Living On The Edge
When ‘Burke’s Backyard’ is on the road we constantly refer to maps to find our way around. It’s frustrating that we seem to spend most of our time flicking between directory pages, because so many of the locations we want to visit are on the map edge. According to science reporter, Graeme Quirk, it’s no coincidence that so many people live on the edge.
If you add up the area within a 3cm strip round the edge of a standard map, it turns out that about half the area of the map is actually on the edge. It’s even more remarkable that you only have about a 1 in 25 or 4% chance that the place you’re visiting will be in a 3cm square in the middle of a map.