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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • The reason it exists is so bizarre too. It stems from the rivalry between the republics of Venice and Ragusea (modern day Dubrovnik). Venice was gradually asserting control over more and more of the Adriatic coastline and Ragusea didn’t much fancy sharing a land border with its rival, so it just gave up one tiny stretch of land each to its north and south to the Ottoman Empire. Venice would therefore have to come by sea or risk angering the Ottomans. Eventually Austria manages to annex the Dalmatian territory of both Venice and Ragusea, but the Ottomans still held those two tiny strips of land. The Ottomans were not typically on the best of terms with Austria, and they held on to the two tiny bits of Adriatic coast up until the treaty of Berlin in 1879. By this point, Neum (the Bosnian one) had been part of Ottoman Bosnia for 179 years, so the borders were pretty damn entrenched, and they survived through the shifts to Austrian, Yugoslav, and eventually independent Bosnian-Herzegovinan political structures. So a petty but clever move of hiding behind a bigger empire in the 1600s created the tiny bit of Bosnian coastline today.



  • Skua@kbin.earthtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSquare!
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    14 days ago

    Wait, you don’t mean the line has to be straight? If that’s what you mean, I’m fairly sure the internal lines in the post are only there as construction. The section of the triangle that’s inside the smaller circle is just there to show dimensions, so it’s drawn (slightly) thinner than the external lines



  • For those wondering why these borders don’t match up: England’s county system is actually the butchered remains of several iterations stitched together in a manner that would appal Dr Frankenstein. This image shows the historic counties, but those basically only exist for cultural reasons today and have not been used for governance since the 70s. They don’t quite match the post - see, for example, Yorkshire being one massive thing in this image but split into four in the post. Even though one of the four is called “east third”. The post’s border also don’t match the modern counties though, so I’m not quite sure what exactly is being shown, but it could be older borders or just whichever borders had the most interesting set of names




  • It seems very strange for him to say that the Good Flag Bad Flag author fails to justify the rule that the flag should be simple literally immediately after showing a slide with a paragraph of justification for that rule. Especially since the next part he speaks about illustrates it extremely well - even if I know that Pennsylvania’s flag is the only one with two horses, how am I meant to recognise the two horses when the flag isn’t laid out flat as an image? I can always tell apart the Nordic ones because the differences are huge simple blocks of colour that I only need to see a tiny part of to recognise and which extend all the way to all four edges. I can’t do that with two black horses on a dark blue field.




  • To write that out in full: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Which looks like I just held ctrl+v until it seemed suitably silly.





  • This is 100% amateur guesswork, but maybe the geography is part of the answer here? Norway is a bunch of extremely jagged coastline opening on to the fairly cold and empty North Sea, and most of the rest of it is equally jagged mountains, so it was probably easy for communities to be relatively isolated most of the time and therefore wind up speaking a little differently to the guys in the next fjord over. The Maghreb, on the other hand, is right on the Mediterranean, which has been one of humanity’s busiest and most travelled areas for thousands of years


  • OP has actually posted an update that (indirectly) explains it! https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/f2a9b56e-f915-4932-a35a-d4c3a6e472c9.webp

    The equator is actually the less-salty bit in between the two high-salt bands. You’ll see the note that says that the less saline areas around the equator are the tropical latitudes that get a lot of rainfall. Because the equator is the most consistently-warm latitude, a lot of water evaporates there and is carried upwards, then falls back down as rain. That air can’t keep going up forever though, so it spills out to the north and south. By this point the water has fallen out of it and it has cooled, so it sinks back down and creates dry areas either side of the equator. We can see this as the two yellow bands on the map, and you’ll notice that the land in line with those is where we see deserts like the Sahara, the Kalahari, Arabian desert, and central Australia. And also lots of salt at the surface of the ocean, apparently, because there’s no rain falling on it.