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If you’re from San Francisco there’s a few things you’ve probably never heard of:
toast without avocados, three figure rent, republicans, and the East Cut neighborhood.
If you go on Google Maps though and search for East Cut it’ll tell you that’s this
neighborhood between Market Street and the Bay Bridge even though, before a year ago,
nobody had even tried to call this area the East Cut.
Nowadays, however, the “East Cut” name is seeping into the real world all thanks
to the world’s benevolent dictator—Google.
Now of course Google is amazing and lovely and I don’t mean to be critical at all of
such a fantastic organization but they do have a certain amount of power over, well,
everything.
More than half of the world’s smartphone users have used Google Maps in the past month
and, considering that there are 2.5 billion smartphone users in the world, that’s a
lot.
Google Maps is the most popular mapping service in the world and that means that when someone
wants to figure out what something is, they check Google Maps.
Quite bafflingly, the benevolent dictator almost almost started a war in 2010.
You see, where Nicaragua and Costa Rica meet on the Atlantic Ocean Nicaragua believes the
border to be this while Costa Rica believes it to be this.
In 2010 a Nicaraguan military troop was sent to the area to do dredging work on the San
Juan River.
While there, though, the troop just happened to meander onto Calero Island which, as far
as Costa Rica was concerned, was Costa Rica.
Now, having a foreign military strut into your country with no prior warning doesn’t
look great.
It looks a whole lot like an invasion so Costa Rica, being, interestingly, the most populous
country in the world without a military, sent 70 police officers to make sure that this
wasn’t the beginning of the Nicaraguan annexation of Costa Rica.
In response, Nicaragua sent an additional 50 troops and the two parties sort of just
had a stand off while the two country’s leaders had a discussion.
As it turned out, the few dozen troops that entered Costa Rica had no intentions to singlehandedly
overthrow a country of five million.
Their commander was just using Google Maps to navigate which showed the border as this.
Costa Rica then went to the International Court of Justice, and complained and then,
after years of back and forth, the court ruled that this area was in fact Costa Rica and
so now Google Maps shows it as Costa Rica and Nicaragua lays off the invasions.
Unfortunately Apple missed the opportunity to create a great Apple Maps ad.
Google Maps does try more or less to follow what people say places are but sometimes some
people disagree on what a thing is.
For example, some say New Zealand, other say “where?”
Some say Machias Seal Island is part of Canada, other say it’s part of the US so if you
search it on Google it won’t tell you which country it is like it does for the rest of
the US or Canada.
It’ll do the same if you look at a town in Western Sahara, Kashmir, the South China
Sea, or any other disputed territory.
But perhaps the biggest issue for Google Maps is what to call neighborhoods.
You see, in most cases, neighborhood names aren’t official—they’re just decided
through what people colloquially call places.
People just refer to this area in San Francisco as Russian Hill or this area Telegraph Hill,
this area Jackson Hill, and at least a few people call this area the East Cut.
In 2015, you see, an organization was founded to improve what was then called Rincon Hill.
For some inexplicable reason they decided they needed a rebranding and they settled
on the neighborhood name “the East Cut.”
They updated street signs and their website and everything but still, when asked, the
mayor of San Francisco said he had never heard of the neighborhood.
Lucky for the East Cut organization, one of their board members just happened to work
at Google, whose offices are in the East Cut, and, according to the New York Times in an
article about this debacle, was able to persuade the company to switch the name which is the
most San Francisco story ever.
Some neighborhood names on Google Maps are even more baffling, though.
In Detroit Google Maps refers to this area as “the Eye” even though really nobody
has ever referred to this area by that name.
A blogger did some detective work and was able to figure out that Google Maps copied
the neighborhood names from a map that some random website published in 2003.
Google Maps even copied the misspellings from that map.
As it turns out, “the Eye” was the name of a community watch organization in the area
so there were signs around the area saying “the Eye” and somewhere along the line
someone got confused and assumed it was the neighborhood name.
Still today that name shows up on Google Maps and, if you really want, you can search and
buy real estate in the prestigious Eye neighborhood.
In true Detroit fashion, houses start at $8,000.
Nobody’s really sure exactly how Google determines neighborhood names but, once they
do, that name essentially becomes official.
According to Google Maps Machias Seal island is both Canada and the US at the same time
but you know what’s also two things at once—Quantum objects since, thanks to Quantum superposition,
these particles can be in two or more quantum states at the same time.
This is what Schrodinger’s Cat is about—it’s like if a cat was both dead and alive at the
same time.
Quantum mechanics is like magic that’s happening in our world right now and it’s sort of
complicated but Brilliant is the expert in teaching super complex things in an understandable
way.
If you take their quantum objects course you’ll go away knowing what only specialized physicists
understand.
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