Robotic vacuum cleaners with chimpanzee heads: the sort of thing that should only exist in a terrible dystopian future.

BoingBoing points to this map of Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian exclave in the Netherlands that contains seven Dutch exclaves of its own:

Each little patch of sovereign soil contains only a few houses, and some buildings straddle the border between two jurisdictions. A walk across town can mean crossing between countries several times. It’s not quite a burbclave in action, but the commingled countries come close. Pregnant women in the small town can choose their child’s citizenship by picking the room in which they give birth. When restaurants are required to close under Dutch law, their patrons can simply move to the Belgian side. Each town even has its own government, schools, police, and fire department, who determine which homes to serve by checking the flag on their address placards.

It may not be a portent for the future of the nation-state — the elaborate exclaves are the result of an obscure 12th century treaty — but Baarle Hertog is an interesting example of elements of polycentrism and the distributed republic in the real world.