
An Imaginary Town Becomes Real, Then Not - dalek2point3
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story
======
cbd1984
Reminds me of three of my favorite words: _Nihilartikel_ , mountweazel, and
dord:

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nihilartikel](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nihilartikel)

[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mountweazel](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mountweazel)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord)

" _Nihilartikel_ " is a German word for "fictitious entry", and it's amazing
that a language which makes noun phrases into words has a specific word for
this concept we express as a noun phrase. Let me gladwell on about how this
tells me deep and profound things about sauerbraten and German psychology.
Truly, we have much to learn from this peaceful, gentle, and thoroughly
Othered group.

"Mountweazel" is a word which came from the name of a fake person used as a
fictitious entry. It's just fun to say.

"Dord" is a genuine accident, which was supposed to mean density when someone
misread an annotation about abbreviations: "D or d, density".

~~~
thaumasiotes
> it's amazing that a language which makes noun phrases into words has a
> specific word for this concept we express as a noun phrase.

How are you distinguishing english "noun phrases" from german "words"? Being
spelled with a space doesn't mean much, and english compound nouns don't
generally get separated.

edit, some examples of what I'm talking about:

"throw away", in the sense "discard", what you do with garbage, is a _word_
from a lexical perspective (a lexeme): it requires its own lexical entry, and
is unrelated to the similar-looking construction "throw away" with the sense
"without necessarily moving, use a violent arm motion to impart velocity to an
object, causing that object to move away from oneself".

But "throw away" [discard] is definitely not a _word_ at the syntactic level,
it is two: other words can appear between the "throw" token and the "away"
token, as in _I had him throw it away_.

The clitic _' s_ of _He 's going to have a hard time later_ is also a word at
the lexical level (exactly equivalent to _is_ ), and at the syntactic level
(because it can be freely used basically anywhere, preceded and followed by
any other words). But at the phonological level, it isn't; _' s_ is a
(usually) zero-syllable construction phonologically dependent on the preceding
word, and unlike a normal word, it has no pronunciation in isolation (that
would be difficult to manage in zero syllables).

It's easy to construct compound nouns such as "garage door opener" in English,
and (I believe; I have almost no knowledge of German) easy to construct
compound nouns that look like "garagedooropener" in German. It's never been
obvious to me that those two phenomena differ in anything except their
spelling, hardly a fundamental feature of a language. Once we've constructed
the compound "garage door opener", it's very rare to manipulate it in any way
we wouldn't be comfortable doing if it were all one big spaceless word -- in
particular, other words won't appear between the "garage", "door", and
"opener" tokens.

If pressed, my personal opinion would be that "garage door opener" is a noun
phrase in English, and the analogous construct is also a noun phrase in
German, even if it's spelled without spaces. But I'd welcome somebody else's
informed opinion.

~~~
morsch
My takeaway from a couple of years of linguistics is that you're completely
correct. Both English and German form compound nouns in the same way. It's a
typographic difference more so than anything else -- modern English defaults
to separating compounds with a space, German typography just doesn't allow for
that.

As English compounds get more entrenched, they tend to be hyphenated -- which
German also allows for, occasionally -- and then fused.

Extremely long compound nouns are rare in both languages, mostly, I'd think,
because they get conceptually unwieldy. It's easier (I would argue/guess) to
understand a sentence talking about what _the captain of the Danube steamship
company_ did than a sentence about what _the Danube steamship company captain_
did. Both utterances are noun phrases and have practically the same meaning.

It's still possible that German and English speakers differ in the way they
use compound nouns -- e.g. how often they use compounds instead of
paraphrasing them or how spontaneously they form new, unfamiliar compounds.

------
defen
See "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" for a fictional take on this.

Meta-comment about the Borges connection: I'm continually astounded by how
prescient his work was. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was published in 1940, so
I suppose it's _possible_ he, in Argentina, heard about this court case in New
York, but I doubt it.

Other examples:

The Garden of Forking Paths: qualitative pre-figuring of the many worlds
interpretation of QM, before that was a thing.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: A character's bibliography contains
references to Descartes, Leibniz, and _the work sheets of a monograph on
George Boole 's symbolic logic_. Now, I don't know the answer to this one, but
maybe someone can help: Was George Boole considered an important philosopher
in 1939? Claude Shannon published his famous master's thesis applying Boolean
logic to electric circuits in 1938 in " Transactions of the American Institute
of Electrical Engineers." \- so again, I suppose Borges could have known about
it through that, but it seems unlikely, So, of all the philosophers he could
have chosen, why George Boole?

~~~
lmkg
Borges was well-read and read English and international works extensively (in
fact, English was his first language, not Spanish), so it's not completely
unreasonable that he kept abreast of new developments. It's still a stretch
that he would know about some random court case in New York.

It's odd to me that you characterize Boole as a philosopher--I've always heard
of him as a mathematician. His work on an algebraic formalization of logic is
foundational to the modern field of logic, which was the primary area of
mathematic research (along with set theory) for the first three or so decades
of the 1900's. For example, the first chunk of Russel's _Principia
Mathematica_ defines a new logical algebra to be used going forward.

It seems you think that the use of boolean algebra was popularized because of
Shanon's application of it to circuitry? Symbolic systems were well-used and
well-known before that. For example, Goedel's theorems (1929, 1931) deal
explicitly with the symbolic representation of logical statements. And I
daresay that the Incompleteness Theorem is something that Borges would have
been intensely interested in, since it deals with the finite accessibility of
knowledge.

In short, Borges would have chosen Boole because, at that time, it would have
been perfectly acceptable to see his work on logic as being similarly
foundational to the field of mathematics as that of Descartes (geometry) and
Leibniz (calculus).

~~~
eternauta3k
> in fact, English was his first language, not Spanish

Where did you get this?

~~~
lmkg
I've heard that in a couple of places, it's difficult to track down a specific
source. It looks like that particular fact isn't on Wikipedia anymore,
although it does say he learned English from a young age.

Source for being raised bilingual "he was not even aware that English and
Spanish were separate languages until later in his childhood" (cache)
[http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=borges+first+language&d=498...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=borges+first+language&d=4982438270272501&mkt=en-
US&setlang=en-US&w=VPucXg81ehXZwFW5FoFkC10Ivai-ERRB)

Source for English as first langue:
[http://kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm](http://kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm)

"English practically as a first language"
[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/24/borges-
had-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/24/borges-had-a-genius-
for-literature-but-not-love-or-much-else.html)

Looks like the truth may be somewhat less strict than what I had remembered.
Nonetheless, not only was he an Anglophone, he was also an Anglophile,
something most of those sources reinforce.

------
ggchappell
> But then, just as this story was to be published, to be extra sure, we went
> to Google Earth, typed in "Agloe" one last time, and, whaddya know? It isn't
> there any more!

> It was removed this week.

Partially, perhaps.

Start at any old place in GM, and search for "Agloe, NY", and I get Aglow
Dermatology and Aglow Decorating Corporation, both in New York City.

BUT, search for "Roscoe, NY", and then search for "Agloe, NY", and it finds
the place just fine.

Maybe the removal of the imaginary town hasn't been pushed out to all users
yet. Or maybe it's just been given some kind of lower-priority status -- "of
local interest only", or something like that.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well...

It may be removed from Google Earth but I don't think Google Maps has gotten
the memo.

Just now, it appeared as something like a suburb of Rockland in my search.
'Course it's possible it was re-inserted by Google when their news-searched
automatically noted the interest in the place-name.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/agloe,+ny/@41.949979,-74.9...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/agloe,+ny/@41.949979,-74.911137,574m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89dc9c2fdbc68939:0xde2b0d4533f1a4a5)

------
creeble
Back in 1976, my girlfriend's mother had a friend who worked for a map company
and was a graduate of the University of Michigan. The company made very
popular maps, everyone had one in their car.

Ohio State University, near Columbus, was the nemesis and rival of UofM. So
this mapmaker stuck a couple of short texts accompanying two roads near
Columbus. One said 'mgoblu' and the other 'beatosu'. They were pretty hard to
find unless you knew where to look.

But his bosses found out eventually and fired him. Haha.

Agloe is a better story.

~~~
ben010783
There's a Wikipedia article on this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatosu_and_Goblu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatosu_and_Goblu)

~~~
creeble
OMG. I wonder if her comment about the dude losing his job was true.

------
tokenadult
This has been going on for a long time. When I was in high school, in an
English class unit on journalism, I learned how the United Press caught the
competing Hearst news organization faking stories about the eastern front in
World War I. The United Press reporters inserted details about a Russian
government official named Nelotsky in their news stories, and watched the
statements about Nelotsky get copied into reports from the competing wire
service. There was just one problem with the Hearst plagiarists' journalistic
procedure: there wasn't any such Russian official. The name "Nelotsky" came
from reversing the spelling of the English word "stolen" and adding a Russian-
looking "ky" ending.

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C07E7DE103FE...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C07E7DE103FE433A25756C2A9679C946996D6CF)

Similarly, in the 1990s I noticed that a popular page on my personal website
was being copied diligently by a college student for his personal website. I
inserted a fake entry, based on the Greek word for "steal." I also put a link
at that entry leading to the copyright notice page on my personal website,
which has a distinctive filename unique to my site. When the student copied
the page again, I was able to show the site administrator at the university
that hosted his site that the student had plainly violated the site user
agreement at that academic institution, which specifically required students
not to plagiarize for their postings on the university site.

I didn't do a lot of public outing of that student--but you had better believe
I still remember who he was. Teachers do well to teach students early and
often to use their own noggins and to do their own writing, giving proper
credit with correct citation form to sources they rely on. That's a better
education than just letting students copy whatever they happen to see, without
any analysis or thought at all.

------
dctoedt
Apple was involved in a similar 'honey pot' case in the 1980s [1], only with
computer code instead of place names on a map.

(The description below is from memory; I can't find the court opinions on-
line, and I _think_ the honey pot was discussed only in the trial court's
opinion, not on appeal.)

Back in the day, Franklin Computer Corp. made a clone of the Apple ][.
Franklin claimed to have used a clean room [2] to develop its own ROM and OS,
without copying Apple's code.

Apple disassembled the Franklin executable --- and they knew exactly what they
were looking for: One of the Apple programmers had created a no-op variable
and set its value to be his own name. (He didn't just put his name into a
comment in the source code, because of course that would have been stripped
out during the build process and wouldn't have made it into the executable
code.)

So guess what Apple found in the Franklin code .... That's right: The Apple
programmer's name in the no-op variable.

Franklin then changed its position and admitted that they'd copied Apple's
code, but claimed (unsuccessfully) that doing so was not infringement.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp).
[Note: The period in the URL might mess things up when you click on the link.]

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design)

~~~
dmdeller
The story continues: after that court case, Apple added a special, obfuscated
'stolen from Apple' icon to the firmware, in case they ever had to go to court
over something like this again.
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Stolen_From_Apple...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt)

------
freyfogle
In Germany there's Bielefeld, a major city that, depending on your opinion,
does or doesn't actually exist:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy)

Then of course there's also the Republic of Null Island
[http://www.nullisland.com](http://www.nullisland.com)

~~~
Udo
Hey, I'm part of the conspiracy: I've been to Bielefeld many times! :D

(There's a biannual pen&paper roleplaying convention there.)

~~~
freyfogle
How can you be sure it was really Bielefeld?

------
ytturbed
Heh. Along similar lines I predict there _will_ eventually be a teapot in
orbit around Mars, placed there by philosophical pranksters.

------
josephpmay
John Green wrote a book[0] about this town. It's a great book, and I'd highly
recommend it to anyone who likes adolescent fiction. I believe it's currently
being made into a movie.

[0]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001ANSS5K?btkr=1](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001ANSS5K?btkr=1)

------
mkhalil
Interesting comment:

"I am a travel writer. I was once speaking to a guidebook writer in Thailand
who told me under pressure to hit a deadline he wrote a review for a guidebook
for a German restaurant, though he had not eaten there. He fabricated a
venison dish, describing the sauce in detail. A couple of years later, feeling
badly about his fiction, he visited the restaurant. The dish was on the menu
and the chef explained so many people came in asking for it he eventually had
to add it."

~~~
jnem
Hmm.. sounds like a case of, "I know a guy who... did something I'm not
willing to admit I did myself".

------
aaron695
"AITCHANDAR ROAD, Ryde - previously Folly Road. The initials of Higginbotham
and Robinson, a local publishing Company. Believing its maps were being
pirated by an opposition publisher, and in order to prove this, they gave the
then unnamed street a false name based on their initials, ie H-AND-R. They
were proved correct when opposition maps were published showing "Aitchandar
Road"."

Funny how reality becomes what people make it to be

[https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Aitchandar+Rd,+Ryde+NSW...](https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Aitchandar+Rd,+Ryde+NSW+2112/@-33.8113632,151.1171226,808m)

------
sbierwagen
Wikipedia article on the general case:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry)

Specific example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

------
jbuzbee
I recall working with a very detailed map of Germany a long time ago and
seeing two nearby towns named something like "Herman" and "Munsterville".
Years later I tried to find them again on a different map and failed. I often
wondered if they were inserted as a joke by a mapmaker.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Map makers do sometimes put fake things (like little roads) that don't exist
on their maps, to hopefully be able to spot third parties copying their data
to make and sell their own maps.

------
brightsize
This "town" is in no less than the USGS's Geographic Names Information System
(GNIS):

[http://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=gnispq:3:0::NO::P3_FID:274...](http://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=gnispq:3:0::NO::P3_FID:2747085)

Added in 2014!

[edit:formatting]

------
rumcajz
Umberto Eco would enjoy this. Fiction becoming reality is his favourite topic.

------
dreamfactory2
Does this mean google maps is using ripped off IP?

~~~
maxerickson
No. At some point it became a real place name. Whether it is still interesting
to show it on a map is another question.

~~~
psykovsky
In the case of the unnamed road it kind of makes sense. They named it, the
name stuck. It's only fair, I think.

