The US-Canada Border Is 5,500 Miles of Pure Nonsense
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an entertaining overview in any thread about border oddities.
What it is
CGP Grey walks through the odd history and quirks of the US-Canada border, including how it was surveyed and its irregularities such as exclaves.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Recommends CoolGuySteve · 2019-01 · on “Canada's Toughest Border Crossing”
There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border. [this video] Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs. Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.
Recommends gregmac · 2020-01 · on “A little-known US-Canada border dispute”
There's a great CGP Grey video on the Canada-US border well worth watching if this interests you: [this video]
Recommends sandworm101 · 2020-09 · on “Northwestern Point of the Lake of the Woods”
There is a great youtube video on this and similar can-US border irregularities. Search for "Canada-US no touching zone". There is another exclave near vancouver. [this video]
Cites sandworm101 · 2016-02 · on “Canadians don’t live as far north as you think”
There was much silliness with the boarder. They actually drew some of it using blank maps. [this video] (And that map missed a huge part of the can-us boarder, focusing only on the southern one.)
Cites jffry · 2016-07 · on “The rectangularness of countries”
[this video] The border is defined as a straight line, but was surveyed as a series of slightly wobbly series of lines. They put up thousands of stone pillars, cut out a strip of trees along the border, and it became official. IIRC there's also some stuff about a disputed island