Terry Pratchett regularly jokes about this phenomenon, with phrasing like "one of those places that only had a name to avoid the embarrassment of leaving large blank spaces on the map".

@jakubslavik5595

3 ай бұрын

Oh, isn't that from the Discworld series? I remember that phrase...

@rooknado

3 ай бұрын

There’s nothing embarassing about it, why would you leave it out regardless of if 20 thousand people lived there or 20? It’s still a location on the map, I don’t get it

@TwilitbeingReboot

3 ай бұрын

@@rooknado Fits with the general comedic tone of the books, mostly. Often the implication is that the place is so small it barely qualifies as a town, more like "a bend in the road with a name."

@simic0racle157

3 ай бұрын

@@rooknado sales the answer is almost always sales, people are gonna buy the most readable and useable maps. If you want to label things just because they are there then feel free to start labeling random points in the ocean, don't think anyone will want to buy your map tho.

@marvalice3455

3 ай бұрын

​@@rooknadoTerry Pratchett's talent was in writing interesting and humorous prose. Not in social commentary. In fact, almost non of his lines which sound "deep and profound" on first reads stand up to even the tiniest amount of scrutiny. They sure are interesting and humorous to read though.

Never actively thought about this before. Yokohama is also a huge victim of the Balitmore effect with 3.7m population living just down the coast from Tokyo

@hamanakohamaneko7028

3 ай бұрын

I mean Yokohama is a satellite city of Tokyo and part of its metropolitan area. It takes less than 30 minutes by train to go between them Try Hamamatsu, it's own city of 800,000, and the largest city in Shizuoka prefecture, but it's not labeled because it's close to Nagoya (but not in it's metro area). Meanwhile Shizuoka, the capital of Shizuoka prefecture, is labeled because it is the capital and is further from Nagoya

@EBGamez1

3 ай бұрын

169th like :)

@josephryall9871

3 ай бұрын

Probably because everyone would just mistake it for a paid ad for tyres. 😂

@slicer2938

3 ай бұрын

Yokohama is in japan techniquely a different city but is considered within the Tokyo metropolitan area and so its combined with Tokyo instead. also funny to see countries that are so small that no cities get shown because the country name is more important. example of this being South Korea with Seoul not being shown.

@dankchill

3 ай бұрын

@@supernovahm1178 alright let me rephrase. I never actively thought about this phenomenon having an actual name for it. I think most people at least subconsciously notice this type of thing but nothing more than that. You don't have to be an obnoxious douche about it

This video is excellent but no one's mentioning how nice it is that this dude comes in, makes his point, and then concludes the video. No filler, no nonsense. Good info in a good size

Back in the 1970s, my dad was an air compressor salesman, and his area included Minnesota and Manitoba. He once had to make a sales call to Churchill, Manitoba. He was surprised to learn he had to take the train. Churchill is on the shore of Hudson Bay, and is a long way from anything else, over terrain that is marsh, lakes, granite, and occasional permafrost. Even keeping the rail open is an effort. My dad looked at the railroad map, and saw labelled stops, every sixty miles or so. "The towns certainly are spread out, up here." "No," he was told. "Those aren't towns. Those are the names of the guys who live there."

@RCAvhstape

3 ай бұрын

I love looking at maps of Canada, the roads going north just turn into thin grey lines and vanish into nothing. Alaska has places you can't even get to by road. And they are on maps lol.

@CartoType

3 ай бұрын

Even Britain has places you can’t get to by road. Inverie in Scotland is one.

@kayekaye251

3 ай бұрын

Tea, Missouri is named that because the suggested names kept being rejected. In small towns they are often only a window in the store. So the owner looked up and saw Tea on the store shelf and they said Sure! Tea is ok!

@smaza2

3 ай бұрын

this is an interesting point, but (as an aussie) I would argue that Alice is very famous within Australia for being the town in the middle of the continent. so potentially the scales are being tipped towards it a bit

@markwestaway7207

2 ай бұрын

@@RCAvhstape, including in Alaska, the capital, Juneau.

Saskylakh, Russia (population - 2317) is visible on Google Maps even when Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Delhi and Beijing are already missing

@sergeyredin4054

3 ай бұрын

Google maps are very strange, in all the huge Yakutia republic they only show the republic's capital and this Saskylakh which I never heard of before even though I born and grown in Yakutia.

@allandriver2066

3 ай бұрын

Putin would love that......

@mossfinder7516

3 ай бұрын

​@@allandriver2066 All of Russia would

@lucarasic8001

3 ай бұрын

Jelisovo in kamptsha (probably butchered that) is visible when Tokyo,New York,Rome, Paris,Shanghai and Madrid are gone. They do have more than 100,000 people living, but these are well known cities

@PeterKnagge

3 ай бұрын

Alice Springs has an airport. In prehistoric times before the internet/gps if you are flying a plane you would want to know where the airports are!

Currently living in Alice and love this about the town ☺️

@wheelzbruh

3 ай бұрын

What are the chances? I live in Alice too!

@stickmdr

3 ай бұрын

How is life like in Alice?

@goaway9977

3 ай бұрын

Stay safe. I will pray for you.

@llamamusicchannel7688

3 ай бұрын

I've driven there from Victoria multiple times throughout my life. Had a cousin living in a caravan park up there.

@Roger__Wilco

3 ай бұрын

I lived there for a couple years in the 90s, in Braitling.

Its important to note that on that map you see a major road running from Adelaide to darwin, and it runs right through alice, in outback Australia any town big enough to hold a service station is kind of a big deal...

@bruhfvdf3145

3 ай бұрын

Any town that IS a service station is a big deal

@Andre_XX

3 ай бұрын

Driving south of Alice once, I had noticed that Kulgera features prominently on all maps of that part of the world. I thought it would actually be some kind of town...

@raygale4198

3 ай бұрын

@@Andre_XX Kulgera, right up there with Cagney Park. infact almost neighbours.

@shramanadasdutta3006

3 ай бұрын

Always wondered why its called the outback. Its not on the outter edges or in the back. Its literally the middle big chunk of the country. What does outback actually mean in Australian?

@bruhfvdf3145

3 ай бұрын

@@shramanadasdutta3006 it means out back, like outside in a place no one goes

I first went to Alice about fifty years ago. At that time ATMs all had a sign saying “if this machine is out of order the nearest machine is …..”. The one at Alice said “if this machine is out of order the nearest machine is at Port Augusta 1226 km away”.

@cameronnewton7053

3 ай бұрын

It's like the "last fuel stop for 600km" signs

@wheresmyeyebrow1608

3 ай бұрын

That’s hilarious

@barts1286

3 ай бұрын

@@Jack_Russell_Brown 600km is about 375 miles. You would only have to carry your jerry can of petrol 18 miles to the next fuel stop, then 18 miles back with a full can.😆

@baardkopperud

3 ай бұрын

​@@Jack_Russell_BrownRemember "NAF Roadbook" here in Norway from my youth, it had rather detailed maps, and sometimes a stretch of road was marked at either end with two red needle/arrow symbols with a gas-pump above, to show there were no gas-stations between the arrows.

@erink476

3 ай бұрын

and I thought the "closed bank" sign in Hay telling you to go to Deniliquin (125km, 1hr 20 min) if you needed face-to-face service was bad. (rest stop while driving Canberra-Adelaide a few years ago. Dad needed a nap, so I wandered around to save my phone battery and data for when there was actually nothing else to do. Unfortunately, it was Sunday arvo so nothing was open except the IGA.)

I mean, considering the fact that Alice Springs is set dead center in of a desert that most people completely avoid because most of it's borderline uninhabitable; 25,000 people may as well be New York City to them.

@flandyc4513

3 ай бұрын

Sounds more like Las Vegas by that description lol

@kangarootube.dailyvideosof5199

3 ай бұрын

Borderline uninhabitable? I love living here

@rawnature8148

2 ай бұрын

Rather be in Alice than Sydney.

Well to be fair Alice Springs is genuinely world famous. So many tourists go there to visit Uluru. It’s not a cartographic anomaly, e.g. weather reports too always feature Alice Springs. It’s like the Galapagos, Cuzco, and Petra, they’re all super famous despite their small populations.

@sylvanelite

3 ай бұрын

Uluru is kinda nowhere near Alice Springs. It’s over 300kms away. People only think they are close because there’s nothing else nearby to compare it to.

@hhelina

3 ай бұрын

I assure you it's not. Uluru is and the other places you've mentioned yes. I'm someone who travels a lot, only heard of it when I had lived in Australia for months

@ravage_rensvae5284

3 ай бұрын

@@doodeedah6409especially with the 160kmh speed limit in outback NT

@doodeedah6409

3 ай бұрын

@@hhelina If I had said “Wadi Musa” instead of “Petra”, many people probably would have never heard of it either. Still I’d consider it world famous to anyone interested in Petra. Probably the first town most people ever know about Jordan. I think anyone planning to visit Australia would have heard about Alice Springs. And you’ll definitely hear it everywhere when you’re here. It’s not a random obscure town like the video seems to suggest.

@doodeedah6409

3 ай бұрын

@@sylvanelite It is the nearest town from Uluru though. It’s a very common thing that people do to stay in Alice Springs and make a day trip to Uluru. 300kms is really no biggie for in the Australian outback scale.

Wild that you can't see Seoul in that last shot (3:54) but you can see Alice Springs.

@WerewolfLord

3 ай бұрын

Seoul isn't labelled, but Pyongyang is. 😂

@groinBlaster31

3 ай бұрын

That's a separate effect. Basically, south Korea is very particular about how they show up on Google maps. The entire country is blank at that distance, actually. At least in this video.

I knew what town would be since I saw the title of this video. I've never watched any videos from your channel, but the moment I saw Australia "every map has this town" I knew it was Alice Springs. I'm from Brazil and I still have with me an inflated Earth globe my family bought (?) in the 90s, and I've always loved Geography. And of course... the globe has Alice Springs. So in my mind as a child, Alice Springs was as important as Canberra or Sydney. I just grew with this information and after a couple of decades, it's impossible to disassociate Australia and this small town.

@subwayfacemelt4325

3 ай бұрын

Hehe, that's so cool. There's something about this whole thing that really tugs at my novelty strings. I feel cute, warm and fuzzy on the inside. You reminded me of some/all of the globes from my childhood, on which I saw Alice printed.

@scarabeo52

3 ай бұрын

As an Aussie who lived and worked in Alice Springs a long time ago I have to agree about it's importance (nearby is Pine Gap defence facility - think CIA and such). It's fifty years since I worked all over Sydney and visited Canberra and I would never contemplate living there...

@Elizabeth2445A

3 ай бұрын

@@scarabeo52 I wouldn't recommend it, canberra is a glorified country town

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

Alice Springs is a really crazy town, a lot of indigenous people sitting around the parks with a lot of fighting (generally between women more than the men) It's definitely an interesting place in a weird way

@PeterKnagge

3 ай бұрын

Alice Springs has an airport. In prehistoric times before the internet/gps if you are flying a plane you would want to know where the airports are! I would argue that place names are included as a logical geographic reference too. I'm not American so first I would find Washington DC then narrow my search to Baltimore. If I want to find Uluru/Ayers Rock then first I would find Alice Springs then narrow my search to Uluru/Ayers Rock. Alice Springs because it is close to Uluru/Ayers Rock it is also a tourist mecca with many international 5 star hotels with an airport.

The biggest example of this is if on maps you go to Greenland you can see Summit camp a station with 5-38 people, meanwhile Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, with a metropolitan population of 23M is not labeled in favour the name of the country. Funnily enough Nuuk, the capital and biggest city of Greenland is not labeled in favour of nothing, even though there is space to write Nuuk.

@birdgod5584

3 ай бұрын

And to the right of Summit Camp is Myggbukta which doesn't have anyone at all

@survivaloftheidiots6239

3 ай бұрын

That literally sounds like a mario kart track 😅

@foreverareaper191

3 ай бұрын

South Korea apparently doesnt have a city now

@YeahNo

3 ай бұрын

I visit Nuuk and Dhaka most days. Or I at least play in their timezones. 😂

@january1may

3 ай бұрын

@@birdgod5584 At least it used to have people within the last century. Out on the northwest coast (at the same zoom level) there's Nunatame which I hadn't been able to confirm _ever_ had any population but even if it did it appears to have been abandoned over a century ago

There's also a big tourist situation given that it's the largest air connection to Uluru. Which also explains Exmouth and Port Douglas being on that zoom (population about 3k-4k) and the existence of Yulara (population about 800 off season). Though Kununurra, Derby and Karratha are stranger anomalies, as they're not quite as touristy as the other places I've mentioned, and have a similar population.

@pixiedust7659

3 ай бұрын

Notice Exmouth, Alice and Rocky are all on maps? They are all on the Tropic of Capricorn.

@rhino6634

3 ай бұрын

The posters thesis is entirely wrong. Alice Springs gets half a million tourists a year. Nothing to do with the actual population. It’s sad pple actually don’t do research. He could validate it by finding other small cities but he didn’t

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

Doesn't Uluru have an airport now? Seems like Alice tourism is dying since that started

@MattMcIrvin

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, the first thing I thought was "isn't that right next to Uluru?" Well, it's not--it's quite some distance away, but just eyeballing it, it seems to be a tourist hub for people going there.

@GamingPenguin4545

3 ай бұрын

As a previous resident of Karratha, its the largest town in the area iirc and a major center for mining in the area

As a retired cartographer, we used to call this using our "cartographic license". It's not just generalization. There is also a priority on what gets put down first and what gets offset, though that's more an issue with hard copy maps than digital maps. Roads and rail lines often follow shorelines and decisions need to be made when all need to be seen. At larger scales (i.e., more zoomed in) there are also decisions to be made on roads vs buildings for example. Never heard this called the Baltimore Effect though.

Alice Springs might only have 25,000 people but it has a major highway The Stuart Highway, and is a major stop for the Adelaide to Darwin Rain Network with The Ghan train. It is actually more important than a lot of other places in Australia being a central connection point.

@Mmmm1ch43l

3 ай бұрын

so? while this might be true on the scale of Australia, Alice Springs is still clearly much less important than multiple capitals of European countries, many multi-million cities in China and Seoul the capital of South Korea and by far its largest city. None of these are visible at the same zoom level that Alice Springs is

@dcarbs2979

3 ай бұрын

@@Mmmm1ch43l How many of those European capitals were overseas intelligence gathering centres for the entire hemisphere? Alice Springs was.

@Nettlewitch

3 ай бұрын

And Alice acts as a defacto city for a huge area that takes in not just the NT but also the northern part of South Australia and a huge swathe of Western Australia (ie the Ngaanyatjarra Lands and even beyond). This video really shows how ignorant east coast city residents are of the significance of Alice. The town is essentially Canberra/Sydney and Melbourne distilled into 25000. And yes, I am an Aboriginal person who had lived in Alice since 2001 so I am a little more informed about its importance than east cost whitefellas.

@Mmmm1ch43l

3 ай бұрын

@@dcarbs2979 oh you got me there, I'm sure Alice Springs is so prominent on the map because it used to be the "overseas intelligence gathering centre for the entire hemisphere"

@Mmmm1ch43l

3 ай бұрын

@@Nettlewitch ok, let's estimate. around 1.8 million people live in South Australia, 1.4 million of those live in (Greater) Adelaide. 2.8 million live in Western Australia, 2 million of those live in the Perth metropolitan area. around 250 thousand live in the Northern Territory. So (extremely generously) 1.5 million people live in an area "overseen" by Alice Springs. That's less than a third of the people who live in (the metropolitan areas of) Sydney or Melbourne individually Yes, Alice Spring may have a big influence over a huge area. But that's mainly because this area is mostly empty. That's sort of the entire point of this video. compared to more densely populated areas (especially on a global scale) Alice Springs is just not that important, don't kid yourself

I'm from Hamamatsu, Japan, a city of 800,000, and the largest city in Shizuoka prefecture. It's not labeled because it's close to Nagoya (but not in it's metro area). Meanwhile Shizuoka, the capital of Shizuoka prefecture, is labeled because it is the capital and is further from Nagoya

@nlpnt

3 ай бұрын

Shizuoka is also the capital of the Japanese toy and scale-model industry, perhaps near to the hearts of mapmakers?

@hamanakohamaneko7028

3 ай бұрын

@@nlpnt Shizuoka makes toy cars, Hamamatsu makes real cars (the birthplace of Honda and Suzuki)

@JB-xl2jc

3 ай бұрын

I wonder if someday it'll be "solved" by urban sprawl causing them to collapse into one megacity? But, then I guess it'd be sections within that megacity that went by the old city names.

@jugo1944

3 ай бұрын

Justice for Hamamatsu

@ASHERUISE

3 ай бұрын

@@JB-xl2jc I would hope not...they're pretty far apart and that would consume where I live too and also 2 entire prefectures. I prefer the city over the countryside but that sounds like an environmental catastrophe. Tokyo can have Yokohama tho like they're basically the same thing.

I find that big international disaster movies often have no idea where towns in Australia are and show strange locations

@adrienaline4894

3 ай бұрын

Team America had one of their locations for the massive strike in Geraldton, Western Australia, roughly. Had a good laugh about that when used to live there.

@musicalneptunian

3 ай бұрын

Isn't there a Hollywood movie being filmed now in Walhalla, Vic, a place with a normal pop of 20 people?

@timgooding2448

3 ай бұрын

@@musicalneptunian Yep. Ice Road 2: Road to the Sky

@graemesutton2919

3 ай бұрын

That's because we are the arse end of the world and it has it's advantages being so

@Magooch86

3 ай бұрын

I always notice this! It's like "wow the aliens targeted Townsville, Burke and Coober Pedy"

While your point still stands valid, Alice Springs is also super famous not just for Uluru, but also as a weather station. I'm from Germany, and in our Geography classes, when we learned about climate zones, Alice Springs was also the example for hot dry continental weather :D As a 14 year old, I could name and show Alcie Springs on a map, but didn't know Canberra existed.

@cameronnewton7053

3 ай бұрын

To be fair, you don't want to know about Canberra because that's where all the politics happens, if I could magically remove the ACT from existence, I would.

@danielsmyth7508

3 ай бұрын

​@@cameronnewton7053you can't remove Canberra yet, not until summanats has been relocated

@jonas-9398

3 ай бұрын

Also, Allice Sprigs is famous for the United States Intelligence gathering facility Pine Gap. It is located just a few miles out of town and is a major strategic location for satalite communications.

@menyjackets593

3 ай бұрын

as an Australian to be honest you’re quite over enthusiastic about Alice Springs. We care more about Aldi than Alice

@VaryaEQ

3 ай бұрын

​@@menyjackets593😂😂

If I'm in Australia and I need the amenities of a mid sized town, knowing where Alice Springs is is probably very important. I reckon they have things like hardware stores, supermarkets, gas stations and hospitals. It is an oasis, and an oasis deserves infinitely more attention than a metropolis because you're not dependent on the latter.

@rod.h8064

3 ай бұрын

Yep, there are all of them there, it's also on the major ground transport route through that part of the country

@THICCTHICCTHICC

3 ай бұрын

Basically all roads that go towards the centre aim for Alice Springs, since there's no way any other roads would be maintained properly. It's not the issue you think it is. Roads towards Alice have existed for well over 150 years now with settlements and communities along the way.

@mm6461

3 ай бұрын

I’ve been to Alice Springs, won’t go back. Total shithole

National weather maps on Australian television almost always feature Alice Springs, and also Broome, another town on the northwest coast, just to fill out the map, because otherwise there would be huge gaps between Adelaide, Darwin, and Perth. Meanwhile larger towns and small cities in the southeast often don't get labeled due to relative proximity to larger cities.

@rhino6634

3 ай бұрын

Not to fill the gaps but to cater to the half a million tourists who visit Alice springs an year

@PeterKnagge

3 ай бұрын

Alice has an airport, & a major tourism & stopover point.

@coreyhodge1798

3 ай бұрын

There's another factor at play here. We have had a fully staffed Bom weather station here until recently. Most towns do not. This isn't just to not leave the map blank but to provide a comprehensive view of the weather across the country rather than having a big unknown area making the weather elsewhere harder to predict.

@Mulgah

3 ай бұрын

Alice probably doesn't need a forecast either, it's gonna be fucking hot

@wanderschlosser1857

3 ай бұрын

"Relative proximity" is the ultimate description of Australia! 😂 I come from Berlin, if I didn't get what I wanted in my local IKEA I just drove 10km to the next one. I now live in Perth. Well the next IKEA is about 3hrs by plane away, in Adelaide. The planes are the busses and trains of Australia. I love the place, it just changes your mindset about distances.

Mount Isa is also on a few of those maps, north east of Alice, population hovering around 18K to 25K people depending on mining booms

@MissingGamer

3 ай бұрын

I was gonna say that, it's on mine!

@yenyehski_698

3 ай бұрын

I always find it funny because Broken Hill is about the same size as Mt Isa City and about as isolated but is left off maps a lot more.

@quackcement

3 ай бұрын

since they are closing the mine, its population will likely drop, however it will stay on maps, for decades to come even it became completely abandoned

@jpmasters-aus

3 ай бұрын

@@quackcementActually one of the issues in Broken Hill is the population is growing and there is now a housing shortage for the new miners and essential workers. Several new mines have opened out of BH and they live in BH and commute out.

@michaelboyce7079

3 ай бұрын

Just in area it's self, Mt Isa lays claim to being the largest city in the world, with the longest main street in the world. It's all pretty tongue-in-cheek stuff though, mostly based on the fact that the Mt Isa city council administers the small township of Camooweal, by road, a mere 190 kilometres away!

Remember a story were tiny town somewhere in Australia got a donation/grant to build a massive library due to this. The philanthropists were looking for a suitable place to build a library and saw the name of the town on a world map thinking it was big enough for the library but in fact there was just plenty of space to write the name of the town and nothing of note within a 1000km and so the cartographers went big.

@stephenpowstinger733

3 ай бұрын

So, did they pull the donation and relocate it?

@TheAussief1

3 ай бұрын

@@stephenpowstinger733 was a line in an Australian novel I read many years ago, either the author was following the same train of thought or something like that happened or nearly did.

As someone who grew up in the DC area, I find it kind of hilarious that Baltimore's label disappears before Fairfax. That's an artifact of the label appearing above the dot--Baltimore is to the north; Fairfax is to the west.

In addition to Guangzhou, you have Shenzhen (12.6M), Huizhou (6M), Dongguan (10.4M), Foshan (9.6M), Zhongshan (4.4M) and Zhuhai (2.47M) between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. You won't see them because they are way too compact. Same for cities around Shanghai and Tokyo.

As an Australian (from Brisbane) who currently lives in Baltimore, this video was right up my alley. Never thought of this phenomenon before, the Baltimore effect, and the Alice Springs effect. Brilliant.

Another example is Switzerland. The capital is Berne but if you zoom out, you'll see 3 cities labeled on the map. Zurich, Basel and Lausanne. As a person from Basel, this is quite nice haha

@xTheUnderscorex

3 ай бұрын

Legally Switzerland doesn't actually have a capital, so that's actually consistent.

@Mmmm1ch43l

3 ай бұрын

@@xTheUnderscorex while this is technically true, functionally Bern is the capital of Switzerland. Google maps clearly thinks so as well since Bern has the special dot only capital cities have. So I doubt that's why this choice was made (also there's a fourth Swiss city which survives to the highest zoom level: Geneva)

@hellodolly7989

3 ай бұрын

@@xTheUnderscorexIn the same way the US doesn’t have an official language, Switzerland doesn’t have a capital bc of history and politics, but still effectively has a place of administration that functions as a capital.

I had a small globe that was a bowling alley prize. On Australia it had only labelled Melbourne and Fremantle, which I thought was pretty cool

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

So odd, considering Fremantle is just a small town that is now part of metropolitan Perth

@RobertJW

3 ай бұрын

​@@chrispekel5709 Maybe it was made by a Dockers fan.

@Spiffington

3 ай бұрын

@@chrispekel5709The largest general cargo port on the entire western seaboard though.

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

@@RobertJW lol

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

hmmm interesting@@Spiffington

I fell for this years ago when I drove from Melbourne to Perth. All those towns along the way... Balladonia, Eucla, Cocklebiddy... The ones you see on the map.. not a town. Just a service station and a pub!

@zoeherriot

3 ай бұрын

So very Australian… that’s one tough drive. It’s mostly dust and trees no higher than your knees. It’s like when you look at eyre peninsula which is about 1/3rd the size of Texas, only has population of 60,000 people. It’s mostly empty.

@barts1286

3 ай бұрын

Eucla is a town, Border Village is the roadhouse..

@Andre_XX

3 ай бұрын

It is said that back in 1979 Jimmy Carter phoned Balladonia to apologise for crashing Skylab on them. I suppose he thought it must be some kind of town. Even today there is not much there, but it does have the best Skylab museum in the world! Back then I reckon the population would not have been more than 3 or 4 people and a couple of dogs.

@zoeherriot

3 ай бұрын

@@Andre_XX Yeah, my father was born in a town with a population of 11. There are so many of these towns that just seem so desolate and isolated in the outback.

@Andre_XX

3 ай бұрын

@@zoeherriot Sometimes I wish I was living out there!

You're not wrong about some of those towns being tiny. Near the end of the video when you moved around to Alaska, it shows Talkeetna, between Anchorage and Fairbanks. It just so happens that I've lived in Alice Springs and I've visited Talkeetna. Alice is huge compared to Talkeetna. There can't be more than a few hundred people in Talkeetna, I would have thought (it's been some time since I was there).

@staticbuilds7613

3 ай бұрын

According to google. Yes it seems only 1000 people live there compared to 25,000 in Alice springs.

@peepeetrain8755

2 ай бұрын

Alice isn't the best example though tbf, Alice is to NT what Fairbanks is to Alaska. Next time you see a map of Australia, see if Eucla (37 pop) comes up, is on the border of WA and SA, or the truckstops along the Nullarbor (literally just a truckstop and a motel are sometimes on our maps), Yulara was on it with 800 people, Derby has 3,000.

@MultiRationalThinker

2 ай бұрын

@@peepeetrain8755 - yes, I've seen a few with Eucla on them. I saw one recently that not only had Eucla, but also showed Top Springs, Victoria River and Threeways in the NT, all of which are roadhouses.

When you zoom in on the Baltimore-Washington area, you can see the town I live in, yet even as a DMV local, I never knew the phenomenon was named after Baltimore. So cool!

Alice Springs is the home of CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association), which promotes Aboriginal music and culture throughout Australia. I have enjoyed and promoted much of their outstanding music.

I've long known about the Baltimore Effect, but this is the first time I've heard it actually getting a name.

Nome, Alaska is another major example of this phenomenon. I was fascinated at how Nome was shown when the map was scrolled around at the end, but not, say, Vladivostok.

@normanclatcher

3 ай бұрын

It's the most interesting town on the Alaskan West Coast by a lot. Kotzebue and Bethel aren't even close.

This same thing happens with Canada. Places like Churchill, Uranium City, and Happy Valley-Goose Bay are utterly tiny and yet they always appear because they need to fill Canada's area with _something_

I noticed that on google maps in Ireland (my country), Dingle is marked on the very zoomed out map even though it only has 2,000 people.

@Calvin_Coolage

3 ай бұрын

Maybe someone working on Google Maps thought to themselves 'Hehe, Dingle,' and decided to include it over another city.

I once saw a globe with Ajo, Arizona labeled on it. I'm not from there, but I've been through it at least a dozen times. There were between 3,000 and 4,000 people there in the 2010 census.

@jugo1944

3 ай бұрын

That label is essential if you really need Ajo

@normanclatcher

3 ай бұрын

Doesn't that mean 'garlic'?

When my family traveled to New York in 2010, we visited the Barns and Nobles bookstore in the 5th Ave. My father was browsing the diaries they had for sale and saw a South America map that surprisingly had our hometown of Taubaté labeled on it. I suppose the American makers of that diary found the larger and richer city of São José dos Campos had just too long of a name to fit their map. Needless to say, my father bought it.

@troybaxter

3 ай бұрын

I'm assuming you are from Taubaté. What country is that in?

@janjager2906

3 ай бұрын

😁 Nice one!

@sohopedeco

3 ай бұрын

@@troybaxter Brazil 🇧🇷

@troybaxter

3 ай бұрын

@@sohopedeco very cool.

Alice Springs is on any tourists to-do list and has flights from various cities in Australia. It doesn't have a huge population but it is important because it's where tourists go in order to visit Uluru which is arguably the #1 most well known feature in the continent of Australia for tourism

Very familiar with this effect growing up in Bristol, which is right next to Cardiff, Wales. Despite being a much larger (and arguably more historically signficant of a city) Bristol is often left off maps as Cardiff is the capital of Wales

"Our town never makes the 7 O'clock news and that's the way we like it." - Daddy-O [ movie Welcome to Woop Woop, 1997]

@Oldtanktapper

3 ай бұрын

I’ve never been able to look at a Cherry Ripe the same way again.

@tylers2059

3 ай бұрын

@@Oldtanktapper I've never able to watch "The Sound of Music" the same way, either.

Great dedication to the bit at 1:47

Your video popped randomly into my feed, and I'm delighted it did. I hadn't contemplated this before, and it is obvious after trying your "Alice Springs" experiment. Many of my favourite towns and cities had disappeared from view. Arles, Nice and Biarritz in France are the most prominent. Disclaimer: Some french blood still runs in my proud Australian veins. I'm looking forward to going through your archive.

Glad I stumble and this video - cheers, looking forward to more

That’s so true as I live in Cairns with a population of 150,000. As long as I can remember it’s always been in the weather map of Australia on the nightly news, & I’m in my 50s. Great video 👍

I had also noticed, when you were zoomed out on the US -- Chicago appeared (which isn't strange), but Naperville did as well. When the next city over (it shares borders) is Aurora which is the 2nd populous city in the State ... Aurora has 200K, whilst Naperville has just over 150K.

What's weirder about Google maps is that at some zoom levels it shows Guangzhou but then zoomed further in it stops displaying Guangzhou but displays Shenzhen instead before showing both

Love how your family atlas is so worn out! I grew up pre internet, and feel the same way about maps. Interesting video!

What a cool video on a subject I had never thought about actively - but passively noted a lot before

I found that genuinely interesting. I've never heard of that before. Thanks for a great, quick, and easy to understand video. Brilliant 👍🏻

Terrific video. As a map aficionado (and sometime Baltimore resident), it's great to see this explained so clearly.

When you travel, the way you look at things and the way you think about things changes. If I had seen this video a year ago it would be just another random video but I actually went to Australia last year, Sydney and Melbourne but ended up doing a lot of research on all of Australia so know about Alice springs, so now this video makes me feel like oh yeah I know about this, I spent some time with Aussie people and the know about the place he is talking about.

I dove across the outback 2 months ago, stopping at allice springs was essential for my trip, i think its safe to say it exists because nowhere else does. reverse balitomore, it would only take building a town of 50,000 residents right next to Alice springs to get it removed from virtually every entire map of Australia

@katiekat2921

3 ай бұрын

8O I think your greatest achievement in life overshadows all this talk about Alice. I mean, diving across the outback is just so frickin awesome!!!

@quackcement

3 ай бұрын

yes it was 12,000km of driving i wont forget@@katiekat2921

Cool point. This explains why, as a brit, I've never been quite sure where Baltimore is beyond "on the east coast somewhere", even though I've been to dc several times!

fascinating content, really enjoyed it, great work👏👏

When I was little, i always thought Alice Springs was pretty big (at least as big as Canberra, where I live) exactly because of this phenomenon. Only fairly recently did i learn how tiny Alice actually is.

@rhino6634

3 ай бұрын

It gets half a million tourists a year so it’s actually much busier than the 30k permanent residents population would suggest

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

​@@rhino6634yeah and I think there's probably 30k Aboriginals who don't call it their permanent home there too

I wouldn’t call it tiny. It has more people than Broken Hill in it. Tiny compared to big cities perhaps but true tiny is Cobar, or Silverton.

Interesting video, Straight to point, informative and entertaining. Great video to watch! love your videos.

Very interesting. I'll have been a look at some of your other videos. Thank you.

Nome, Alaska is like that too.

@sohopedeco

3 ай бұрын

The first time I saw that town on a map, I assumed it was a mistake and they forgot to fill the name of the town. "Nome" means "name" in Portuguese. 😂

@aliquotidian

3 ай бұрын

@sohopedeco - very close to its origin. It was noted as a settlement with no agreed name, so the first field cartographer wrote "Name?", which was somehow read as "Nome". The publisher didn't verify, hence Nome. Although maybe the first field cartographer was a Portuguese speaker and wrote "Nome?" End result the same

@knutthompson7879

3 ай бұрын

That’s a good example

I wonder how Alice Springs residents feel about their hometown's worldwide fame?

@xyreniaofcthrayn1195

3 ай бұрын

Hot, bothered, thirsty and proud.

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

Most of them just want some money to go put it in the casino pokies

@chrispekel5709

3 ай бұрын

I wish I was joking

@tyronebiggums5547

3 ай бұрын

Don't care Ur a white dawg + gimme money 4 da bus m8 + my land + white dawg + goon yummy yum yum.

@mm6461

3 ай бұрын

They’re too indigenous and too drunk to care

Thank you. That was very informative and I didn't know about any of it.

Wow, man, that's such great content, instant subscribe, loved it!

the main problem with Australia is : if they don't label small cities or even villages, people will think there's absolutely nobody in Australia (there's as many habitants in Australia as in The metropolitan area of New York, New York is only a city while Australia is nearly as big as USA)

@rhino6634

3 ай бұрын

Alice springs isn’t small by any means. It gets half a million tourists a year. It’s a very popular tourist destination. His thesis is completely wrong.

@maarten1115

3 ай бұрын

@@rhino6634Tourists aren't permanent residents, by that logic Mount Everest would be a medium sized city.

@ian7033-qj9wg

3 ай бұрын

@@rhino6634 half a million people pass though it a year, if you going from Darwin to Adelaide or vice versa you pretty much have to. Thats not the same as getting half a million tourists. You might as well say the same about every little town along the Nullabor.

>Alice Springs population: 24,855 people (2021 census) >"Tiny town" Why are city people like this?

@RandomStuff-he7lu

3 ай бұрын

Dude, my suburb has 40,000 people.

@Myne1001

3 ай бұрын

@@RandomStuff-he7lu and? 25k in a regional city is a lot, especially considering over 80% of Australia lives in the capital cities. An inland city being in the tens of thousands is quite rare and far from a "tiny town". I grew up in an actual tiny town of under 300. The current place I live is barely 1/5th of Alice Springs' population. It ain't small.

@Nukearc

3 ай бұрын

You could fit 25,000 in one building. That is pretty tiny.

@RandomStuff-he7lu

3 ай бұрын

@@Myne1001 Yeah.... it's still tiny and I say this as an Australian.

@Myne1001

3 ай бұрын

@@RandomStuff-he7lu but are you a city person?

fascinating video, Thanks!

this is one of those phenomenon that I'd never have realized unless it was pointed out, as you have in this video, but it really is interesting to think about

This video came up in my recommended for a couple days in a row and I didn't watch it because I already understood why Alice Sprongs was marked, but I finally decided to watch it and honestly this is a great vid. I'm very glad I decided to watch it

I already liked looking at maps as a kid and was always fascinated by Alice Springs, sitting there in the middle of the desert in this country on the other side of the world. I think it was even on my globe. So when eventually I went to Australia, that was one of the stops. Nice telegraph station there, by the way!

Man, your channel is amazing! You deserve a portable teleprompter! Please get one! :)

Getting back to the analog maps, in this case, the globes found in classrooms, the three towns I lived in as a child in Northwest Territories, Canada were printed on the globes. Yellowknife, Hay River, Fort Smith. Its nice when your territory is 40% of the size of the country

Love the sneaky and cheeky Hilltop Hoods shout-out. Great work!!

This has some very interesting real world implications. I always think of this when people discuss where to put a new AFL team. People often throw up names like Alice, Darwin or Cairns because they know them on a map. In reality though they are tiny compared to Sydney and Melbourne

Cool videos and nice examples

The reverse Baltimore phenomenon is a cool idea, that I hadn't thought about before. This was an really interesting and engaging video.

I already knew exactly what city you were talking about before I even started the video because I used to wonder the exact same thing when I would look through atlases as a kid!

very informative!!

This is something I've passively observed but never put a lot of thought into. Very interesting!

what a cool lil thing i never really thought about, thanks!

An intelligent video on an intelligent subject! How refreshing! Thank Yiu!

This is a little reminiscent of the metric of "Prominence" for mountain peaks. To me, Alice Springs stands out in a way similar to how small hills get significance where I live. Sure, Cobbler mountain isn't much compared to its sibling Appalachian peaks, several miles away, but its surrounded by so much flatter land that its seen as significant. Likewise Alice Springs may be a very small and remote town, but its the biggest town for an immense stretch in any direction

@apertamono

2 ай бұрын

That's an interesting comparison, because the prominence of a mountain peak can be calculated. It should be possible to calculate the prominence of cities too, when you have complete population data. Maybe they're already doing that for digital maps, I don't know.

Fascinating. Now I will not be able to look at a map without thinking of this video.

I have a world map desk mat produced by some Danish company sometime in the early 2000's, and in Australia it shows the towns of Hughenden, QLD. (Pop: 1136) and Forsayth, QLD. (Pop: 129). It doesn't show Bundaberg, Gladstone, Mackay or Innisfail, or a single town on the east coast between Newcastle, NSW and Brisbane, QLD, but those two inland flyspecks are on this world map.

New subscriber from the Philippines here! (1:38) Take a good look at Baguio, a mountain city (much like Knoxville) located on the northern fringes of Luzon. Baguio is often seen overshadowed by Manila. That's the Baltimore effect.

oh yeah, that was a good watch!. Please make merch for me haha x

THIS explains why San Diego, California (where I was born and in whose general area I've lived all of my life) is often left out of national weather maps on television. It's so close to LA. I've always felt that San Diego is Los Angeles's often-forgotten and overlooked stepsister to the south.

this is actually something ive been thinking of a lot recently. its so interesting to see how in more populated areas, only big cities show up at most scales, while Australia, and other places, will show the most random tiny towns. I love looking around these towns tbh

It's most useful to label the largest town in a state or area, otherwise nothing would be labeled in that area which isn't helpful to most people.

I did know that about Alice Springs. It's awesome!

I did this years ago with Nova Scotia since it's near my home province and Halifax, the capital (and arguably only city in Atlantic Canada), was left out, but nearby Dartmouth was displayed. I just checked it again, and Halifax was covered by the province label, but the smaller towns of Truro, Lunenburg, and Antigonish were all appearing while Halifax was not. For context, both times used google Maps, first on desktop, then on mobile

1:51 - I like the names. Fish n Chips and Ornamental Hedge sound like fun places to visit!

Fascinating! Never noticed this before

I remember seeing Queenstown on maps a lot when I was younger. Since it is the largest town on the West Coast of Tasmania it randomly got a spot on some world maps. Its population is a bit under 2000 now, but it used to be bigger.

Really enjoyed this video. It highlights how complex a digital map algorithm or physical map is, the delivery is excellent and I now want to know how many capital cities of the world are considered less important than Alice Springs. Time to open up Google maps 😅

Very interesting, never thought about it that way before

This is too cool for school. Thanks for sharing!

yeah alice is also tho fairly major tourist destination (hub of central australia, near Uluru) & I think this also has a practical value - if you're in Washington you may not need a small-scale map to label Baltimore as you have access to most services & other maps. if you're in central australia you NEED to know where you can reliably get water, fuel, accommodation, food, emergency services, roadside assistance, whatever as there may not be anywhere closer/any closer places are even smaller. as a practical tool it makes total sense to me

Noticed the Baltimore Effect at 3:54 when zooming out from showing Alice Springs (I think of Pine Gap when talking about Alice Springs). South Korea shows no cities, including Seoul (capital with population of nearly 10 million), however North Korea does show Pyongyang (capital with population just over 3 million)!!

I knew this was going to be about Alice Springs as soon as I read the title, because I’ve seen it on maps SO many times.

Hello from Saint Paul, Minnesota! I'll even abbreviate it. St. Paul! The name Minneapolis completely covers us and even sprawls into Wisconsin.