I'm worried about posts like this making it on the front page: so much information spread so thinly. There isn't any analysis that could explain why or how implicit trends are important or even real.
I sort of think you miss the point. This gives a sense of place and location, which is why I posted it. Some of the data, unfortunately, looks a bit wrong.
What I did find interesting is that it awakened in me a little more curiosity about the lands and countries around me, and the people who inhabit them. That's really not a bad thing!
The Washington Post blog had an article the day before called "40 maps that explain the world" that has more depth around why the maps are the way they are.
Anyone know if the map of "literal Chinese translations for country names" is accurate? Seems like there's some possible insight into Chinese culture if what it portrays is accurate.
I wonder how much business China does with Italy :D
It's not really fair to translate the names back into English in this way. Finland, for instance, is 芬兰 which does indeed mean fragrant orchid, but the reason that name was picked is because it's pronounced fēnlán which sounds roughly similar to "Finland" in English. To Chinese people, these are just phonetic loan words and don't carry any meaning beyond being state names.
That said, the map as a literal translation is mostly "correct", even though it is meaningless.
I might add that "Asia" also is a loan word in Chinese. If you do a literal translation of that name, it comes out as being something along the lines of "secondary/inferior continent". This does not mean that Chinese people think Asia is a bad continent. It's just a phonetic loan.
I neither speak nor write nor read Chinese, but someone explained to me that those names are simply rough phonetic approximations. They decided to go with words that weren't offensive, but sound like the country's names, because that's the polite thing to do.
I'd love for someone who actually knows what they're talking about to chime in, though!
You can see that some name are purely phonetic (finland, bielarus).
A few however, ends with 国, which is the character for country. These names are actually significant (for instance, china is 中国, middle country (middle kingdom) and germany actually is brave country)
Wait, how comes on the fifth map, "McDonald’s Across the World", Iceland is shown as not having McDonald's, but at the same time it's listed as the third most expensive country for McDonald's burgers?
Just in case someone is actually confused: I am sure you can buy McDonald's-equivalent burgers in Iceland or at least estimate the cost of a burger if it were to be sold there (in the appropriate quantity typical of such a country etc.).
Well, they do say "McDonald's burger" not "equivalent".
Give what ronaldx said, I suppose it's a case of using different dated data for each part of the map, but this doesn't look good, someone should have catched that before publishing.
I don't know about this case specifically, but it doesn't have to be recursive. English has a similar examples, such as Scotland, England, and Denmark. To take the first as an example, "Scot" is the demonym, and we add the suffix "-land" to make the placename. A demonym doesn't have to be based on the placename.
The Street View availability in Europe isn't really accurate from the macro level- if you zoom into central Europe, you'll see that Germany and Austria have very little Street View coverage.
Depends on what you mean by "false"? In a scientific sense, the position of North is arbitrary because we have no evidence to suggest a "correct" way up for our relative position in the universe. The poles are arbitrarily named as a reference point and a Northern Hemisphere dominance in cartography was probably what lead to the orientation of what most people recognise as the "right way up".
In non-scientific terms, the orientation of the map is a fairly universally accepted format from which most people work, so in that sense it is necessary that North is at the top because that's what people understand.
I'm sure someone with a little more knowledge of cartographic history/time to research will fill in some blanks here but I'm fairly certain the orientation we give to globes and maps was from European influence, consequently it makes sense for them to place themselves at the "top" half of the world rather than the "bottom".
If you google for it you mostly get "popular science" nonsense and linkbait and "common sense" junk.
For example the Egyptians put south "up" not because of interior decorating but because even the dumbest sailor understands water flows "down" and the nile more or less goes from S to N, so make them match, so the nile flows down on the world and on the map.
As for the compass stuff, northern hemisphere astronomers figured out the whole "north star" thing a long time before compasses, and a set of star maps for each season (or month, or whatever) more or less has the same circumpolar stars on every map (although a different orientation), so I guess to smear the ink the least you draw the circumpolar stars first, why not at the top. Or rephrased the natural way to figure out a star map is to pattern match the circumpolar stars, hold up your star map matching the circumpolar stars on the map with the world, and you "naturally" end up with the north side up, more or less, so you can read the star names with the "boring" circumpolar stars matched up and the zenith at the center of the page. Or rephrased something like the boring circumpolar stars are always "naturally" going to be one corner of the circle of your map so you'd tend to write the seasonal star names right side up across the map, sorta. Well it's hard to describe but makes sense if you physically act it out.
Rephrased, in the northern hemisphere you've always got a north star to find and face towards. Then hold up your map (star map or geographic) until N points to that star, which happens to be the way you're facing. Coincidentally that means the N always ends up at the top of the page. I suppose just to be a PITA you could find Polaris, face it, and "About Face" just to be difficult, then match up your map with "N aka toward Polaris" to the bottom, but its likely not happening.
Well obviously not completely arbitrary - it's entirely based on earth's magnetic field.
As for which way we call 'up' - here's an excerpt from the 'North' Wikipedia article as for why 'North' is up instead of 'South':
Up is a metaphor for north. The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The historian Daniel Boorstin suggests that perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient for study if they were in the upper right-hand corner.
Edit: As user javindo points out, the excerpt is especially true for globes where studying land on the bottom of a globe is especially cumbersome. It's hardly arbitrary that ~3/4 of land is in the Northern Hemisphere.
That's a good question. I'll take a stab at answering it.
(This is supposition on my part, it is not backed by links to wikipedia or anything.)
I believe the word "arbitrary" applies because Magnetic North pulls a compass needle in a specific way, but that technically, the needle points both north and south.
It is merely due to convention that we navigate by first finding magnetic north. It would be just as easy to navigate by finding magnetic south...mathematically speaking.
Navigators had stellar nav a long time before compasses.
If you live in the N hemisphere theres a really convenient star nearly perfectly (by olden standards) north. Polaris.
If you live in the N hemisphere you could never see a "south star" if one existed, which it doesn't (although there are some close ones).
If you live on a rotating planet, there's no such thing as a permanently "East" star or permanently "West" star.
So you inherently end up navigating off the north star. And in another post I tried to explain there's some built in human-user-interface issues that you tend to hold the map upward pointing to the one feature you're sure of, and with ancient-style celestial nav thats always going to be north because of the north star aka Polaris... so once you have literate map users, map makers are inevitably going to write place names right side up with top pointing to Polaris aka the north star aka "North"
I thought that this was a remarkably informative article! One of the other ways I personally got a sense of the locations of countries was a quite simple yet addictive Windows game called EMPIRE [1]. For instance I now know where Egypt actually is on the world map.
One thing that made me kinda worried: Why some countries with the lowest age of first sex, are the same ones with so much persecution of people that do sex at that age, specially in the form of child porn laws?
Obviously. But one could argue that there should be a correlation between the age most people start doing something (in this case having sex/filming sex) and the age at which it becomes legal to do so.
After all, laws are typically meant to be a 'best-fit' policy for societal norms.
The U.S. does have paid maternal leave. In fact, I had 6 weeks paternal leave at my old job. The benefit was available to all employees at the (Fortune 500) company.
I get 4 weeks vacation time. That doesn't mean the US has 4 weeks vacation time.
Apparently however, I picked the wrong career and should have been a coach. And people wonder why the US is going in the shitter. Must be all that socialisms.
They were trying to make a point of sports vs academics with a bit of north-south, but the hidden truth is all 50 of them were in the public-higher-education-industrial-complex.
"Fortune 100 firms overwhelmingly offer some paid time off to care for a new child and recover from childbirth. Among the companies in the Fortune 100 that responded to the JEC questionnaire, three-quarters (73.6 percent) offer mothers either paid family or disability leave. Firms are more likely to offer paid family leave to mothers than to fathers as only 32.1 percent report offering paid family leave to fathers. However, most (75.5 percent) firms allow employees to use accrued sick days, and among our sample, nine-out-of-ten (88.7 percent) report offering some kind of paid leave—family leave, pregnancy-related disability leave, or allowing the use of accrued paid sick days—for the birth of a child."
I think the map isn't very helpful. I would be interested in seeing how many women have access to maternal leave in the U.S. I best the number is surprisingly high. Also, many small employers are willing to work with parents. A mandate doesn't give any flexibility. For example, perhaps a parent would prefer going part-time for several months instead of 6 weeks paid. Employers compete for hires, why not allow them the flexibility to design their own benefits?
Then those who prioritize it will take jobs where it is available.
By mandating it, an employer has to consider the possibility whenever they hire someone, and so salaries will be lower as a result. If the employee doesn't get pregnant and use the leave, their salary has been kept lower with no benefit to them.
The expected benefit for those that don't use the leave themselves is a more stable and healthy society due to better child care and stronger social/family bonds. Overall lower (net) salaries is a trade-off that most societies in the world are willing to make. Mandating it is a means of mitigating the tragedy of the commons - people thinking that there is no benefit to them at all when they don't get the benefit directly.
