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ZIP codes aren’t polygons, they’re delivery routes. Take a look at this map:The red streets all have the same ZIP code; the blue, purple, and green areas are each different ZIP codes as well. Notice how messy it is: the blue area is discontiguous, there’s a red street in the purple area, and the polygons overlap. Districts are supposed to be contiguous areas. This doesn’t cut it.Instead of trying to slice and dice the country with truck routes, the Census Bureau instead uses census tracts and census blocks to divide up the area of the United States. Those are geographic regions defined in every county of every state. For instance, here are the 2010 census tracts in central Lubbock County, TX, identified with red numbers:Within each tract, there’s a bunch of blocks—again, all contiguous regions. They’re not marked on this map because there are too many to count.Texas, at least, uses these blocks to define its districts. For instance, here’s the 2013 definition of state House District 84 from Article 2, Section 84 of Senate Bill 3, 83rd Legislature, 1st Called Session:SECTION 84. District 84 is composed of Lubbock County tracts 000202, 000301, 000302, 000402, 000403, 000404, 000405, 000500, 000603, 000605, 000607, 001000, 001200, 001300, 001400, 001601, 001602, 001702, 001705, 001708, 001709, 001801, 001803, 001804, 001901, 001904, 002204, 002300, 002400, 002500, 010402 and 010403; and that part of Lubbock County tract 000201 included in blocks 1011, 1012, 1013, 1014, 1015, 1016, 1017, 1018, 1019, 1020, 1021, 1022, 1023, 1024, 1025, 1026, 1027, 1028, 1029, 1030, 1031, 1032, 1033, 1034, 1035, 1036, 1037, 1038, 1039, 1040, 1041, 1042, 1043, 1044, 1045, 1046, 1047, 1048, 1049, 1050, 1051, 1052, 1053, 1054, 1055, 1056, 1057, 1058, 1059, 1073, 1074, 1075, 1076, 1077, 1078, 1079, 1080, 1081, 1082, 1083, 1084, 1085, 1086, 1087, 1088, 1089, 1091, 1092, 1093, 1094, 1103, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, 2033, 2034, 2035, 2036, 2037, 2038, 2039, 2040, 2041, 2042, 2043, 2044, 2045, 2046, 2047, 2048, 2049, 2050, 2051, 2052, 2053 and 2054; and that part of Lubbock County tract 000700 included in blocks 1012, 1013, 1014, 1023, 1024, 1025, 1026, 1027, 1028, 1029, 1030, 1031, 1032, 1033, 1034, 1035, 1036, 1037, 1038, 1039, 1040, 1041, 1042, 1043, 1044, 1045, 1046, 1047, 1048, 1049, 1050, 1051, 1052, 1053, 1054, 1055, 1056, 1057, 1058, 1059, 1060, 1061, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1067, 1068, 1069, 1070, 1071, 1072, 1073, 1074, 1075, 1076, 1077, 1078, 1079, 1080, 1081, 1082, 1083, 1084, 1085, 1086, 1087, 1088, 1089, 1090, 1091, 1092, 1093, 1094, 1095, 1096, 1097, 1098, 1099, …You get the picture. That long list (which I included maybe a third of) produces this district:That’s House District 84. It looks vaguely reasonable because it’s composed of census tracts and blocks—in other words, actual polygons. ZIP codes aren’t polygons.Now, notice I never said this can’t be gerrymandered. In fact, Texas is well known for its partisan gerrymandering, and that gerrymander was done in the same way as this district was drawn: census tracts and blocks. That’s because there are so many census blocks that you can assign them creatively to different districts and still gerrymander however you want.But ZIP codes don’t solve that. There are still a lot of them—almost 5,000 allocated in Texas alone. Given that no state has more than fifty or so U.S. House members—or 400 state House members, as New Hampshire has—you could still gerrymander the state easily.So ZIP codes are a horrible way to draw districts because they don’t make geographical sense. And even if they did, they wouldn’t solve gerrymandering.

Thanks for A2A.1. Harriet The Tortoise, Who Died In 2006, Had Seen Charles Darwin In PersonHarriet the tortoise was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin during his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands as part of his round-the-world survey expedition, transported to England, and then brought to her final home, Australia, by a retiring captain of the Beagle. However, some doubt was cast on this story by the fact that Darwin had never visited the island that Harriet originally came from. She had an estimated age of 175 by the time she finally died at Steve Irwin's zoo!Sadly the three of them with the exception of Mrs.Irwin are no more with us.2. Orville Wright Was Still Alive When Hiroshima And Nagasaki Were Bombed (1945)The Wright brothers are rightly credited with inventing what we know as airplanes, and it must have been tremondously difficult for Orville Wright, whose brother Wilbur died back in 1912, to see his life's great acheivement be responsible for the greatest single act of destruction man has ever seen. In 1945 U.S. Airforce planes dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least 129,000 people, mainly civilians.Orville died in 1948 and expressed sadness in an interview about the death and destruction brought about by the bombers of World War II:"We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong ... No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses."3. Star Wars Came Out The Same Year As The Last Guillotine Execution In France (1977)Star Wars premiered in the U.S. on May 25th 1977. At the same time this futuristic sci-fi was wowing audiences around the world, the medieval practice of death by guillotine was still taking place in France, where Hamida "Pimp Killer" Djandoubi was beheaded for the torture and murder of a young woman. This was the last use of the guillotine in France, nobody else has been executed using any means since.4. Nintendo Was Founded When Jack The Ripper Was Still On The Loose (1889)Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company associated with video game legends such as Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda and the Pokemon characters is actually much older than the video game era. They originally made playing cards called hanafuda, and the company was founded way back in 1889, when the infamous Jack the Ripper was creating havoc on the streets of London. The true identity of the Ripper has never been discovered, and he was a prime suspect in the murder of the unidentified woman known as 'The Pinchin Street Torso,' because that is all that remained of her. This happened only weeks before Nintendo came into existence.5. Oxford University Existed For Hundreds Of Years Before The Aztec Empire Was Founded (1428)The Aztec Empire, began as an alliance of three Nahua altepetl city-states. These three city-states ruled the area in and around the Valley of Mexico from 1428 until the combined forces of the Spanish conquistadores and their native allies under Hernán Cortés defeated them in 1521. Aztec culture had rich and complex mythological and religious traditions, as well as achieving remarkable architectural and artistic accomplishments. This does not mean they were not advanced, they had proper canal system, with high rise buildings, their own universities, schools, systems, etc.Meanwhile in England, Oxford University was already well-established. It has no known date of foundation, but there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.Thanks for Reading!

[Image: “Massacre of the Jews of Metz during the First Crusade,” by Auguste Migette]Antisemitism was actually preached by popes, clerics and Christian mystics (like Hildegard of Bingen) since the First Crusade. The First Crusade is also known as “The Rhineland Massacres,” the German Crusade of 1096, the persecutions of 1096, or Gzerot Tatenu (Hebrew: גזרות תתנ"ו‎ ). Crusaders often committed genocide against Jews, whereas Saladin practiced magnanimity and acceptance when he re-took Jerusalem, welcoming Jews and Christians alike. In fact, the organized Crusader genocides of the “German Crusade” of 1096 are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust (David Nirenberg, The Rhineland Massacres of Jews in the First Crusade, Memories Medieval and Modern, p. 279).The preaching of the First Crusade inspired an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence. Jews were perceived as just as much an enemy as Muslims. and they were more immediately visible than the distant Muslims. Many people wondered why they should travel thousands of miles to fight non-believers when there were already non-believers closer to home (Christopher Tyerman. God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 99–100). Crusaders claiming to be following the prominent preacher of the First Crusade, Peter the Hermit, massacred Jews on their own initiative, to pillage their possessions (Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: a social and intellectual history (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1998.It is also likely that the crusaders were motivated by their need for money. Many crusaders had to go into debt to purchase weaponry and equipment for the expedition; many crusaders inevitably found themselves indebted to Jewish moneylenders. Having armed themselves by assuming the debt, the crusaders rationalized the killing of Jews as an extension of their Catholic mission (Hans Mayer. "The Crusades" Oxford University Press: 1988, p. 41.). The Jewish populations of Spier, Worms, Metz, Cologne and other centres were massacred by Crusaders, who detoured into Jewish communities to kill, rape, and pillage. Medieval Jewish writers wrote about the killings at the time.When Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, the age of coexistence between Jews, Christians, and Muslims of that region came to a crashing halt. The official website of the Jewish Agency for Israel narrates:In 1099 the Crusaders besieged Jerusalem and, in one of history’s strange ironies, the “City of Peace” was once again involved in war and bloodshed. The Christian soldiers, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, scaled the city walls and massacred the inhabitants — Jews and Muslims alike. In order to repopulate the city, the Crusaders transferred Christian Arab tribes from Transjordan and settled them in the former Jewish quarter.Jerusalem became the capital of the Crusader kingdom and thrived because of the concentration of all the government and church bodies there. Tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims visited the city every year, thus adding to its growth and prosperity. But the Jews were still for the most part banned, as during the previous Christian period.In the aftermath of the First Crusade, right up through the last Crusade and the tolerant edicts of Saladin, it has historically been Muslims and Muslim rulers who have been most inclusive of Jews:It is interest to note here that, as far as Palestine is concerned, the right of Jews to “return” to live in this small area of land was accepted by all successive Muslim rulers from the Muslim conquest to the end of the nineteenth century, when Zionist settlement there became entangled in European weltpolitik*. Gibb and Bowen relate how, when the Jews of Europe “learned of the paradisiacal life awaiting them in Turkey” and many of them set out for Palestine, it was not the Muslims who objected but the [Christian] Franciscans of Jerusalem, “who talked the Pope into forbidding the Venetians to carry Jewish passengers to the Holy Land.” This was not the first time Jerusalem Christians tried to prevail on Muslim rulers to ban Jews from living in the city. A similar attempt was made first when the second Caliph, Omar, entered Jerusalem at the time of its conquest by the Muslim army in the seventh century, and again when Salah ad-Din [Saladin] drove out the Crusaders in the twelfth. On both of these occasions, the Christian patriarch of the city tried to persuade the Muslim conquerors to prevent Jews from living in or (as in the latter case) returning to Jerusalem after they had been expelled from it by the Christians. Both Omar and Salah ad-Din refused to heed their pleas. (Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, p.40)