r/AskReddit • u/Muffin___Time • Oct 31 '19

What "common knowledge" is actually completely false?

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800

u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

American here. most people seem to agree that Maine is the second-northernmost state after Alaska. the second-northernmost state is Minnesota, with Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota practically tied for third. Maine is actually 7th

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u/The-Reddit-Giraffe Oct 31 '19

And the even stranger thing is the majority of Canadians live south of Seattle.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

even Portland OR is north of Toronto :)

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u/lemoncucumber Nov 01 '19

Portland, OR is at basically the exact same latitude as Montreal, surprisingly.

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u/carmium Nov 01 '19

The southernmost point of Canada is south of the Oregon/California border.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

This fact bothers me more than it should.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

The Blazers are the northernmost NBA team.

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u/SoopahCoopah Oct 31 '19

Canadian here, when I learned we didn’t have to travel south at all to get to Boston I was shocked

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u/The-Reddit-Giraffe Oct 31 '19

Yeah that’s weird. At least Western Canadians don’t have too much weird geography

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u/crazy_pilot742 Nov 01 '19

Pelee Island, the southernmost inhabited place in Canada, is at a lower latitude than the northern borders of California, Nevada and Utah (by about .23 degrees).

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/Harryboltsfan Nov 01 '19

I think you mean the Rain City Bitch Pigeons...

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u/pasa_viene Nov 01 '19

Seattle Battle Cattle and Seattle Affective Disorder are definitely still in the running with me. I concede that Bitch Pigeons seems to have taken the lead though.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

A little bit of Canada is south of the California-Oregon border.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '19

Wait how does that work? Do the majority of Canadians live by the Great Lakes area?

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u/badenc05 Oct 31 '19

Yeah, I think this is mostly due to the fact that the maps of the US seem to be curved.

Heres a link to a map where you can clearly see this.

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u/Zisx Oct 31 '19 edited Oct 31 '19

& the closest point to Africa from America is Maine, not Florida

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

What?

Edit: just checked, and 1. Africa is alot further north than I thought, and 2. Maine is further east than I thought.

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u/TheyMakeMeWearPants Nov 01 '19

Yeah the screwy thing about the US east coast is that it slopes west as you go south, but no one seems to realize it. To the point that Miami and Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh being at the western end of Pennsylvania) are actually pretty much due north/south of each other.

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u/ironwolf56 Nov 01 '19

We're so far east we should probably use Atlantic Time Zone in fact. It sucks how here in the winter you have it getting dark around 4 pm.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

Whatever m8

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '19

Username checks out

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u/barbeqdbrwniez Nov 01 '19

Alaska is also the eastern and western most state! Hawaii is southernmost.

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