Directional Colloquialisms

Directional Colloquialisms

The convention in cartography is that unless otherwise specified, up on the map is always north. It wasn’t always this way. Different cultures used different, and often highly inconsistent, conventions which had cultural or religious meaning. What sealed the “north is...

Splitting Hairs?

In the world of demographics, seemingly small differences in national statistics can have dramatic effects, especially when those differences have different spatial expressions. The average age of the population in the United States is about 38.5 years old. In Canada,...

Privacy and the Census

Every representative democracy has a fundamental need to undertake a regular enumeration of its citizens to ensure that equal representation can be maintained as best as possible. But once you have gone to considerable trouble to count the people, it is quite...

Peering over the Border

Over the years, despite my attempts to assimilate into the American melting pot, the pronunciation of certain words betrays my heritage. No one whose first language is Canadian can say the word “out” without evoking a barely concealed snicker from most Americans. Eh?...