brendan
tho the connection here between ellis & baarle was fortuitous
i have just also chanced on your interesting 16 may post to the
international boundaries list about baarle having been
remeasured in 1995 down to the centimeter
so it seems these 1999 ellis metes & bounds
in thousandths of a foot
besides being rendered in a novel & surprising unit of measure
are also remarkable for representing a thirtyfold improvement
upon even that 1995 extremity of accuracy
coming in at under a third of a millimeter
& i figure they must even still today represent the state of the art
for they correspond to the most accurate available gps plotted
points
in 5 or 6 decimal units of degminsec latitude & longitude i think
which translates to about the thickness of a needle shaft
if not of its point alone
indeed it is hard to imagine why anyone but a totally fanatical
punctologist would even want or ever try to surpass that degree
of accuracy even if they someday could
so we may not only have the state of the art here
but we may have reached the very limits of usefulness & doability
--- In
BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, Brendan Whyte
<bwhyte@u...> wrote:
> Ellis Island:
>
> thousandths of a foot? Is this the US going metric without
going metric? I
> don't think I've ever seen ruler with 10ths of an inch (only 8ths
and
> 16ths), let alone 1000ths.
>
> Do you have coords for these points Michael? Where did they
come from?
>
>
> Baarle:
>
> >happily it appears to be another tossup between 2
candidates
> >both looking in this case like about 220 meters
> >
> >these can be seen in
> >http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//baarle/baarlemap.html
> >as the irregular pink polygon at upper left near the name
loveren
> >& the white quadrilateral 2 scrolls down between k12 & k13
>
> At one time I posted a map of Baarle labelling the enclaves N1
ot N8 and H1
> to H22. The Louvren enclave of Belgium is H7. It is the
smallest in area
> (2469sq metres, or 0.2469ha). The next smallest in area is
H22, the enclave
> formed in 1995 in the far west of the commune of
Baarle-Nassau, from
> one-third of a field (not shown on the map you linked to). H22
is 0.2632ha.
> Perimetrically, the order swaps. H7 has a perimeter of 214m,
but H22 has a
> smaller perimeter (because it's almost square, not irregular) of
209m.
> These figures are taken direct from the 1995 minute which
delimited the
> enclaves to the nearest cm, and their areas and perimeters to
the nearest
> (sq) metre.
>
> The military map of Baarle, on Barry Smith's site that you linked
to is a
> standard topo map of Baarle, drawn by the Belgian IGM=Institut
Geographique
> Militaire. This has since been renamed the IGN=Inst. Geog.
National. This
> particular IGM map dates from the 1960s I believe, when the
exact number
> and boundaries of the enclaves were unknown. It is only since
1995 that we
> have a formal delimitation and can say how many enclaves
there are, how
> large, and what their perimeters are. Because of this, the small
enclave SW
> of the word 'mast' between K12 and K13 is fictitious. I spoke
with someone
> at Baarle (I forget who: probably a chap at the Cadastre in
Breda), who
> agreed it was an error on the map (just as the current Dutch
topo maps of
> Baarle are incorrect too, misplacing H22 for example).
>
> So, the smallest enclave at Baarle has a 209m perimeter, and
is H22, the
> new one in the far west.
>
> As for Cooch Behar, there are enclaves there as small as
0.27acres. As
> there are 2.47 acres per ha, this gives it an area of 0.1093ha,
or 1093sq
> metres. I have no idea of its true shape, but if square, it would
have
> sides of 33m, and a perimeters of 4x33m=132m. It is probably
not square,
> but will not be highly irregular either, as the edges of the
enclaves
> mostly follow rice paddy bunds (known locally as 'ails': see my
thesis),
> which are generally rectangular in shape.
>
> If the Zim/Zam/Bot/Nam boundary turns out to be a point, it will
be the
> shortest in the world, and if the lines don't meet at a point, it will
> still be a strong contender.
>
> but for the moment, despite the lack of precision, Cooch Behar
beats Baarle
> for boundary brevity by about 8:5
>
> B