Budzilla posted:

This should have been posted in the OP. PNAC redrawing of the ME.

KoldPT posted:

1kmē population grid of Spain and Portugal. I live in one of the most dense areas in Portugal, hooray statistics!

Whorelord posted:

Map of countries by cannabis use by percentage of the population.

Guessing there's ritual significance for the high rates in Papua New Guinea and Ghana?

Found it somewhat amusing at least :P

computer parts posted:

Vegas mostly, it seems.

also, that weird wavy pattern in the north of the state (and elsewhere like in Southern California) is apparently due to the Checkerboarding grants that the feds gave out back when the Transcontinental Railroad was being built:

drk posted:

Grand Fromage posted:

A pretty nasty one too. Other than the minerals and prestige, another reason China would never give it up is just about every major river in China comes from glaciers in Tibet. China has enough water problems without giving control over its fresh water supply to an independent state that could decide to cut them off.

Koramei posted:

Almost certainly yes to all of those, but keep in mind that that map was probably not written with any regards to religious sensitivity.


Forced cultural assimilation has been a common practice of China for most of its history and is massively destructive to those they subsume. Whether that's actually genocide or not (it's funny, they go to lengths to make their wording as unambiguous as possible in these definitions but there is still way too much room for debate) is ... maybe not as concrete as I had assumed, on reading a little more about it, but as I said that's entirely semantics. China's ills in Tibet have been way overblown in the west for sure, and it's a good thing to counter the boogeyman image they're acquiring, but "have not performed forced sterilization or killed as many Tibetans as there are Tibetans" is not to say they are not doing all kinds of wrong there.

All that said I agree with your side of the argument; excusing a repressive and feudal government 'cause "every premodern state was as bad" seems a bit weird when the time period we're talking about is centuries after most of the rest had been reformed. It is not analogous to colonization.

semi-related: Asia in the early 20th century


(click for bigger if you wanna see cities and whatever. look at all that Wade-Giles )

made of bees posted:

That could be why some Estonians want to do exactly that.

Lord Hydronium posted:

The size of Alaska:

Torrannor posted:

Well, in the oft-maligned Mercator Projection, Alaska is about half as big as the entire contiguous United States.

Peanut President posted:

Folks asking me to define worth: Can't farm it, it's nearly inhospitable, and it's really hard to get to. It's like buying the moon.

chairface posted:

It was strategically useful in WWII. A lot of lend-lease gear was sent through Alaska and then Siberia to the USSR from the USA. There's sadly not an accompanying map but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_convoys_of_World_War_II

Lawman 0 posted:

Unironically we should start thinking about how to split up the moon and asteroids soonish.

computer parts posted:

Even if we get bases up and running it's still not going to be any easier to do moon stuff than Antarctic stuff and that continent is still considered neutral ground.

Real hurthling! posted:

but twitter is like one big forum where people use their real names and censor their racist opinions even less!

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Though being shat on by Europeans up-close and personal wasn't/isn't exactly unheard of for Africans either.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Not at all. Currently, Africa sits on top of an upwelling of mantle, which is why the continent is relatively uniformly high-elevation in the south, while Indonesia is just the opposite. Then there's accretion, which adds to to continents' edges, volcanic activity where plates are subducted, and finally orogeny where plates smash into each other. On top of that you have erosion, which can wither away at the continents quite rapidly, though this is very dependent on location/climate.

E: To give an example, the area around the Rocky Mountains used to be a shallow sea, then the Farallon plate was subducted beneath America which resulted in a giant plateau/mountain chain the likes of the Himalayas, and that has since been eroded down to what is there today.

Basically, it's more of a rough idea where the (major) plates were, than an exact map. I suppose geologists can see whether a place was below sea level at a certain point, but I think that map is just to give an idea of where the various plates were and how they correspond to modern borders.

Riso posted:

made of bees posted:

I feel like any metric that says LGBT rights are more or less the same in all of the US as in, say, the Netherlands is broad enough to be basically worthless.

PittTheElder posted:

I'm curious about Brazil, and probably other countries in the same boat I didn't bother to look hard enough at: did they take actual steps to legalize homosexuality between 1800 and 1870, or was it just never illegal in the first place, and the map is counting from date of independence?

pig slut lisa posted:

That's gotta be at least a little wrong. The Nile floodplain is the most densely populated part of the country by far, it's true, but it thins out the farther upstream you go. Also the Fayoum Oasis isn't shown.

Kamrat posted:

Since it's International Women's Day (or was yesterday depending on where you live) I thought I'd share some maps about the treatment of women in different countries.



Both are from this Wikipedia article and both are from 2011 so they're a little bit outdated

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Salinity in the Baltic is only a fourth of what it is in the North Sea around the Danish islands, and it drops to less than a tenth in the furthest reaches, due to a high level of precipitation vs. narrow and extremely shallow straits. Conversely, the Mediterranean is very saline, especially in the east, since it has a high level of evaporation and a constant inflow from the Atlantic.

Anyway, the fact that Baltic water comes from precipitation basically means you would have to build a dam right across the rivers leading into it, as well as across the Danish straits. Hell, if you just built one across the Danish straits, the sea level would rise until it found another path, probably through the Kiel Canal area.

Phlegmish posted:

All of these non-European civilizations sound like nancy boys to me. No wonder the Europeans won.

In all seriousness, good personal hygiene by itself probably didn't help much against massive epidemics, as evidenced by the fact that the Middle East was almost just as badly affected by the plague as Europe.

Lawman 0 posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_hygienical_jurisprudence

Killer robot posted:

This is what was missing from every cyberpunk setting world map I've ever seen.

duodenum posted:

Phlegmish posted:

I remember looking at a map some time ago and being surprised that the Baltic countries were larger than I had assumed. They're just not very densely populated. Flanders by itself has about the same number of inhabitants as all three of them combined.



The interior of the Iberian peninsula is a total wasteland as well, with the exception of Madrid.

Phlegmish posted:

France is homogeneous outside of the cities in the sense that no one lives there.

I'm surprised that so many muslim countries aren't recognizing Kosovo.

Phlegmish posted:

They have an officially recognized government that is in control of a single Mogadishu neighborhood. I'm barely exaggerating.

duckmaster posted:

Not particularly useful in a country which sent 8 MiG-21s to Israel a few years ago for upgrades. 4 of them mysteriously disappeared: almost certainly sold on by a senior air force General or government minister (probably a few of them). Cambodia has over 2200 Generals compared to the US cap of 500....!

Anyway this is a derail so have some maps.


US bombing targets on Cambodia 1965-73:




Unexploded ordnance in Cambodia (yellow is probable, red is definite):




They're constantly finding unexploded stuff around here. They found this yesterday, which in true Cambodian style they picked up and threw onto the back of a truck!

Maybe not as interesting as some other maps in this thread but important to remember the effects war can have even decades later

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

This article mentions the likely source, a released database of US bombing missions in the region

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf


There's a good map on the second page.

twoday posted:

Thousands of years from now archeologists studying the 20th century will still be randomly blown up by XO, I would like to this. Consequently no one will want to study this period and our material culture will be poorly understood! Especially Belgian and Cambodian culture,

DrSunshine posted:

"Th-this place wasn't designed to keep people out... it was designed to keep something in!!"