Gregory's Server
Welcome to another #geoweirdness thread, this week we turn our eye to a part of the world that doesn't always get a lot of attention: the Indian Ocean.
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Hey, did you know there will be an election in the United States 🇺🇸 next week? Nowhere does big better than the States, so we thought in honour of the event we'd make this week's #geoweirdness thread our biggest ever; a 50 toot extravaganza covering something geo weird and wonderful from each and every state. 1/ 2/ Alaska, AK Vast, wild and cold, Alaska is also, to put it crudely, absolutely huge. The great Aleutian Arc archipelago that spans outwards of the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea crosses the 180° meridian, and means that Alaska is the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost state all at once! The state capital, Juneau, isn't reachable by road, due to surrounding mountains. As the locals say "only three ways to arrive in Juneau: plane, boat, or birth canal" Don't forget - today 🗓️ Fri. Oct 25th is #fridaygeotrivia We post the question here at 17:00 Berlin 🇩🇪 time / 4pm London 🇬🇧 / 11am New York 🇺🇸 Rules / prizes / more details: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-october-2024 See you in a few hours. This week #fridaygeotrivia returns - we play 🗓️ Fri. Oct 25th at 17:00 Berlin 🇩🇪 time / 4pm London 🇬🇧 / 11am New York 🇺🇸 Join us! Details / Rules: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-october-2024 Past questions to quiz yourself: https://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/fridaygeotrivia Let's close out the week with a #geoweirdness thread Today we'll explore the wonderful world of linguistic maps and atlases. These thematic maps plot diatopic (dia = across, topy = place) distribution of linguistic features such as vocabulary, grammar usage and, most famously, pronunciation. Let’s get straight to it with a challenge: Below are three maps. For today’s thread, we’re interested in the info conveyed in just two of them. Can you work out which? 1/ 2/ The map of Iberia "only" plots the different regional languages, it doesn’t convey anything regarding language characteristics. So it is simply a “map of languages” rather than a “linguistic map”. We’re interested in the other two, which are great examples of linguistic maps which plot lexical (words) and syntactic (sentence structure) variation across geographical space.  🚨⏱️ 90 minutes to go until we post this month's #fridaygeotrivia question! The game begins today at 17:00 Berlin time / 4pm London / 11am New York Details / Rules: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-september-2024 See you then After last month's summer break #fridaygeotrivia is back! We will play this Friday (27th) at 17:00 Berlin time / 4pm London, 11AM New York. Details / Rules: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-september-2024 We hope you can join us. Today we’re once again working out of the excellent facilities of Geovation in Clerkenwell. Many thanks to them for making this fantastic resource available Next week the OpenCage team will be back in London 🇬🇧 for Geomob London on the evening of Wed the 18th, so it's fitting that for this week's #geoweirdness thread we focus on an iconic bit of cartographic history that started in London: The tube map. 1/ 2/ The first version of the London Underground Map we know and love today was designed in 1931 by Henry Charles Beck. It’s one of the most recognisable cartographic works of all time What you get when you have a free text field asking developers which programming language they use
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@opencage Or as I heard someone call it a long time ago, Guido's little language. But oddly enough, now when I google for that phrase, I find just one hit. I thought it used to be a common derogatory name for Python... (Note: Personally I have nothing against Python. What I find irritating, though, is Perl criticism (always the same jokes about line noise etc) from people who have never even used it back in the days when it did seem like a good idea.) For this week's #geoweirdness thread, we return to the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 - join us a look at some of the geo oddness of Wales 🏴, or Cymru in Welsh. 1/ In this week's #geoweirdness thread we again explore the oddness of a specific country and what a country it is. Today we bring you… Chile 🇨🇱 1/ 2/ As you may have noticed, Chile 🇨🇱 is a tremendously long and thin country. The Chilean mainland spans approximately 4,300 km from north to south and 180 km from east to west. A fun site for comparing country sizes is https://www.thetruesize.com In honor of #OpenStreetMap’s 20th birthday today here’s our thread with all the OSM community interviews we’ve done on our blog over the years: For this week's #geoweirdness thread, we head back to Europe - join us as we consider the geographic oddities of Switzerland 🇨🇭 1/ 2/ Switzerland 🇨🇭 has a beautiful cartographic history that dates back many centuries, most famously involving the mapping of the Alps 🏔️ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_Switzerland What you may be less familiar with is the tradition of "hiding" secret figures and illustrations in the complex charts. 🚨 The game begins! 🚨 Remember - you MUST include the #fridaygeotrivia hashtag and emoji flag of countries. Name sets of places - countries or admin level 2 (states/provinces) - such that one name is *uniquely* a geographically modified version of the other. Example: West Virginia and Virginia in the US 🇺🇸. There is no "North Virginia" or "East Virginia", West Virginia is a *unique* modified version of Virginia. We will list answers in this thread 1/ 2/ Remember - only one answer per toot. Full rules and details on the blog: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-july-2024 Don't forget - later today (5pm central European time) we'll post the question for this month's #fridaygeotrivia Hope you can join us. Details: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-july-2024 We hope you've all been enjoying long, lazy summer days, but now it's time to get serious again ... This Friday (🗓️ Fri. 26th July) it's time for this month's #fridaygeotrivia Details/Rules: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-july-2024 Who will walk away with the coveted emoji trophy 🏆 ? Will @SK53 be able to defend the title? As always you can practice by revisiting past #fridaygeotrivia questions: https://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/fridaygeotrivia You may also enjoy last month's @geomob podcast episode where @stevenfeldman@me.uk interviews @freyfogle about the details of running #fridaygeotrivia and our #geoweirdness threads: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-239 Hope to see you here on Friday! ⏰ Time is a funny thing! For starters, how are we already nearly in August? But more importantly, when examined closely, time reveals several excellent #geoweirdness examples. In this week's thread, we’ll look at some of the weirdest timezone quirks from around the world. To get us started here’s a map of the world as segmented by the tz database. 1/ 2/ Before we go full #geoweirdness , a bit of #geoeducation Time zone information is tracked by the "tz" database, a fascinating, open-source project worth learning about! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database Most countries have simple time zones, generally based on the sun's position relative to the region's positions on the Earth's surface. However, time zones also involves political and historical factors, and thus they don't always correspond to the longitudinal lines on the globe. |
2/ The region came into focus recently when it was announced that the UK 🇬🇧 will give the strategic Chagos Islands - aka the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) 🇩🇬 - which includes Diego Garcia, site of a major UK/US 🇺🇸 military base, to Mauritius 🇲🇺
This story is still unfolding - stay tuned!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98ynejg4l5o
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