East Meets West or In Search of an Orange Dot.

I found an orange dot on my computer screen. I couldn’t figure how it got there and I tried to clean it off. Next time I looked, it wasn’t there.

Then it was back, in the same spot. I tried to remove it again, this time paying attention to what I was doing. It stayed put. Hmmm. A mystery.

Do you know about some of the neat features that WordPress provides to its bloggers? They give us counts as to how many viewers visit our blogs, the count for our busiest day, and which search terms led someone to our blog. Pretty neat, I think. (Stay with me, here.)

A fairly new WordPress feature is a map of the world showing the countries where the viewers are from. When I first noticed this, my browser screen was not at its full size. Sometimes I could see that Alaska was colored in. Ooh, I thought, someone in Alaska read my blog? Cool!

Cool, maybe, but not necessarily true. Once I increased the size of my browser screen, I noticed that all of the United States was orange-colored, meaning that the viewer from the USA could have been from any state, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Which brings me back to the orange dot that I kept trying to clean off of my computer screen. It was Hawaii on the WordPress global map. Hawaii is, of course, way off in the middle of the Pacific and very small.

Mystery solved.

Sometime after that, I noticed another orange dot on the right side of my computer screen. I tried to clean it off. (A conditioned reflex; that’s my excuse.) On the map, it was north of Japan and just off the coast of Russia. But Russia and Japan were not highlighted as points of origin for a blog visitor. In fact, no country on the right (east) side of the map was highlighted. The only country highlighted was on the left (west): the United States.

That little orange dot is part of the United States? As it turns out, yes.

With a little Internet research I discovered that the orange dot is the easternmost part of the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Why then, was it on the right/east part of the map and not on the left/west part of the map with the rest of the United States? Because, geographically speaking, that orange dot, Semisopochoi Island (Russian for “having seven hills”), is in the eastern hemisphere, 14 minutes east of the 180th meridian. That makes Alaska the northernmost, westernmost and easternmost state. Hawaii is the southernmost state.

Learn something new every day. Well, some of us, some days.