Geography
The Census Bureau lists a location (latitude and longitude) for each place, although this list is not intended for general use and is part of the Bureau's TIGER mapping system to graphically represent the statistical areas used in census data. The Census Bureau's criteria for establishing the location does not correspond to the criteria used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for locating named communities, which is intended to be an authoritative reference for a place's location. The central location of a place shown on Census Bureau maps for a community may differ significantly from that on USGS maps for the same place and may even be outside the area that local residents think of as that community. The Census Bureau's location of a place is the approximate geographic center of the polygon making up the boundaries of the place at the time of the decennial census. The USGS location of a populated place is the center of the original place, if known, such as the city or town hall, main post office, town square or main intersection regardless of changes over time.
Read more about this topic: Place (United States Census Bureau)
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)