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TheImmigrant posted:The CFA franc was pegged to the value of the French franc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFA_franc
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May 27, 2013 10:26
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Kurtofan posted:These maps were posted in the Pictures thread: Also, who the hell thought they saw bigfoot in Rhode Island, and why is Maryland of all places a bigfoot hotspot?
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Jun 1, 2013 08:23
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Reveilled posted:I was always quite fond of For Want of a Nail: Effectronica posted:This was, I think, a deliberate attempt to be crazy, but basically time-traveling Carthaginians That's... quite a premise you have there.
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Jul 1, 2013 06:14
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wukkar posted:I'm reading 1491 right now. Things would have been pretty drat different if De Soto did not just so happen to bring 200 pigs with him to the New World. Particularly striking was when the author asked if there was any way to avoid the horrific epidemics, even if the natives/Europeans understood everything about the diseases that we do, and he concluded that maybe if the Europeans stayed offshore and traded over ropes... forever... the natives might have been okay. In other words it was inevitable. 1491 is a really depressing book. (A really, really good depressing book.)
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Jul 30, 2013 18:41
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DrSunshine posted:It does -- for pre-industrial agricultural civilizations! The Medieval Warm period saw a huge population increase in Europe as more areas that were, in cooler times, less amenable to agriculture, became wetter and warmer and increased the available arable land. It's not even as simple as warm = good for agricultural civilizations, there's a bunch of factors that make it good or bad in each individual case.
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Mar 15, 2014 00:03
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I was laughing pretty hard at the "Uinited Arab Emirates" just being in the middle of absolutely nowhere northern Siberia (with most of Europe), like the mapmaker just gave up their last weak pretense of giving even a modicum of a drat and stuck it in a blank spot, until I realized it just had an extremely faint line for some reason. A line pointing quite precisely to Afghanistan, but that's more par for the course on that map. Also, I just realized that there are two Bangladeshes.
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Jun 7, 2014 20:31
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the jizz taxi posted:Since when is trying to pronounce unfamiliar foreign words the right way 'pretentious'? It shouldn't really matter though. Just do your best to be understandable and respectful, however you can pull it off, and it doesn't really matter. If you're really just making an effort to be respectful to other languages, that's fine. I'd be surprised if that's what most people would be doing though. I'd guess a lot of people making a point of "correct" pronunciation are doing it to be smug and feel more correct, rather than to communicate better or more respectfully.
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Sep 4, 2014 08:59
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Grand Fromage posted:No way. Korean and Japanese are almost the same language, they're the same family. Grammar's virtually identical and both get most of their vocabulary from Chinese. They both are claimed to be isolates because of nationalism. My wikipedia tier understanding of the subject makes me imagine it's plausible (it also seems possible that they're both just distantly Altaic languages), but if it was so obviously just a political game, you'd think the relationship would be more widely accepted, at least among western scholars. Like, I was kind of surprised to learn Serbian and Croatian are literally the exact same language earlier in this topic, but looking into it, it's not like serious scholars pretend otherwise. I know nothing about the specifics of linguistic classification, but I find the relationships fascinating, so any insight into how these languages are related would be cool.
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Nov 16, 2014 12:45
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Not limited to Africa, so the resolution isn't as good as it could be, but it does have the advantage of covering 5000 years. Obviously this is based on population growth models and whatever records remain, and not a set of complete census data, but it looks sensible enough at first glance.  On the current subject of diseases- check out Mexico between 1500 and 1600 for something depressing. How hard would it be to make a gif of this? It'd be really neat to see this in sequence. Generation Internet posted:Australia: "gently caress off, we're full"
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Nov 23, 2014 19:10
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Lord Hydronium posted:Also have a bonus map of Catholic provinces/archdioceses: There's one that covers most of North and South Korea, but then there's another tiny one in North Korea. It's not even Pyongyang or anything.
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Apr 22, 2015 22:02
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Guavanaut posted:Time for another guess the map:
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Apr 22, 2015 23:57
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Belgium is already the most horrific absurdity, so this map didn't need to change it at all. Perfect.  Guavanaut posted:Shouldn't they be joining the commonwealth with Poland and Hungary?
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May 5, 2015 00:19
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Ammat The Ankh posted:I like how you can clearly see the route of the transcontinental railroad here. Check out how far apart the day lines are in the east and how they run into a wall around Missouri. It took one day to get to Ohio, another to get to Chicago, but to cross Missouri took three more days. Even the fastest route, through Nebraska and Wyoming, was a further 14 days. I do wonder what accounts for the ease of travel along that corridor, and the difficulty to the immediate north and south.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:58
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Well... okay. That's pretty obvious looking at it that way. I had a mental image of the Rockies all kind of starting at once in a north-south ridge, but I guess that's just in Colorado.
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Jun 3, 2015 03:12
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icantfindaname posted:The thing about China and maybe India being equal civilizations or whatever with the West is that they were historically large and wealthy, but they didn't directly interact either with each other or with the European/Middle Eastern ecumene a whole lot, just because of geography. Manufactured goods from one area ended up in the other sometimes, and there are Persian-influenced Muslims in both India and China, but that's essentially it as far as interaction went. Nobody in Europe or the ME ever heard of Confucianism or Hinduism until the early modern era and colonialism essentially. In the few hundred years before 1800, the Spanish colonies in the New World produced almost all the worlds silver, and fully half of it ended up in China. Global trade was massive, both for China and Europe. It's true that there wasn't much exchange of people or ideas though. This is largely thanks to China being extremely uninterested in that type of thing, and at the same time being uninterested in influencing inconsequential barbarians. Christianity made inroads into Japan as early as the 16th century, but a strong central government put a stop to that as quick as it could. I don't know as much about Christianity in China, but I remember reading that the Jesuits had found a place in the Chinese court for their astronomical knowledge, and that's about as far as pre-19th Century Christians really got (the Jesuits were pissed that protestant missionaries were ruining their long-game by bumbling around with "the people" and getting killed by mobs of peasants, prompting British intervention, around the time of the Opium Wars). Europeans never had enough power to spread their ideas to the strong centralized states in East Asia until the 19th century, and even then China didn't get serious about Western ideas until they were beaten by the Japanese who adopted them first. Basically, China called the shots before the 19th Century, so not much happened between Europe's sphere and China's sphere. China was too singularly awesome to care about the rest of the world. And if you're talking pre-Oceanic trade route contact... I'm just going to say "the Mongols" and call it a day. Basically, China has always been way more rich than anything around it, and so had little interest in things much past its own borders. And you're hilariously wrong about India- totally influenced by and influencing the middle east, and China too. There are so many Greek and Roman coins in India. Not a lot of Greek or Roman writing on the subject, but a ton of physical evidence of quite extensive contact. Pook Good Mook posted:Not to mention that by 1820 Europe and its Colonies were hilariously more economically active than China and the rest of East Asia. Eiba fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 09:51
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icantfindaname posted:The entire point of my post was that things like philosophy and religion for the most part never really moved from east to west. If China and India had never existed and there was a big China-shaped ocean in its place there would have been very little different in the development of the western half of Eurasia beyond higher-order macroeconomic effects that few people noticed at the time to begin with. It just didn't interact with Europe or even the Middle East a whole lot. The narrative you see about China regaining its rightful place in the world order or being a counterbalance to western civilization or whatever doesn't make any sense because it never was that, it never even really interacted with western civilization in the first place. And also you're wrong. Let's say we're talking pre 1500s so you don't have global oceanic trade yet: Materially, inventions diffused. Economically, the entire world was still oriented towards China. Roman aristocrats had a taste for silk, which wasn't grown next door. People traveled on those trade routes and, yes, passed more than goods along those routes. Ever heard of Nestorian Christians? Some of the nomads raiding Chinese cities worshiped a man the Romans nailed to a cross on the other end of the continent. Militarily and politically... the Mongols developed in the Chinese sphere. Their tactics (siege tactics in particular) were based on fighting in China and their imperial structure was created with the knowledge of how China ran. These people went on to rule the Middle East and Russia for a non-trivial amount of time. Even earlier I suppose you've never heard of the Greco-Bactrians, or the Indo-Greek Kingdoms. There were Hellenistic influences in India around the time Buddhism arose in India, which in turn influenced all of east Asia. Central Asia is not a wasteland. It has been full of cities and kingdoms rich on trade for thousands of years. Do you think the Chinese didn't know who these people were, or these people didn't know who the Chinese were? Or do you think it was the Middle East that was oddly ignorant of their neighbors? Do you know why Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world? Hint: they didn't independently develop Islam. I don't even know what your basic point is, but you're so fantastically misinformed about that I have to object regardless of what you're trying to say. For the map thread have a linked gigantic map of Islamic populations. Note the absolute cultural wall between east and west.
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Jun 17, 2015 02:22
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sweek0 posted:Pretty drat obscure, but have a guess. Actually, looking it up it's pretty darn similar. How useless. Isn't that one of the most basic rules of map making? The more your map resembles a population density map, the more pointless it is. Per capita is almost always more meaningful for indicating... anything. By comparing the maps I can see New Hampshire likes their lawns, and the west in general can't support as much as the east (no surprise)... but I couldn't tell that from the original map alone. Edit: Though I suppose if you just straight up did it per capita you'd end up with a map that mostly indicates how concentrated a state's population is, considering most of the discrepancies I can see are probably to do with urban centers increasing population density without increasing lawns. I mean, besides the obvious "the west is dry" thing going on. Oh well. I guess shading in whole states is a pretty bad system to use in general. Eiba fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 19:16
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The real issue with this chart isn't that it overlooks China being on both lists (I'm sure that's why they say "rarely"/"tend not to" and so on), that's not a big deal. The real issue is that, uncontent with East Turkistan, China has annexed Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan without anyone noticing! Taiwan, of course, has always been part of China according to the UN so that's no big deal.
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Jan 24, 2016 09:39
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Tree Goat posted:"gently caress off, we're full" says nation that is comprised, mostly, of vast tracts of emptiness. That's not to say the people shoving refugees onto concentration camps on random islands aren't super racist, but it's not like they're just selfishly hoarding some sort of massive utopia. Australia is garbage, and the people living there are probably numerous enough to ruin their own environment already. At least that's my understanding. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure "It's huge, therefore can accept a bunch more people" is a silly way of looking at it.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:39
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open24hours posted:The idea that Australia is at or even close to carrying capacity is risible. It does do a good job of uniting racists and environmentalists though. Is that a point trotted out often in these kinds of discussions? I'd hate to have put out a racist talking point by accident. I'd be curious about reading more about the subject. I can totally believe that the Australians are living way too decadent lifestyles as it is, but I'm pretty skeptical that you could get a group "living the good life" to voluntarily give that up without some sort of crisis pushing them. I imagine if I was an Australian I'd be more pissed at that though and less cynically resigned.
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Jan 25, 2016 06:34
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ReagaNOMNOMicks posted:Bad thigns happening vs good things happening, measured in milliHitlers or negative milliHitlers "I'm having a good time! This is the opposite of Hitler right now."
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Feb 5, 2016 21:54
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fishmech posted:It seems like the percentage-area figure should be proportion of electric supply in that area coming from dams, yet Norway doesn't seem to be high in it at all I kind of wish there was a version without the blue circles making it literally impossible to see that aspect in densely populated areas.
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Feb 18, 2016 03:25
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sparatuvs posted:Russia is pretty collectivist, collectivism is more fem. I mean, I know national stereotypes are bullshit, but so is the basis of that map, it seems, so it's curious that they don't match up.
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Feb 23, 2016 03:49
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Elyv posted:The weird thing to me about that map is that the labeled lines are ok, but then you have colored areas which don't match reality at all It's still an overly simplistic map with a bunch of weird errors, but it's not horrifically wrong when you realize that.
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Aug 6, 2017 06:13
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The map is kinda fun but very silly, but this:A Buttery Pastry posted:In this different timeline, it's not hard to imagine that cats might have evolved into becoming scantily-clad bipedal tool users. There are two main branches here, the tiger people of India and the Persian cat people of the Ummah. <-- Hope this is what you were looking for. I've spent a lot of time on that guy's really, really cool site, and it's always incredibly jarring when you get to the end of a planet he's talking about and he starts describing the lifeforms that might populate it.
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Aug 17, 2017 19:02
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Carbon dioxide posted:Full size:
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Oct 14, 2017 16:54
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Squalid posted:Obviously this is a difficult subject and even defining what ethnicity means can be extremely contentious. You may be describing a real difference of some sort that is worth talking about perhaps, but you're putting it in terms that are either really inflammatory or obtusely specialized. Either way you're communicating poorly and should probably reconsider the way you assert what groups are not "ethnically distinct". I don't think anyone would have batted an eye if you talked about Asian Americans being seen as less "other" than some other groups, and explaining how that might even be a fundamentally different experience for them would probably have started a thoughtful conversation, but to translate that into "not ethnically distinct" is not a helpful way to phrase things.
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Feb 18, 2018 01:25
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Arglebargle III posted:Why would you vote for president in California?
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Apr 28, 2018 00:00
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Milo and POTUS posted:Whats going on in North Africa? Edit: I don't know why but the two Greeces keeps making me laugh. Why is loving up a map by swapping random stuff, but then just duplicating one random bit so funny? Eiba fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 07:33
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There are some national borders that are suspiciously obvious on this map. Did Sweden/Finland really cut down every last tree, and gain it back recently, but Norway did not? Same with the US/Canada, where it seems the Americans are nothing but "gains" while the Canadians are all "current". I might be misreading the map, but it seems like it might be just coloring countries with expanding forests darker green, though that's not what the key seems to imply. Obviously the red/brown bits aren't sorted by nation.
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Dec 30, 2018 04:29
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Minenfeld! posted:The northeastern US state I live in was like 80% deforested in 1900 and is now over 90% forest. But yeah, New England is pretty incredible in that it's completely forested today but pretty much all of it is little over a century or so old (except for parts of Maine). People really invested in farming here, not to mention all the industrial uses of lumber back in the day, but then it turned out that there was absolutely no reason to farm here when Ohio existed, and industrialization just made farming/logging here a quaint anachronism. They apparently do studies here on how forests develop because people have been documenting everything about how they come back.
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Dec 30, 2018 04:50
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Platystemon posted:
Also "Southeast Alaskan / British Columbian Waters" is the best name they could come up with?
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Sep 25, 2019 01:56
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The ancient coastline visible on these is really interesting, and not just for the reasons it's usually interesting. It might just be the colors they're using, but it seems like the Black Belt is barely visible on the first map- blacks in the south are very slightly more likely to believe global warming is real. And that's kind of interesting itself, because it's not like they're likely to be any more educated than their white neighbors, just less likely to be Republican, and apparently that's enough. That's not exactly new or surprising information, but still interesting to see. But the sad bit is they seem way more ready to believe that global warming will harm them specifically than almost any other region in the country. Apparently it's easy for them to imagine that they, personally, will be hosed over by forces almost entirely out of their control. That just seems more plausible to them. Sucks that they're right.
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Dec 22, 2019 04:06
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Honj Steak posted:Can somebody estimate how many inhabitants each of these countries would have? Seems like a surprisingly equal partition at first glance. To illustrate where this gut feeling comes from, a classic:  (More people live inside that circle than outside of it.)
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Apr 12, 2020 07:57
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Platystemon posted:It turns out that someone made a webpage for this sort of thing. But unfortunately we've got severe projection issues- straight lines on a flat map aren't the same between two projections. Where the line goes through India really matters. I eyeballed it twice, without putting a ton of effort in, and got between 1.6 and 2.6 billion people in Kurdistan. There are a billion people between these two lines...  I think the line more generous to Kurdistan is the more accurate one, but hosed if I know for sure.
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Apr 12, 2020 09:08
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Oh wow. I've seen "what if Europe was colonized" maps in the past, but none that approach this one in thought and detail. I love how they consider the continent to have spoken one "language," and consider the Roman Empire to be the "southern period" of the modern HRE. There are just too many details, all of them cutting and cogent. I've been staring at this thing for hours and I'm sure I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
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Jul 5, 2020 00:13
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Minenfeld! posted:"Unsiran Narodou" is a nice touch.
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Jul 5, 2020 01:19
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Grape posted:Maybe also split New England in two since the bottom three are wildly different than the top three. That's kind of the issue my gut is having with most of these cultural zones. Urban/rural cultural divides are generally greater than regional divides in my experience. Just think of Texas or California. If you're going to say that a regional culture has urban and rural manifestations, and understand that one region can be wildly different depending on levels of urbanization, then New England is pretty coherent.
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Jul 21, 2020 22:56
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Kamrat posted:I just find it hard to believe that a major news corporation would put Hong Kong on the wrong side of the world without anyone even noticing, seems like they had a troll in the studio. There are other people who don't get that thrill, who aren't especially engaged by and therefore aren't especially curious about maps. These aren't dumb people, or necessarily incurious people in general, just people who don't enjoy the same things as us. Typically people like that are obliged to learn the basics of maps, but it's less likely to stick with them because they don't think about it as much. There are a lot of people out there like that. There are a lot of people out there who can look at South America without "NOT ASIA" blaring in their most primal image recognition centers of their brain. Brazil is big. Has a vaguely curved east coast. Close enough for them to recognize it as basically China. It's hard for us to imagine since it's so deeply, intuitively understood by the type of people who would read this thread, but that level of understanding is very much learned, and it's very possible to just not have it. I don't have a clue how the the graphics themselves are made. Maybe someone was trolling, but maybe they've just got unlabeled maps and someone just forgot what South America looked like.
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Jul 25, 2020 01:56
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Phlegmish posted:They don't need to know where Paraguay is as an isolated bit of trivia. That, in itself, is useless. But it might be interesting, occasionally even useful, to know why Paraguay did x in the 19th century, or why it is inappropriate to call people from Paraguay y, or which languages are spoken there, or how Paraguay relates to the rest of Latin America, etc. And if they know these things, and they're even somewhat familiar with its neighboring countries, then they can easily 'know' where Paraguay is as a simple logical deduction without ever having spent a significant amount of time studying maps. Cartography itself doesn't particularly interest me, it's what maps visually represent in a simplified way. I just cannot grasp not attempting to understand the social world that surrounds us and shapes us all. I couldn't live like that. The person who labeled Hong Kong in Brazil could be an expert on Chinese culture and the unusual relationship between the city and the country and what-have-you, and still not have recognized the shapes. I don't think "cartography itself" interests any of use here. It's a symbolic way of understanding relationships, and that's why it's interesting. There's got to be more going on for us- this isn't the politically neutral map thread- but at the same time there's something about the way maps communicate things that's compelling. Someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is the Romans didn't really have maps the way we do. There's some travel distance charts, and some novel attempts at cartography, but by and large everyone who lived in the Roman Empire thought of the world in terms of narrative, rather than charts. So-and-so neighbors whoever, as a phrase, rather than any sort of visual representation of where these groups are. Trying to conceive of the world without thinking of maps is impossible for me, so it's fascinating to imagine a coherent world without them. Like trying to imagine how to think and make sense of the world if you don't have language. Only understanding the world without maps is a thing people have done throughout history, and people at the CNN graphics department evidently still do. (Not that I'm sure they actually have a particularly good grasp of the world at all.) I don't have a wider point with all this, I just think it's very interesting to think about. As a side note, your Goonited Nations gang tag... is that the UN flag with the ring from goatse? If so that's... some pretty evocative vexillology.
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Jul 25, 2020 05:50
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