original Algonquian pronunciation.
17:20 I think you said "1719" and "100 square meters" instead of 1790 (on screen) and 100 sq Mi Thanks for the video as always, looking forward to the Smithsonian video
19:20 - Sometimes jurisdictional cession needs some follow-up. Long ago the county courthouse in my home town left the middle of the town square because it needed to be much larger. I think the building wasn't built durably enough and couldn't be saved. At all events it was torn down. The Feds put a U.S. Post-Office in a new building on the same land, jurisdiction of which was duly transferred by statutes enacted by both sides. Later. the Post-Office outgrew the facility and relocated a few blocks away. The Feds enacted a statute that repudiated jurisdiction over the vacated land back to the State. But the State where my home town is located has a law on the books that says it doesn't have jurisdiction just because someone else (the Feds or a neighboring State, for instance) has passed a law ceding jurisdiction to my home State. It's not effective, this law in my State says, until my State passes a law ACCEPTING the jurisdiction being ceded. And with regards to this former Post-Office, my State has never passed the required law (unless they did so since the last time I checked). So, allegedly, you can do anything you'd like to do on that plot of land or in the building situated on it, without fear of being prosecuted. Something similar is alleged concerning a thin stripe of land in Yellowstone National Park. So they say.
Nice to see you got to experience some of the only snow the area's gotten in the last few years. Hope it was a nice hike (and scoot, and drive). (And you even managed to find a Welcome to Virginia sign that didn't have a 'radar detector illegal' sign in view, or at least not in frame :D -- however that is the classic sign pairing to see when driving into the state)
@ 6:59 Every time someone says the border to Canada is not straight, they say that's because it's zigzaggy. No, the latitude line is not straight in the first place!
The code actually does work. A portion of the code has built in redundancy so that if part of it is destroyed it can still be read. You can still scan it with the piece missing. Give it a try.
Matt, it’s great to see you around my old stomping grounds. A fun walk involving the DC line is to walk the bike path on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Virginia to Maryland, cutting across the southernmost (watery) corner of DC. There is a brass marker showing the border of VA and DC and another marker, a few hundred feet farther, showing when you cross from DC into MD.
The entire reason for the federal district not being a state or in a state is to prevent undue influence by that state over the federal government. You should make a video on why DC exists.
7:47 - I wonder if one party surveying the line started at the West and worked Eastwards, and another group of surveyors started East and worked West. Attributed to a person named Peter Drucker (correct his Comment if that is wrong) is a method for tunneling through a mountain, with one group of diggers starting on one side, and another on the other. "When they meet, they've dug a tunnel. If they don't meet, they've dug two tunnels".
Wikipedia has a fun article on state and international boundaries that have been determined by surveyors' mistakes. It includes a piece of land cut of from the United States by bodies of water, and joined to Canada by land. To drive from this piece of a U.S. State into any other U.S. State, you must drive through Canada. These things start out, often, with such language as "to the point where A and B meet" where "A" and "B" are two different geographic features. Problems arise when A and B turn out to NEVER meet, and the legislators writing the definition didn't know that yet.
I agree. However, they either don't have straight sides (e.g. lines of latitude off the equator) or aren't quadrilaterals (e.g. octant covering equilateral rectangular triangles, or quadrant covering right angle sectors).
Does that sign at 9:55 claim the stone is 6 miles North of the West Boundary stone? Shouldn't it be 6 miles NorthEast, or 6/(sqrt(2)) North and the same distance West?
Is there some kind of mathematical reason why the number of stones is offset by one from the number of miles? Would have loved it if you could have mentioned that
4:04 - I can't get an angry tadpole out of the shape of Australian Capital Territory. To me it looks like a silhouette portrait of a sardonic woolly mammoth named Joe in a camouflage tuxedo walking (on a Tuesday afternoon) in the bike-lane from the barbershop (where he got a flat-top buzz-cut) to a banquet where he'll receive his Honorary Ph.D. In Arcane Highbrow Stuff from the University of Not In Kansas Anymore. Is that not what everyone else sees?
5:13 - The people who live at 6119 on that street should have bought either two sixes or two nines for their address, and they should have nailed up one of the "1" s upside-down, to preserve the 180-degree rotational symmetry. Much of my home town is covered by sidewalk bearing the names of people in each year's graduating classes. When walking the wrong way towards 1991 I once attempted to tell my companion that the University is older than I'd thought, with a class of 1661. My companion wasn't gullible enough to buy it. A mile away someone has their street-address number "301" embedded in bronze in the sidewalk in the same manner. Someday I'm going to carve the name "Flavius Valerius Constantinus" beneath it, with the initials "M.S.I.A." (Master of Science in Imperial Administration) for the degree conferred.
Around 2:00, there is a map showing "all 9" of the 40 marker stones, some of which are missing. There are channels where even more people would feel compelled to verify the counts ... but not many such channels.
He was talking about one side, although I do think that he misspoke and said 9 when he meant 11. About a minute later, he used the correct number of 11 stones per side, which added up to 40 for all four sides. and it adds up to 40 instead of 44 because each side shares 2 stones, one with each of the adjacent sides.
Also interesting to notice that the national mall essentially makes a cross made out of grass, but is missing a chunk of an arm. Other proposals for the national mall design had a fully visible cross in this location.
Played around a bit on Google Maps. It looks like with a little work, you could just about come up with a decent marathon route that runs around the DC-Maryland border. The straight line length is about 25 miles. On Google, I got a walking path of about 30 miles, but there are some parts that can be cut off if you had permits to make it shorter. Not sure if you can cut it all the way down to 26.2. Probably not quite. But if you're creating with the start and end and maybe cut a corner, you might be able to get there.
9:00 i think defining the boundaries of a territory by lattitude and longitude makes FAR more sense than an actual square or rectangle, since we are dividing territory on an actual sphere called earth, not territory on a flat planed map, where the square is more at home. that said, as a colorado resident i want the map markers redone to be accurate. what the heck!! we can do better
Matt acknowledges that it is sometimes hard to measure exactly correctly, but ... underestimates the other reasons that borders are wrong. Michigan's original surveys were a bit off, with two lines that needed to be reconciled. (If I recall correctly, by around 10 feet.) But the glitch in the Southern border is because of politics (Ohio was already a state, and wanted the Port of Toledo.) And there really were conflicting legal descriptions, because the borders were initially defined (and sometimes redefined) by politicians who were pretty sure they would never visit, and so didn't care. Even when they depended on a survey, it was often a survey to be completed later, budget willing. But did they at least learn their lesson from "The Toledo War", and get more careful with later boundaries? Of course not. The border with Wisconsin was defined by a pair of rivers, one of which never actually existed, and the other of which ... well, it wasn't clear which of three river branches they were talking about. The one eventually chosen isn't even the most likely. Since the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in disputes between states, they kept having to appoint special masters who kept saying, essentially, "The written law is stupid. To the extent we can understand it, it should be ignored in favor of doing what common sense says, and justifying it by saying too many years have already passed." (But there are kids who get an extra 30 miles of bus ride to school because someone did raise one Ohio issue in time.) Some of these "disputes" were in my lifetime, and I put "dispute" in quotes because it was usually really some private individual looking for a loophole to prevent enforcement of laws that both states agreed with.
Matt, I'd like you to increase by 10 the markers on a doorframe, a window frame, and a paper book, to see how their imperfections match up with the state of Colorado: my guess would be that there's no such thing as a perfect rectangle.
DC Boundary Stone are definitely a unique thing. I used to visit that northern one a lot as I used to live next door it it. Did you have a meet up in DC?
America must drive mathematicians crazy that the lines that define state borders are called "Parallels" when in sphere geometry, parallel is exactly what they are not.
Looking at Google maps, there appears to be some areas where the borders seems to jog and zig just a little off from straight square. (see near where the northwest line meets the Potomac, or some sections along the most northeast side near 16th or Blair Rd)
Matt, could you please enable automatic English subtitles. For those of us who are hard of hearing or deaf, it means we can enjoy your videos, without deafening our family 😊
Can you please do a follow-up video on what well-defined mathematical methods might one use to attempt to quantify exactly how square a shape is? And by each of those measures, exactly how square is a circle, an equilateral triangle, Colorado, or a hypercube?
When Matt says Canberra is "right in the middle" of Sydney and Melbourne, what he means is Canberra is about twice as close to Sydney as it is to melbourne. (Less than 300KM to sydney, more than 650KM to melbourne). (TLDR NSW refused to cede any territory unless it was closer to Sydney).
The Parker DC
I knew something like this would be among the first 10 comments!
This will annoy Matt but I think he'll appreciate that the US tried hard and got really close to their magic square district.
parker colorado
Yeah I am still waiting for AC version so that i can just plug it in into socket on my wall without that AC to DC converter block thing
Parker state.
Not a state, but it could be.
Is a square... well... was a square for a while, but it is not a square now. But it could be.
missed opportunity for a squarespace sponsorship 😏
01:00 Why do the spikes on that fence face inwards? Does stone have a history of escape attempts?
I think stone's admirers have a history of lawsuit attempts. 😀
well if they faced directly upwards or even outwards, it would be an injury risk, this way it's a lot harder to injure yourself while walking around it
Look like people traps to me.. easy to get in but tough to get out of one. Now that I think of it.. wonder how many dudes been rescued out of those.
I guess you don't need to stop people getting in as long as you can stop them getting out again.
Mathematicians check in, they don't check out
As Matt walks around DC you could say he’s taking a square route.
Just like DC did in 1847
As a Coloradan, I've never been so thoroughly roasted.
" How past Matt is doing on the ground , Ooooh he had been arrested "
As a person raised in Potomac, Maryland I appreciate your efforts Truman!
That chunk off the QR code was peak comedy meeting peak design.
Always fun seeing something filmed so close to where you live, that you might actually be in the background somewhere!
As someone who’s from DC and is piqued by its history here’s some more information:
Before Congress declared Washington to become its capital it was initially Philadelphia until a local militia stormed an insurrection demanding back pay from the revolutionary war. Our capital moved around from Princeton, Annapolis, NYC, and back to Philly before Hamilton and Jefferson compromised that the nation’s capital should be in the middle of the north and south and independent so that no state had leverage over congress. This was also done so that the US treasury was also created to incur the debt of all states rather than 13 separate states debt. So they decided to plot our capital on a literal swamp (look at pictures of dc before it became our capital) from land between Maryland and Virginia. However one major area was particularly divisive amongst the northerns and southerners.
Alexandria while under Virginia’s domain was the second largest slave port town outside of Richmond and many questions whether or not it should be justified to ratify slavery in our nation’s capital at the behest of the largest slave port in the area. Decades go by and when the issue was brought up again realizing the political tides have changed for that issue Virginia, Congress enacts a gag order halting the issue to further proceed. By 1846 the Virginia General Assembly finally passed a retrocession and Congress backed up the legislation.
If you’re even remotely interested check out this link www.virginiaplaces.org/boundaries/retrocession.html#:~:text=The%20white%20political%20leaders%20in,significant%20number%20of%20local%20jobs.
Sounds like there was some wheeling and dealing going on. Must have been fascinating. I wish I was in the room where it happened.
Shoutout to Colorado, gotta be one of my favorite n-gons where n is somewhere in [4, 944].
17:18 Only 100 square meters? That seems *really* small for a capital city!
They mainly did this so that the capital sole function would be for the workings of the federal government rather than it being a major city for domicile and commerce. If you look at what DC was before it becoming a capital the land was literally a swamp lol.
Do not rule out too early the hypothesis that the U.S.A. has a different sized metre to the rest of the world, idiosyncratically defined perhaps as a tenth of a D.C..Or maybe 1729 fluid ounces. (-:
It's even more impressive that they told him that he could have 100 square meters a year before the meter was originally defined. (It was actually "ten miles square", or 100 square miles.)
Summary: Virginia did a take-backsie
Fuckem. Take it back. Confederates don't get a say.
Thank you for this fun tour of the edge of our home state! (Speaking optimistically.) If you haven't already, look into fellow mathematician Benjamin Banneker, hired for his astronomical expertise in determining the founding marker at Jones Point. Wherever you land on the judgment of "only helped a little" vs. "helped a lot but was undercredited" on this one project, his life's work is pretty impressive.
The reason Washington D.C. isn't a perfect square (rotated 45 degrees to be what some would call a "diamond", as in baseball) is because the 18th-century surveyor James Parker (Matt's ancestor) didn't properly envision a tilted square on an ideal sphere (with an Equator and Poles). He felt that if you picked the center-location of the square, and went North and South (along a longitude-line) by "x" degrees of longitude to plot the Northern and Southern corners (respectively), and then went East and West of the center also by exactly the same "x" degrees of latitude to plot the Eastern and Western corners (respectively), the result is the corners of a sphere's version of square, which is true only if the center-location was on the Equator. Otherwise, you end up with a Parker Square, not a true square. Another shape (on the surface of an ideal sphere with an Equator and Poles) sometimes called a "Parker Square" is a region wherein (a) the North and South boundaries are lines of latitude, (b) the East and West boundaries are lines of longitude, and (c) the sides are fudgingly asserted to be "equal" because the degree-measure difference between the two latitudes is equal to the degree-measure difference between the two longitudes.
Drinking game: take a shot every time Matt says "fencepost problem!"
Double whenever he miscorrects because of it.
and then once the video is over you'll have a drinking problem!
Surely you are taking shots _in between_ the times that Matt says "fencepost problems"? Apart from the last shot, of course. (-:
@@rightfront Now imagine taking a shot every time he called D.C. a state.
It was a perfect square as far as the methods available at the time of surveying that land in 1792. Also the Potomac has shifted slightly since its original surveying.
It’s the real world manifestation of the Parker Square.
"our old nemesis spherical geometry"
Matt at 1:47: "You can't actually walk exactly along the border the whole way, it's not publicly accessible"
GeoWizard, Archie and Adam Fieldhouse, Marcus the Chess Teacher: "Challenge Accepted!"
Realtor: "And this lovely 3 bedroom colonial house comes with your own personal cornerstone of American heritage. Enjoy paying the taxes of two different 'states'... and the random UA-camrs in your yard"
0:06 As a Virginian I’m happy that you came to pay us a visit. As your biggest fan I’m sad to find out you didn’t give me a shout while you were in town
Truman is the real hero here.
Thank you for your service, Truman
11:57 "and how are you doing past matt?"
....
"Oh hes been arrested."
😭😭😭😭🙏🏾
I used to live near the 9th stone. Had a run-in with the property owners when I walked up their driveway to see the stone. They didn't seem to mind!
6.18 dunkin is well known for being a "local independent chain"
If he goes to Boston he better drink a Compass.
0:55 The square having 90 degree sides is how you know this is how you know Matt is a flat earther
15:13 It's definitely pronounced "Potomac," not "Potomac." Uh.. I mean, it does not rhyme with Atomic. Puh-TOW-mack is the official pronunciation since 1931. It used to be called Patawomeck, and I don't think there's any surviving record of the original Algonquian pronunciation.
i believe it’s pronounced potomac
People who think DC should be a state have never done research into why is was specifically made to not be a state.
17:20 I think you said "1719" and "100 square meters" instead of 1790 (on screen) and 100 sq Mi
Thanks for the video as always, looking forward to the Smithsonian video
the most interesting geometric state border I think is between Pennsylvania and Delaware. it's (mostly) a circular arc!
19:20 - Sometimes jurisdictional cession needs some follow-up. Long ago the county courthouse in my home town left the middle of the town square because it needed to be much larger. I think the building wasn't built durably enough and couldn't be saved. At all events it was torn down. The Feds put a U.S. Post-Office in a new building on the same land, jurisdiction of which was duly transferred by statutes enacted by both sides. Later. the Post-Office outgrew the facility and relocated a few blocks away. The Feds enacted a statute that repudiated jurisdiction over the vacated land back to the State. But the State where my home town is located has a law on the books that says it doesn't have jurisdiction just because someone else (the Feds or a neighboring State, for instance) has passed a law ceding jurisdiction to my home State. It's not effective, this law in my State says, until my State passes a law ACCEPTING the jurisdiction being ceded. And with regards to this former Post-Office, my State has never passed the required law (unless they did so since the last time I checked). So, allegedly, you can do anything you'd like to do on that plot of land or in the building situated on it, without fear of being prosecuted. Something similar is alleged concerning a thin stripe of land in Yellowstone National Park. So they say.
I didn't realise spherical geometry was our old nemesis, however I am now convinced.
M. Parker could have just been being hyperbolic. (-:
"American history in a nutshell, tax and slavery"
Oddly poetic
The buck stops w/ Truman the camera guy.
it's Tom Hanks' son!
so ... a Parker square state?
That was a fun stroll. Arlington Cemetary, Reagan airport, pentagon, crystal city and pentagon city all feel like they are practically part of DC.
Matt Parker: 18:43 "So there you are, American history in a nutshell: tax and slavery" 😬
Falcon: "He's Out Of Line, But He's Right"
The camera guy trying to correct their horrid pronunciation XD My hero.
Nice to see you got to experience some of the only snow the area's gotten in the last few years. Hope it was a nice hike (and scoot, and drive). (And you even managed to find a Welcome to Virginia sign that didn't have a 'radar detector illegal' sign in view, or at least not in frame :D -- however that is the classic sign pairing to see when driving into the state)
I really liked that breakdown of the true shape of Exaggerado
@ 6:59 Every time someone says the border to Canada is not straight, they say that's because it's zigzaggy. No, the latitude line is not straight in the first place!
The Parker QR Code does not even work. Thanks, Virginia !
The code actually does work. A portion of the code has built in redundancy so that if part of it is destroyed it can still be read. You can still scan it with the piece missing. Give it a try.
As a Maryland resident i can say that we held up our end at keeping DC square.
I always find it amusing hearing British people (not just Matt) pronounce "Maryland" - and I'm not even American.
«Because it is projected on to a spherical object» -was my thought immediatly when I saw the title😅
Matt, it’s great to see you around my old stomping grounds. A fun walk involving the DC line is to walk the bike path on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Virginia to Maryland, cutting across the southernmost (watery) corner of DC. There is a brass marker showing the border of VA and DC and another marker, a few hundred feet farther, showing when you cross from DC into MD.
My favorite flavor of geography and mathematical pedantry
HA!!! The first corner Boundary Stone is across the street from my Apartment Complex and I didn't even know it was there!!! lol
The entire reason for the federal district not being a state or in a state is to prevent undue influence by that state over the federal government.
You should make a video on why DC exists.
The knock-off Indiana Jones music made me laugh out loud!
7:47 - I wonder if one party surveying the line started at the West and worked Eastwards, and another group of surveyors started East and worked West. Attributed to a person named Peter Drucker (correct his Comment if that is wrong) is a method for tunneling through a mountain, with one group of diggers starting on one side, and another on the other. "When they meet, they've dug a tunnel. If they don't meet, they've dug two tunnels".
Wikipedia has a fun article on state and international boundaries that have been determined by surveyors' mistakes. It includes a piece of land cut of from the United States by bodies of water, and joined to Canada by land. To drive from this piece of a U.S. State into any other U.S. State, you must drive through Canada. These things start out, often, with such language as "to the point where A and B meet" where "A" and "B" are two different geographic features. Problems arise when A and B turn out to NEVER meet, and the legislators writing the definition didn't know that yet.
Most accurate milestone
Unpopular (Popular?) Opinion: A rectangle on a sphere is a rectangle. 🙂
I agree. However, they either don't have straight sides (e.g. lines of latitude off the equator) or aren't quadrilaterals (e.g. octant covering equilateral rectangular triangles, or quadrant covering right angle sectors).
i remember Vsauce Michael saying the word hexahectaennacontakaiheptagon when explaining what the shape of Colorado actually is
9:54 All 99 PI listeners know “Always read the plaque.”
I love Matt's back-pi-ack :D
Does that sign at 9:55 claim the stone is 6 miles North of the West Boundary stone? Shouldn't it be 6 miles NorthEast, or 6/(sqrt(2)) North and the same distance West?
Good work Truman
As ever, blown away whenever I'm reminded that Chevy Chase is a placename.
Is there some kind of mathematical reason why the number of stones is offset by one from the number of miles? Would have loved it if you could have mentioned that
DC isn't a square because it's square root is XXIV and a half
4:04 - I can't get an angry tadpole out of the shape of Australian Capital Territory. To me it looks like a silhouette portrait of a sardonic woolly mammoth named Joe in a camouflage tuxedo walking (on a Tuesday afternoon) in the bike-lane from the barbershop (where he got a flat-top buzz-cut) to a banquet where he'll receive his Honorary Ph.D. In Arcane Highbrow Stuff from the University of Not In Kansas Anymore. Is that not what everyone else sees?
17:20 only 100 square meters? very stingy, even before the take-backsies
I'm glad I'm not the only one that heard it.
It's 100 square miles.
Ignore the "corner cases"... Or "intersecting edge cases"
5:13 - The people who live at 6119 on that street should have bought either two sixes or two nines for their address, and they should have nailed up one of the "1" s upside-down, to preserve the 180-degree rotational symmetry. Much of my home town is covered by sidewalk bearing the names of people in each year's graduating classes. When walking the wrong way towards 1991 I once attempted to tell my companion that the University is older than I'd thought, with a class of 1661. My companion wasn't gullible enough to buy it. A mile away someone has their street-address number "301" embedded in bronze in the sidewalk in the same manner. Someday I'm going to carve the name "Flavius Valerius Constantinus" beneath it, with the initials "M.S.I.A." (Master of Science in Imperial Administration) for the degree conferred.
Around 2:00, there is a map showing "all 9" of the 40 marker stones, some of which are missing. There are channels where even more people would feel compelled to verify the counts ... but not many such channels.
He was talking about one side, although I do think that he misspoke and said 9 when he meant 11. About a minute later, he used the correct number of 11 stones per side, which added up to 40 for all four sides.
and it adds up to 40 instead of 44 because each side shares 2 stones, one with each of the adjacent sides.
@@3RaccoonsInATank he said all 9 and then the far corner, meaning he was only reeferring there to how many they would encounter en route.
Also interesting to notice that the national mall essentially makes a cross made out of grass, but is missing a chunk of an arm. Other proposals for the national mall design had a fully visible cross in this location.
One of my fav UA-camrs and my son’s fav author walked right by our house and I somehow missed it?!?!?!?
Played around a bit on Google Maps. It looks like with a little work, you could just about come up with a decent marathon route that runs around the DC-Maryland border. The straight line length is about 25 miles. On Google, I got a walking path of about 30 miles, but there are some parts that can be cut off if you had permits to make it shorter. Not sure if you can cut it all the way down to 26.2. Probably not quite. But if you're creating with the start and end and maybe cut a corner, you might be able to get there.
Do Delaware and the 12-mile circle border next!
at least you tried, Truman, at least you tried.
9:00 i think defining the boundaries of a territory by lattitude and longitude makes FAR more sense than an actual square or rectangle, since we are dividing territory on an actual sphere called earth, not territory on a flat planed map, where the square is more at home.
that said, as a colorado resident i want the map markers redone to be accurate. what the heck!! we can do better
Potomac River = River McRiver
River son of river
A square state that isn’t a square nor a state. Does this video exist?
When i read the title, i thought it was a Map men video.
5:15 You doxxed them half. We just don't know who "them" in this case is yet but at least we know where they live!!!
@19:53 the corner is the 11th one not the 10th one. Fence post problem
Darn politics getting in the way of geometric perfection.
Again..
Matt acknowledges that it is sometimes hard to measure exactly correctly, but ... underestimates the other reasons that borders are wrong. Michigan's original surveys were a bit off, with two lines that needed to be reconciled. (If I recall correctly, by around 10 feet.) But the glitch in the Southern border is because of politics (Ohio was already a state, and wanted the Port of Toledo.) And there really were conflicting legal descriptions, because the borders were initially defined (and sometimes redefined) by politicians who were pretty sure they would never visit, and so didn't care. Even when they depended on a survey, it was often a survey to be completed later, budget willing.
But did they at least learn their lesson from "The Toledo War", and get more careful with later boundaries? Of course not. The border with Wisconsin was defined by a pair of rivers, one of which never actually existed, and the other of which ... well, it wasn't clear which of three river branches they were talking about. The one eventually chosen isn't even the most likely.
Since the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in disputes between states, they kept having to appoint special masters who kept saying, essentially, "The written law is stupid. To the extent we can understand it, it should be ignored in favor of doing what common sense says, and justifying it by saying too many years have already passed." (But there are kids who get an extra 30 miles of bus ride to school because someone did raise one Ohio issue in time.) Some of these "disputes" were in my lifetime, and I put "dispute" in quotes because it was usually really some private individual looking for a loophole to prevent enforcement of laws that both states agreed with.
I'm an American, and I was aware of this. Dadgummit, Virginia. Why can't we have nice things?
You could ask that question about so many topics…
Matt, I'd like you to increase by 10 the markers on a doorframe, a window frame, and a paper book, to see how their imperfections match up with the state of Colorado: my guess would be that there's no such thing as a perfect rectangle.
17:22 "Up to 100 square meters" Made a real Parker Square out of that one, Matt
It a great week for the Potomac
17:20 The only time the Congress used the metric system. Washington DC was supposed to be tiny.
Calling DC a state is an insult.
Matt you were one stone away from my neighborhood! Shame you didn't check out the Takoma stone. DC statehood!
Hi neighbor! Agreed, he was so close to greatness.
No taxation without representation 🙏🏾
2:04 call back to the fence post problem hits like crack cocaine for those who watched
because Virginia was hungry and took a bite out of DC
Yes Matt, we are happy with ourselves. 😊 Now, are you walking down to Jones Point lighthouse and the southern most point???
Is that a Goruck rucksack Matt is wearing!?
"we have john williams at home"
DC Boundary Stone are definitely a unique thing. I used to visit that northern one a lot as I used to live next door it it. Did you have a meet up in DC?
America must drive mathematicians crazy that the lines that define state borders are called "Parallels" when in sphere geometry, parallel is exactly what they are not.
Looking at Google maps, there appears to be some areas where the borders seems to jog and zig just a little off from straight square. (see near where the northwest line meets the Potomac, or some sections along the most northeast side near 16th or Blair Rd)
17:22 correction! 100 square _miles,_ not meters
Matt, could you please enable automatic English subtitles. For those of us who are hard of hearing or deaf, it means we can enjoy your videos, without deafening our family 😊
Oh this man and his squares
Can you please do a follow-up video on what well-defined mathematical methods might one use to attempt to quantify exactly how square a shape is? And by each of those measures, exactly how square is a circle, an equilateral triangle, Colorado, or a hypercube?
When Matt says Canberra is "right in the middle" of Sydney and Melbourne, what he means is Canberra is about twice as close to Sydney as it is to melbourne. (Less than 300KM to sydney, more than 650KM to melbourne). (TLDR NSW refused to cede any territory unless it was closer to Sydney).