Jay Foreman

So it's very easy to accidentally crop and forget it's there.

The answer is absolutely yes.

This sort of thing happens all the time, and it specifically happens in North America.

There was a famous case where after the Treaty of Paris, they were trying to draw the border between what would eventually become the U.S.

and Canada.

And what they decided to do was, let's just stick to the 49th parallel.

And it's supposed to continue from east to west in a unwavering, dead straight line.

But of course, what happened was most of that continent wasn't really known to the mapmakers at that time.

There was rather a lot of guesswork going on.

So they drew the line first and the map became the border between the two before the actual world itself appeared.

had the border imposed onto it.

And as a result, they found all sorts of things that if they'd had an accurate map in the first place, or if they'd gone out to look in the first place, they never would have chosen a dead straight line on the 49th parallel.

So there are two big examples.

One of them is Point Roberts, which is supposed to be in British Columbia in Canada, but it's actually in the US.

It's a peninsula.

that behaves like an island because you can only get there from the US by boat or by driving through Canada and having your passport checked twice.

So all the American citizens that live in Point Roberts, if they want to go to their nearest high school, they have to drive through Canada and back again, effectively using their passport four times a day.

And there's another one as well.

There's the Angle Inlet, which is the same thing, but closer to the east coast.

And that was an example where the treaty said the border should be at the northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods.