Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Lots of Dots

A letter in yesterday's Star Tribune by Steven Boyer of St. Paul included this fact I never knew:
We have 400 military bases in Afghanistan. That's a base for every 629 square miles. If they were evenly spaced around the country, no base would be more than 25 miles from another; in fact, there would be four bases 25 miles away and another four bases 35 miles away from each of the 400 bases.
Because I lack imagination, I wanted to map that spacing onto a geographic region I'm familiar with, so I picked Minnesota:

County map of Minnesota with a grid of blue dots at 25 mile increments
Thirteen bases in St. Louis County alone.

Remember, Minnesota is about one-third the size of Afghanistan.
Posted at

2 comments:

  1. SonjaFebruary 2, 2012 at 8:33 AM

    Steve's a friend of mine. He's an inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer. He recently rode his bike to San Francisco scattering his lefty views across the heartland. http://slowbikeride.blogspot.com/2011/07/day-8-clark-sd-continued.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Daughter Number ThreeFebruary 2, 2012 at 7:37 PM

    Thanks, I will check it out!

    ReplyDelete

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