OK, this video makes no direct mention of the things it makes me think about—nonetheless, it’s neat unto itself and worth your time.
But what it gets me thinking about is the difference between being “accurate” (i.e., mating the objectively observable world) and “precise” (i.e., being broken into suitably small gradations for the work at hand)—because this is a story about both human failures in accuracy and precision. And, to the degree this is about politics (which is usually how the US-Canada No Touching Zone is presented; this is the third or fourth time this has come up for me [DISCLOSURE: I’m from and reside in Michigan]), it’s about how quickly humans begin to fully and deeply conflate the signifier (the word, the map, the photo) with the signified (the notions these hashes and squiggles imply, the *actual* land you’re standing on, your *actual* living-breathing child). It also makes you think about all the kinds of *errors* there are out there, beyond simple fat-fingering and typos. I mean true, legit errors in how we compartmentalize things in our damn little monkey brains.
Canada & The United States: Bizarre Borders Part 2 – YouTube
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