331 - East and West: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

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If you’re American, geographically inclined and a bit of a stickler, this cartographic incongruity is a bit of an annoyance. From the US, the shortest route to what’s conventionally called ‘the East’ is in fact via the west. Going in that direction, you’ll hit the ‘Far East’ before you’re in the ‘Middle East’. And Europe, or at least that part usually included in ‘the West’, lies due east. So East is west, and West is east, in blatant contradiction of what’s probably Rudyard Kipling’s most famous line of verse:

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Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

 

This opening line of The Ballad of East and West is often quoted to underline some insurmountable difference between the two hemispheres. It has almost invariably been misused. Taken as a whole, the Ballad has a subtler message than the one implied in this single verse. It attributes the gap between the two cultures more to nurture than nature. The entire couplet (which also closes the poem) reads:

 

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

 

The poem dates from 1889 and is set in the British Raj. At least here the context is pretty clear: Britain is the West, India the East. But definitions of ’East’ and ‘West’ vary greatly throughout history - and remain fluid. To stick to the British perspective of the poem, where did (and where does) the East begin? The Berlin Wall? Istanbul? The Middle East? Persia? The Indus River? Or at the Greenwich Meridian, placing London in both the eastern and western hemispheres?

 

As it turns out, a general definition for what is East and where West is, one that transcends place and time, is impossible to formulate. This is because both terms are ambiguous to start with. The word West derives from an Proto-Indo-European root [*wes-] that signifies a downward movement, hence associated with the setting sun (cf. Latin vesper, from the same root and meaning both ‘evening’ and ‘West’). The Proto-Indo-European root for East is [*aus-], which has the opposite meaning, i.e. an upward movement (of the sun), dawn.

 

As those etymologies suggest, East and West are but a matter of perspective. East is where the sun rises, West where it sets - as viewed from wherever you are. Which, incidentally, also means that it’s essentially impossible to be ‘in’ the East or West, as both aren’t fixed places, but shift with the horizon.

 

Nevertheless, ‘East’ and ‘West’ have been embedded in our topographies ever since civilisations started naming the world around them. Take Europe for example. The name quite possibly derives from the Phoenician word ereb, meaning ’setting’ (as in ’setting sun’), as it lay to the west of Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon, more or less). Similarly, the term Maghreb, used to describe the North African region at the western edge of the Arab world (i.e. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), is Arab for ’sunset’ or ‘western’, as that is indeed their position from a peninsularly Arab point of view.

 

Point of view is crucial, of course. East and West only exist in relation to someplace else. For many centuries, Europe was the vantage point from which the world was discovered, viewed and named. Columbus sailed west to arrive East in India, but instead stumbled on a new continent. It took a while for the confusion to lift, so the first name for America was the Indies, from 1555 on shifting to West Indies (when the mistake became increasingly apparent). About four decades later, the original Indies (i.e. India and South East Asia) started to be called the East Indies - to distinguish them more clearly from the West Indies. East and West were defined relative to Europe. Or more precisely Western Europe, for even eastern Germans and Balts were called easterlings by mediaeval (Western) chroniclers.

 

That East-West divide within Europe would harden from the beginning of the 20th century, with ‘the West’ used in a geopolitical sense from World War I, denoting the Allies (Britain, France, Italy) as opposed to Germany and Austria-Hungary (although they were known as the Central Powers, not the Eastern ones). ‘The West’, in opposition to the Soviet Union, was first used in 1918, ’the East’ as in the Communist Eastern part of Europe was first recorded in 1951.

 

During the Cold War, ‘the West’ was pretty clearly delineated, including all the NATO members (plus countries economically and culturally close to that alliance’s shared ideals, i.e. Sweden, Switzerland and Austria, but even Australia and New Zealand). ‘The East’, concurrently, consisted of the Warsaw Pact and affiliated Communist societies: China (”The East is Red”), North Korea, Vietnam.

 

The fact that the Cold War is over, not to mention the continuously diminishing global impact of Europe, will continue to chip away at the still dominant eurocentric toponymy of the world. In Australia, that ‘western outpost’ in the Pacific, ties with the ‘mother country’ (and Europe as a whole) have become so distant that Ozzies have begun referring to countries such as Indonesia, China and Japan not as the Far East, but as the Near North.

 

Maybe the same will happen one day in the US, when Europe will no longer be the West but (with a nod to Don Rumsfeld and Europe’s pensioner boom) the Old East and East Asia perhaps will be the New West. Not forgetting that the Chinese have never thought of themselves as eastern or western but, of course, the Middle Kingdom…

 

This map was sent in by Dennis J. Brennan, Sara Harrison, Kristin Kopf, and can be found here at the rather fantastic xkcd.com, ”a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, quoted before on this blog for its amusing map of online communities.

330 - From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents

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Both these maps show the same segment of the southern United States, and demonstrate a similar pattern. Yet each describes a wholly other era and a completely different process.

 

The bottom map dates from 1860 (i.e. the eve of the Civil War), and indicates where cotton was produced at that time, each dot representing 2,000 bales of the stuff. Cotton was King back then, and mainly so in the densely cultivated border area between Louisiana and Mississippi, and in an equally dense band of cotton cultivation starting west of the Mississippi-Alabama line, tapering out across Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Other cotton centres are the areas around Memphis and what appears to be Lawrenceburg in southern Tennessee.

 

The top map dates from 2008, and shows the results of the recent presidential election, on county level. Blue counties voted for Obama, red ones for McCain (darker hues representing larger majorities). In spite of Obama’s national victory, and barring Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, all Southern states (i.e. all states formerly belonging to the Confederacy) went for McCain. The pattern of pro-Obama counties in those southern states corresponds strikingly with the cotton-picking areas of the 1860s, especially along the Louisiana-Mississippi and Mississippi-Alabama borders (the pattern corresponds less strikingly and deviates significantly elsewhere).

 

The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days.

During the Democratic primary, many African-American voters supported Hillary Clinton, thinking it unlikely Barack Obama would win the nomination, let alone the presidency. When it became apparent that Obama had a good shot at the nomination (and thereafter at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself), their support for Obama became near monolithic. As it turns out, president-elect Obama won with the an overall support of 53%, but that includes over 90% of black voters (1).

 

And while their votes did not swing their states towards ‘their’ (2) candidate, the measure in which black residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina voted for Obama is remarkable in that this particular voting pattern still corresponds with settlement patterns of almost a century and a half ago.

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Many thanks to Paul Downey for sending in this map, found here.

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UPDATE #1:  I received an overlay of both maps from Mark Root-Wiley: “The borders do not line up perfectly but came closer than I thought they would. The top layer had to be made semitransparent in order to see the blue vs. red breakdown in Arkansas/Lousiana/Mississippi, but I think it’s pretty useful.  The correlation was even stronger than I thought.” It looks great. Thanks, Mark!

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UPDATE #2: The original juxtaposition of the two maps was the work of Allen Gathman (explained here, and done here).

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UPDATE #3: In comment #96, C. Neal explains how the voting pattern can be related to even more antique antecedents than Antebellum agriculture - the Late Cretaceous Period, no less. Go to the comment for link to the post…

 

(1) Of white voters, only 43% voted for Obama; since Lyndon B. Johnson, no Democratic candidate for the highest office has ever garnered more than half the votes of European-Americans.

(2) Obama self-identifies as black, but with a white mother and a Kenyan father, shares no personal, historical bond with the issue of black slavery in the US.

329 - Chaffinch Map of Scotland

Chaffinch Map of Scotland is a poem written in 1965 by Edwin Morgan (b. 1920), Poet Laureate of Glasgow (1999) and (since 2004) Scottish National Poet (1). The work looks deceptively simple, while in fact it is a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism (2).

 

The chaffinch (3), or spink, is a small songbird of the Fringillidae family, and can be distinguished by its greenish rump and white bars on its wings (the male additionally by its blue-grey cap and reddish belly). This most common of European finch species is noted for its powerful and typical song. Chaffinches have an innate ability to sing, but also adapt to the songs of ‘teachers’ in their vicinity. This explains the curious incidence of regional variation in their song, a trait their song shares with human speech.

 

This poem is a map of Scotland, or at least those areas in Scotland where the chaffinch is endemic. It shows the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie in the south. It is interesting to note that the generic term finch is an onomatopoeia, raising the intriguing possibility that the regional variation in human dialect terms for chaffinch somehow mimicks the dialects in the birdsong itself. Which conjures up the fairy-tale notion of animals (i.c. birds) initiating humans in the secrets of language.

 

Many thanks to Raynor Ganan for sending me a link to the page on (in?) his Ragbag.

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(1) also called Makar, i.e. ‘maker’, after mediaeval antecedents.
(2) or maybe a deeply ironical mocking thereof.

(3) that’s Fringilla coelebs, if you prefer to speak Linnaean.

328 - Fuzzy Britain, and Truth in Maps

“(…) for the last two years, I’ve been taking pictures of Britain on world maps,” writes Ben Terrett, graphic designer and blogger at Noisy Decent Graphics. Well, not too bad, if that’s the only thing that’s wrong with you (1).

There is, however, a method behind his madness: “About two years ago, I was looking at a map of the world and noticed that Britain seemed disproportionately large. My companion remarked that this was because in the days of yore, whoever was drawing the map always made their country look bigger and more important.”

On the surface of it, this is a reasonable enough assumption. Were it not that the carto-spatial expansion of most countries is rather constricted by their land borders. Imagine - short of actual, genuine irredentism, that is - continental countries spilling over into their neighbours on each other’s maps the way the Hulk bursts out of his t-shirts (2). Things could get messy pretty quickly in a very real-world, diplomatic incident (or even Hulk-movie) kind of way.

But Britain is, as in so many other cases, the exception to this rule. As an island nation, it is bordered only by the sea (3) and as a former Empire, it has a more than favourable sense of its own place in history (and geography). It is thus eminently suited for cartographical inflation.  

Britain’s aquatic Einzelgang does indeed allow for quite some variation, as Mr Terrett’s research demonstrates. The variation is however not limited to size, as demonstrated by this overlay of 14 different cartographies of Britain (compensated for scale differences). The composite map is quite fuzzy indeed.

Mr Terrett concludes: “This isn’t a cartography blog and I know some of these maps are over-stylised for a reason, but I want to make a wider point about graphic designers and the assumptions we make and how easily they are accepted. If you look at all the maps (separately), they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together, it looks like madness. Like people taking liberties with the truth.”

Well, this is a cartography blog, and I’d like to go on a bit about the the relationship between truth and maps. The point being, in short, that all maps are lies - they are 2D renderings of a 3D reality, invariably containing some form of deviation of the ‘truth’. It’s almost as if this was cartography’s version of the Original Sin. And yet maps can’t be all lies, not even mostly lies: they must refer in some reliable way to the outside world, or be useless (4).

But the disconnect between map and territory goes deeper than that one untransferable dimension. Even if an exact 3D, 1 on 1 map of a territory were made, how truthful could it be? It would only represent reality without actually being it. If the lay of the land would change, which would be wrong: the reality of the terrain, or its mapped representation?

The map-territory relation is explored further in this Wikipedia article. And in Jose Luis Borges’ famous, though very short story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in which a map is devised on such a scale that it covers the charted empire completely, voiding the map of its purpose.

Could one not conclude, paradoxically, from this story that maps are only useful insofar as they do deviate from the truth? Even while retaining enough truth to be reliable? What an unsettling thought - and it’s already way, way past my bedtime…

Many thanks to McBain and Eliana MacDonald, who provided me with the link to the relevant page of the aforementioned blog.

 

(1) Pot kettle black, I know.

(2) as Kermit the Frog, also verdantly challenged, once remarked: “It isn’t easy being green”.

(3) The UK nowadays has a land border, of course: with Ireland - but only since that republic’s independence from the UK in the early 20th century. Other British land borders are/were either colonial, or medieval (in France).

(4) Unless they are strange maps of course, in which case this definition may be defenestrated.

327 - City Maps As A Rorschach Test

This map, showing the surface and population of selected world cities, is outdated by over two decades. It was published in the Dallas Morning News on 9 June 1983, since when the population of Dallas itself, for example, has grown from just over 900,000 to well beyond 1.2 million inhabitants (2007).

Some of the shapes of the cities shown here might be outdated too; as they grow, cities tend to expand into and annex their environs. The tentacularity of London in this map is a good indication of that process - but has itself become obsolete: this shape no longer corresponds with any present-day depiction of the city.

What remains striking about this map, even though we’re talking about populations and surfaces of 25 years ago, are the relative population densities of the cities. Dallas and Houston are comparable to each other in population and both are in the same category, surface-wise, as London and New York. But the population of the latter two cities is roughly 6 to 8 times higher than either Houston or Dallas, indicating that these have a much lower population density. A possible explanation: the automobile (and the flat prairie they were built upon) has allowed both Texan metropolises to sprawl in ways unimaginable just over a century ago, and impossible even today in more constrained surroundings.

The two other European cities depicted here (apart from London, i.e. Amsterdam and Rome) have city centres that are smaller and more densely populated than their American cousins. About equal in size to Rome (and to each other) are Toronto, Montreal and Boston, but they are much less packed with people (2.6 million for Rome, between half a million and 1.2 million for the other cities). Chicago’s sprawl and density puts it somewhere between Dallas and London. DC and San Francisco are special, in that they are very constrained surface-wise (legally in DC’s case, physically by the Bay and the Ocean in San Francisco’s case). This ‘pressure cooker’ circumstance causes their populations to be much denser than in either of the sprawling Texan cities.

All of which is very interesting, but this is not what first drew me to this map. It is interesting in a more primordial, psychologically more revealing way, as a Rorschach inkblot test. That test, as you will recall from any number of treatments of the subject in popular culture, allows an analyst to make deductions about a subject’s personality and emotions by the way he or she interprets the shapes of random inkblots.

The method is still used, but controversial, as suggestibility, bias and other aspects of subjectivity might prevent a valid “reading” of the result. As is best summarised by this classic Rorschach joke:

A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.

“A man and a woman making love in a park,” the man replies. The psychiatrist holds up the second picture and asks the man what he sees. “A man and a woman making love in a boat.” He holds up the third picture. “A man and a woman making love at the beach.”

The psychiatrist says, “It looks like you have a preoccupation with sex.” The man replies, “Well, you’re the one with the dirty pictures.”

Here’s what my imagination makes of some of the city shapes presented here (feel free to add your own):

• Dallas: an overweight, angry, club-wielding caveman plagued by scrotal elephantiasis.
• London: a double-headed eagle clubbed to death by an overweight, angry Texan caveman.
• Chicago: a one-toothed Bart Simpson looking west.
• Washington DC: a Moai statue (as on Easter Island) tilted downward to appear even more introspective (a la Penseur by Auguste Rodin).

Incidentally, Rorschach inkblot tests were named after the Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, who devised the first such test in 1921. Mr Rorschach’s family name derives from an eponymous Swiss town, on the southern shore of Lake Constance. A map of Rorschach unfortunately only demonstrates that it looks like nothing at all…

Many thanks to Robert Allison for providing this link to the map.

326 - Where Is Obamaland?

 

 

According to Barack Obama, “there are no blue states, no red states, only the United States of America”. That is the rhetoric one should expect from a president-elect, intent on overcoming the inevitable polarisation of an election campaign. Given the oppositional nature of politics in a democracy, however, it seems likely that a divide between Obamaland and McCain Country will continue to exist. But where exactly are these two political entities?

In 2004, a satirical map of Jesusland and the United States of Canada made the rounds of the internet, showing a red-state heartland bounded by a few coastal and northern blue states, joined up with the US’s northern neighbour Canada. That country’s perceived liberal political culture is seen by some as more in line with the ‘leftist’ leanings of the Democratic party, which dominates the blue states.

This year around, Jesusland has taken a beating, and the victorious blue states no longer feel as if they need northern comfort. Nine states have switched from red to blue: Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado in the west; Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the south, and Indiana, Ohio and Iowa in the midwest. As a result, Obamaland consists of four separate chunks of territory, with West Virginia awkwardly poking its two panhandles into the largest of those four areas.

Interestingly, McCain Country still consists of one contiguous territory, but if the freshly defeated senator from Arizona would want to visit the outgoing president Bush on his Texas ranch, he would need to drive all the way north to Cheney Territory (i.e. Wyoming) and then south again through Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to avoid ‘blue’ country. East of the Mississippi, and with the exception of Florida, redness is a southern thing. The northernmost ‘red’ point on the map, east of the Mississippi, is the aforementioned northern panhandle of West Virginia.

Obamaland fragments into a thousand little pieces when the map’s focus shifts to victories at the county rather than the state level. Obama tends to win in densely populated urban centres, that look isolated amidst all the rural red, which now reaches its northern zenith east of the Mississippi in upstate Maine. That little red island in a blue sea is the reverse of most of the rest of the map.

Obamaland’s terra firma is fragmented into a few large chunks: in the Northeast, west of the Great Lakes, a cluster in the southwest, and clinging to the West Coast.The rest are smaller archipelagoes and islands in an ocean of red. 

 

These two cartograms and many others analysing the outcome of the 2008 US presidential election can be found on this excellent page at the University of Michigan, maintained by Mark Newman of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Many thanks all those who provided me with a link to this page.

325 - What If Italy Had Won the War?

 

 

Rarely is the question asked: What if Italy had won the Second World War? The more frequently asked question is: What if Germany had won the war? Italy may have been the birthplace of fascism (1) but in the original Axis of Evil (2), the Italians clearly were the junior partners to the Germans - ideologically, economically and militarily.

Fascist Italy nevertheless has an expansionist track record distinct from Germany’s: Mussolini’s stated aim was to restore the Roman Empire (or build something similar to it), and to reclaim the Mediterranean as an Italian Mare Nostrum (3). He never quite managed to do that, but did cobble together something of an African empire, conquering Lybia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and part of Somalia.

Closer to home, some of Italy’s irredentist (4) frustrations were satisfied by the annexation of neighbouring territories, such as the area around Nice after the fall of France. Expansion in the Balkans and Greece was less successful, and the Germans had to come to the aid of the Italians to consolidate the Axis hold on the area. After the war, Italy obviously lost all its colonies and extra territories.

These two maps are an answer to the Italian version of the most frequently asked What if-question about the Second World War. They are taken from Italian writer Enrico Brizzi’s novel L’inattesa piega degli eventi (’The Unexpected Unfolding of Events’), which describes an allohistorical world in which fascist Italy breaks with Hitler in time to be counted as a victor, come Germany’s eventual defeat. The alternate 1960s Italy described in the novel is still ruled by an ageing Duce (5), a situation immediately reminiscent of Spain, which was the fiefdom of generalissimo Francisco Franco, the victor of the Spanish Civil war, from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s.

In the book, Mussolini has kicked out the royal family and reduced the role of the Church, firmly establishing his hold over power. The colonies have been promoted to the status of associated republics, but this is largely a formality. The story in Brizzi’s book follows the travels of an Italian sports writer in these African possessions of Italy, whence he will return with a different view of the Madrepatria (’Motherland’).

These maps show Italy’s territorial acquisitions in Europe and Africa. In Europe, Italy as grown to the detriment of France (annexing Corsica, now also an associated republic, the area around Nice - Nizza in Italian - and the Savoy), Austria and Malta (also an associated republic). In Africa, the Italian Empire controls Eritrea, Ethiopia and the larger part of what today is Somalia. The British rule over Somaliland in the north, an enclave in Italian East Africa. There is something going on with part of the Savoy, but both my eyesight and my Italian are too deficient to figure out exactly what it is.

Many thanks to Valerio Taubmann for sending in these maps. More on Mr Brizzi’s book on this page of his website (in Italian).

1. Mussolini’s power grab in 1922 preceded Hitler’s by more than a decade.
2. Rome-Berlin, as of the signing of a friendship treaty between Italy and Germany in October 1936; Rome-Berlin-Tokyo, as of the signing of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The Axis was thereafter sometimes also called RoBerTo in Italy.
3. ‘Our Sea’, a common term for the sea when all its shores were Roman possessions.
4. Irredentism, i.e.the desire to annex territory based on historical and/or ethnic grounds, gets its name from Italia irredenta, a term to describe territories held by the Austro-Hungarian empire between the unification of Italy and the end of the First World War, and claimed by Italy.
5. Fascist leaders love epithetons. Hitler’s was Fuehrer, Franco liked to be called Caudillo and Mussolini was nuts about Duce, which means something like ‘leader’ or ‘guide’.

324 - The North America Nebula

 

The constellations visible in the northern hemisphere, including the twelve signs of the Zodiac, owe their names to the Babylonians and the Greeks. Only during the last few hundred years did European explorers travel far south enough to observe the constellations in the southern hemisphere. These often carry more ‘modern’ names, such as Telescopium, Microscopium and Octans.

The discovery and naming of nebulae (i.e. interstellar clouds of star-forming matter) is similarly recent, and some also carry names that could not have been given by the Ancient Greeks or Babylonians, such as the Boomerang nebula, Barnard’s Loop, or this one, the North America nebula. This nebula, discovered in 1786 by British astronomer William Herschel, was named by his German colleague Max Wolf, because of its remarkable similarity to the North American continent - especially the outlines of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

These areas are in reality a jumble of gas, dust and newly formed stars, and they are lit up by the brightness of these young stars. The North America Nebula covers an area more than ten times the size of a full moon, but is not bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. It spans about 50 light years, at a distance of about 1,500 light years towards the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), more specifically Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation. The North America Nebula also carries the less imaginative names of NGC 7000 and Caldwell 20.

Many thanks to Matthew Kehrt for drawing my attention to this nebula; picture and some information are reproduced from this page at the fantastic Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

 

 

323 - Taking Note of Old Europe

A - “Now you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s Old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently — what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? — you’re right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem (…)”

Q - “But opinion polls –”

A - “But — just a minute. Just a minute. But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They’re not with France and Germany on this, they’re with the United States.”

That exchange, in 2003, between then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and (Dutch) TV journalist Charles Groenhuijsen, was about the level of support in Europe for American designs on Iraq. Rumsfeld ruffled the feathers of traditional US allies in Western Europe by suggesting that their opposition to US invasion plans mattered less now the ‘centre of gravity’ in Europe had shifted towards Eastern European states. These states, only recently freed from the Soviet yoke, were more appreciative of US foreign policy than Western European countries, Rumsfeld suggested.

There are other definitions of what “Old Europe” is. The time before the French Revolution (1789), when royalty ruled, privileged few profited and the masses were voiceless serfs, has sometimes been called ”Old Europe” (although more commonly defined as the Ancien Regime). Europe is also old demographically - low birthrates combining with long life expectancy to make the average age of Europeans the highest in the world.

And Europe is part of the “Old World”, because it was known to the Ancients (this also included parts of Africa and Asia), as opposed to the “New World” (i.e. the American continent, only opened up to European exploration, expansion and exploitation from 1492 onward).

“Old Europe” is also the name of this work by artist Justine Smith, composed of the national bank notes of all European countries. The Europe in this map is “old” in that it is composed of bank notes as they existed before the introduction of the single European currency. On January 1, 2002, coins and bank notes in euro replaced the national currencies of most EU member countries at that time.

The Eurozone now comprises 15 of Europe’s 27 member states, with three older members actively having opted out (i.e. the UK, Denmark and Sweden) and most of the newer members slated for inclusion (once their economy performs within certain parameters). Here are the present members of the Eurozone, with their former currencies:

• Austria (schilling)
• Belgium (franc)
• Cyprus (pound)
• Finland (markka)
• France (franc)
• Germany (mark)
• Greece (drachma)
• Ireland (pound)
• Italy (lira)
• Luxembourg (franc, pegged 1:1 to the Belgian franc)
• Malta (lira)
• Netherlands (guilder)
• Portugal (escudo)
• Slovenia (tolar - cognate with dollar)
• Spain (peseta)

Slovakia is slated to join on January 1, 2009, thereafter retiring its national currency, the koruna. As with all other Eastern European countries that have joined the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) was obliged at its accession to adopt the euro. The others will do so when the conditions are met.

The euro is also the de facto currency of a number of European countries that are not members of the European Union (a precondition to be de jure part of the Eurozone): the Vatican, Monaco and San Marino (Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc, by the way), and the former Yugoslav republics of Kosovo and Montenegro.

The euro has defied prophecies of monetary doom, becoming a strong and internationally respected currency, steadily gaining on the dollar. It has also eliminated the costly necessity of converting currencies within (most of) the European Union. I don’t know if this is true or if it is euro-propaganda, but to illustrate the negative economic impact of these conversions, it was said that you could take any amount of any currency in the pre-euro EU, convert that amount into each other currency until you were back at the original one, and be left with half the original amount of money - without having traded a single thing.

The downside of currency unification is the de-diversification of European money, which used to have very distinct national flavours (metaphorically speaking, of course). Nowadays, bank notes in euro look the same everywhere, as do the euro coins, with the difference that the latter are stamped on one side with a national design by the country they’re minted for.

You are hereby cordially invited to identify the national heroes and motifs represented on the notes on this map (and other now obsolete ones you might have fond memories of).

This map, sent in by The Fashioniste, is one of a series made with bank notes by artist Justine Smith (another one, inevitably, is Euro Europe, made up of euro notes).

322 - The ‘claves of Liechtenstein

  

 

The tiny, obscure alpine principality of Liechtenstein seems to exist as mainly a repository of arcane distinctions:

• At 160.4 sq. km (62 sq. mi), Liechtenstein is one of the smallest independent countries in the world (#189 out of 194 according to Nationmaster).
• In Europe, however, it is one of the bigger mini-states; San Marino, Monaco and Vatican City are smaller.
• But Liechtenstein is the smallest German-speaking country in the world, in population as well as size (there are only about 35,000 Liechtensteiners). It is also the only German-speaking country not to recognise officially any other language next to German (1).
• It is also the smallest country bordering more than one other country; Liechtenstein is hemmed in by Switzerland to the west, and Austria to the east.
• The country took its name from the dynasty that ruled it (usually it’s the other way round). The dynasty got its name from somewhere, of course, i.c. faraway Castle Liechtenstein (”bright stone”) at the edge of the Wienerwald, south of Vienna.
• By disbanding its 80-man strong army in 1868, Liechtenstein may have been the first country in the (modern) world without an organised military force.
• Prince Franz I (born 1853, ruled 1929-1938) was married to a Viennese noblewoman of Jewish descent - probably the only Jewish crowned head in Europe, an especially poignant position in those especially anti-semitic times. Franz I abdicated in 1938 because he couldn’t bear the thought of the Nazis invading while he was on the throne. As it happened, they respected the principality’s neutrality (although the local Nazi sympathisers agitated against Franz I’s wife).
• After World War II, Liechtenstein offered asylum to 500 Russian soldiers who fought on the German side - a staggeringly high number, considering the small population had difficulties feeding itself. Argentina eventually agreed to take them in.
• During the Cold War, all Liechtensteiners were forbidden entry into Czechoslovakia, which had nationalised huge tracts of land formerly held by the Liechtenstein dynasty.
• Although landlocked, Liechtenstein’s lenient banking regulations have made it such a fiscal paradise that it is often included in the top lists of ‘offshore’ tax havens.
• In 2003, the ruling prince Hans-Adam threatened to leave the country if he lost a referendum on expanding his powers. He won, making Liechtenstein the only European country in modern history where the monarchy’s power increased. The prince can now veto laws and dismiss governments - making the principality the closest thing present-day Europe has to an absolutist monarchy.

Another distinction is visible only when seeing a map of the borders of Liechtenstein’s Gemeinden (communes) such as this one. Liechtenstein as a whole has an unremarkable teardrop shape, but the subnational entities are fragmented to such an extent that, internally, Liechtenstein looks like a crazy patchwork quilt. It must be the most exclave-rich country in the world, at least relative to the rather small number of subnational entities.

I use the word ‘exclave’ instead of the more currently used term ‘enclave’. The meanings of these terms overlap, but only partially (2). And the distinction is particularly clear in these cases.

While many of these Liechtensteinian fragments might be considered exclaves, most also border more than one other territory, and consequently only three can be considered enclaves (which are totally surrounded by only one other territory): the communes of Schaan and Planken each contain an enclave of each other within their main territory (each enclave in this case naturally also being an exclave), Schaan also containing an enclave of Vaduz (which, from the point of view of Vaduz, is an exclave, of course).

• Vaduz, the capital of the country, is the most fragmented of Liechtenstein’s 11 communes. It consists of 6 distinct territorial units, one of which is a true enclave within the commune of Schaan. The name Vaduz might derive from aquaeductus (’aqueduct’) or from vallis thiudisk (’valley of the [German] people’), its either/or origin reflecting that, linguistically, Liechtenstein was in a contact zone between romance and germanic cultures.
• the commune of Balzers consists of three incontiguous areas.
• Triesenberg, consisting of two separate parts, is the largest commune of the principality.
• Schaan, the most populous commune, is all over the place, with three large chunks of territory in the north, centre and south of the principality - plus two exclaves in Planken.
• Planken, which counts less than 400 inhabitants, is the least populous of Liechtenstein’s communes. It consists of two larger bits of territory, and two smaller exclaves, one of which is also an enclave in Schaan.
• Eschen, in the north, is made up of a large, medium and small portion. Its neighbour Gamprin is made up of two parts.
• The communes of Ruggell, Schellenberg, Mauren and Triesen consist of (only) one part each.

This map found in the Atlas of Liechtenstein at Wikimedia Commons.

PS - the map looks a bit iffy just above where the name PLANKEN is printed. I assumed the corridor linking what looks like a second exclave of Schaan to that commune’s main territory is part of Schaan itself, making that exclave contiguous (and therefore not an exclave). This was consistent with the information I have on the number and location of communal enclaves. Two comments convinced me that the Schaan corridor is in fact a Vaduz exclave. Any more info, please send. 

(1) See comments for more on official languages in Germany other than German.

(2) Map nerd alert: When the distinction between enclave and exclave is less important or not relevant, imprecision can be avoided by syncopating either term to ‘clave.

321 - The Forgotten Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia

 

Almost a century and a half after Orélie-Antoine de Tounens assumed the title of King of Araucania-Patagonia, his descendants still lay claim to the throne of that putative monarchy at the southern tip of South America.

The website that maintains a flicker of hope for Araucania-Patagonian* independence states that De Tounens, a French lawyer, was crowned King by the native Mapuche (or Araucana) Indians. This sounds a bit on the self-serving side of far-fetched, considering the Mapuche’s long history of violent and successful resistance to foreign domination of any kind, be it Inca, Spanish or Chilean.

Especially since King Orélie-Antoine I, when exiled to Paris by the Chilean government, made no bones of referring to his distant and rather inhospitable realm as la Nouvelle France, to drum up support for his cause and convince enough of his countrymen to become colonists in the new state.

Surely, the Mapuche would have minded French dominion about as much as they objected to Chilean supremacy. Only at the time, the former seemed less likely than the latter, which is what the Mapuche must have thought, if the crowning of the Frenchman was entirely their idea.

The Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia was proclaimed on 17 November 1860 to comprise the Mapuche tribal areas south of the Rio Biobio in Chile. Four days later, the new King extended his claim to include all lands south of the Rio Negro in Argentina, all the way down to the Straits of Magellan.

The Kingdom’s first and only resident monarch established his capital at the town of Perquenco, whence he was chased by a Chilean military expedition that eventually led to the pacification, occupation and annexation of Araucania.

After his expulsion in 1862, the King mounted three unsuccessful expeditions to reclaim his throne, and died in France in 1878. The kingdom has been a geopolitical chimera ever since. For a very brief moment in 1984 (and again in 1998), the Kingdom regained actual physical form when a man named Jean Raspail** floated the Royal Araucania-Patagonian flag over Les Minquiers, a small archipelago in the English Channel. Formally part of the British-ruled Channel Islands, he proclaimed them to be la Patagonie septentrionale (‘Northern Patagonia’).

Although Araucania-Patagonia was never recognised by any other nation, the royal family has never relinquished its claim to the throne. To this day, there is a pretender - Prince Philippe of Araucania. Chances of his ever wielding the sceptre over an antipodean version of Quebec are very small indeed. His Royal Highness does seem to be involved in fighting for the cultural rights of the Mapuche Indians, who currently number about 1 million in Argentina and Chile together.

Many thanks to Diego Carando for pointing out the website www.araucania.org, which contains this map of the Kingdom here. 

* Or should that be Araucanian-Patagonian?

** In 1981, Raspail won the Prix roman de l’Academie francaise for his novel Moi, Antoine de Tounens, roi de Patagonie. He was also consul-general for Arauncania-Patagonia.

320 - Put That In Your Pipe And Smoke It: Italo Disco

 

PERTINI DANCE (by S.C.O.R.T.A., 1984)

“What a superstar to be, is the best you can see.

Yes this is a brave man, oh. The first Italian man,

To the people in square, ‘Who is he, a king?’ - ‘Oh no’.

Well I see you just now, you’re a genius, wow.”

CHORUS:

“Let’s go. Right. Go go.

Let’s dance. Pertini super disco dance.

Let’s dance. Pertini super disco dance.

Just the music, just the music, just the music.”

The music is bad, the English is awful*, and yet the song was a hit. Apparently. In Italy, in 1984. Time and date might help explain why, because the Pertini Dance is an example of so-called Italo Disco, a primitive form of electronic music that was popular in continental Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s**. The musical outfit S.C.O.R.T.A. (’scorta’ is Italian for ‘escort’) was responsible for the hit, and was never heard of before or after it.

The Pertini Dance was a hommage (if one can call it that) to Alessandro (’Sandro’) Pertini (1896-1990), at that time the President of Italy (1978-1985). The eternal pipe-smoker was probably the most popular president Italy has had so far. Pertini, a socialist, was born in Liguria, elected to the first post-war Italian parliament and designated to preside of the Chamber of Deputies before becoming President of the Republic.

The record sleeve shows the whole of Italy wafting forth from Pertini’s pipe, even with separate tufts of smoke for Sicily and Sardinia. The image is of course somewhat reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting of a pipe, entitled La trahison des images (’The Treachery of Images’) and adorned with the phrase Ceci n’est pas une pipe (’This Is Not A Pipe’). Which is of course correct, as the title describes not a pipe, but a painting of one.

Many thanks to The Fashioniste for sending in this map.

* You have been warned. Here is a clip of the song on You Tube (audio only, though).

** Italo Disco describes a phenomenon in Italy in particular but all over continental Europe in general; I am not sure how much it overlaps with the term ‘Euro Disco’.

319 - “Ours Is A Special World”

 

“I was contemplating the logo and slogan of `The Hospitality Industry`, the vaguely named corporation that apparently makes foil/paper wrappers for hamburgers, wondering just what `Special World` they were talking about,” writes `Abner Cadaver, hamburger eater`. ”Then I realized the world depicted had only vague similarities to our own - the Hospitality Industry inhabits a `special world` of tectonics gone horribly, horribly awry.”

Indeed.

Florida and Cuba have merged to form one giant peninsula of the North American continent, jutting deep into an islandless Caribbean. Canada`s Far North only boasts one island - or none, if that is Greenland, split in two. The British Isles are presented as a single blob, while smaller dots in the North Atlantic mark out probably Iceland, and possibly Spitsbergen. Denmark and Italy have melted away from the European continent, and the Mediterranean is broadly connected to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans by Africa`s drifting south. Madagascar is counter-drifting north, towards India. Most of Asia is hidden from sight, the visible part of the mainland dominated by two huge lakes, the Black/Caspian Sea and a super-version of Lake Baikal.

Thanks to Abner Cadaver for sending in this map on a wrapper. Let`s hope this map was more off than his burger.

318 - The Semicolonial State of San Serriffe

Nobody had ever heard of San Serriffe before April 1, 1977, when the Guardian newspaper (UK) published a special 7-page supplement on the 10th anniversary of that nation’s independence from Britain.

The archipelago was discovered by the English in 1421, colonised by the Spanish and Portuguese and later annexed by the British, ceded to the Portuguese and later for some time a condominium between the latter two nations. San Serriffe gained its independence in 1967. It took the independent nation 20 years of military rule (mainly by a general Pica) before it managed to elect its first civilian president, A. Bourgeois, in 1997.

San Serriffe’s exact location is a matter of dispute. It has been situated in the neighbourhood of the Seychelles, but it appears the island nation drifts as much as 1.4 km per year. Even this astonishing speed does not account for sightings of the archipelago in places as far-flung as the Bering Sea and  just off New Zealand’s South Island.

At the last available census (1973), the island counted just under 1.8 million inhabitants, of which approximately 574,000 Flong (the native ethnic group), 640,000 colons and semi-colons (European settlers and people of mixed race), 270,000 Creoles, 117,000 Malaysians, 92,000 Arabs and 88,000 others.

The country consists of two main islands, Caissa Superiore (Upper Caisse) and Caissa Inferiore (Lower Caisse), the latter of which has a prominent promontory, ending at Thirty Point. The islands are separated by the Shoals of Adze. The capital city, located on Upper Caisse, is the city of Bodoni. Other cities are Port Clarendon, Garamondo and Cap Em. The nearby island of Ova Mata is a Spanish possession. 

San Serriffe is, of course, not real. The country was one of the Guardian’s most elaborate, and most successful April Fool’s pranks, and was ‘revisited’ by the newspaper in 1978, 1980 and 1999. One clue to its non-existence are the many references to typography, in its name (’sans serif’ is a typeface), its shape (a semicolon) and its cities (Bodoni is a the name of a series of typefaces of the ’serif’ type). An even more obvious clue was that an alternate name for the main island was Hoaxe. 

The idea for San Serriffe came from Philip Davies, then in charge of the Guardian’s Special Reports department. “The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I’d never heard of. I was thinking about April Fool’s Day 1977 and I thought: Why don’t we just make a country up?”

Many thanks to D. Zasoba for providing this link to a map of San Serriffe. More on its ‘history’ on this page of the Museum of Hoaxes.

317 - Tea As A North/South Litmus Test

The following was taken from the website eightoverfive, and is “a nonscientific investigation into the relationship of sweet tea availability and  the separation of northern and southern cultures in the United States.”

 

“An interesting phenomenon exists in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The northern and urban areas of the state do not generally offer sweet tea in restaurants, whereas it is a staple beverage in the southern part of the state. Many clear present-day distinctions exist between the cultures of the north and south, but could the availability of Sweet Tea be a quantitative example?” 

This map shows the results of a survey of over 300 McDonald’s restaurants in Virginia as to the availability of sweet tea in their premises. The result is a dividing line between northern and southern culture quite distinct from other, more commonly used dividing lines, such as the Mason-Dixon Line and the border between the Union and Confederate states during the Civil War.

That line was established by calculating a median line between the southern range of non-sweet tea and the northern range of sweet tea (both of which become much clearer by ticking the relevant boxes on the website).

Sweet tea is not available in the northernmost parts of Virginia, while non-sweet tea is available quite far south in the state. The resulting line of best fit dissects Virginia in roughly equal northern and southern halves, implying that ‘northern’ (i.e. non-sweet tea drinking) culture penetrates far more south than previous demarcations suggest.

Thanks to Sean Holihan for pointing out this cool experiment. Go visit the relevant page here.

316 - Les extrèmes se touchent: Palinworld

In its most recent issue, The New Yorker magazine revisits one of its most famous covers ever. Saul Steinberg’s cartoon on the front page of the 29 March 1976 issue showed the world as seen from New York’s 9th Avenue. Mr Steinberg’s ironic, iconic cartoon, mentioned earlier on this blog (#72), has been recycled, imitated and parodied many times - and now by the New Yorker itself, as a  comment on vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s world view.

The world outside Alaska knew little of Sarah Palin before Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced, on August 29, that she would be his running mate. It seems that before that date, Sarah Palin also knew little of the outside world. She has been outside of the US only once, on a visit to Alaska National Guard troops in Germany and Kuwait. 

One of Palin’s more unfortunate statements, much derided afterwards, is her claim that the governorship of Alaska was a good preparation for the job of vice-president, since, as she explained to ABC interviewer Charlie Gibson, Alaska is so close to Russia. Which is a foreign country: ”They’re our next-door neighbours, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Well, at least that is true. Big Diomede and Little Diomede, are where les extrèmes se touchent, as the French say. These two islands in the middle of the Bering Strait, which separates Russia’s Far East from America’s Frozen North, are Russian and American respectively. As they are only 2.5 miles from each other, they are well within visibility range on a clear day. In winter, when the sea freezes over, you can even walk from the US to Russia, and vice versa - but check with customs first. 

But to claim that  geographical fact alone as a justification for foreign policy experience is just too absurd for words (*). And if something is too absurd for words, why not draw a cartoon? Which is exactly what Barry Blitt did, for the Oct. 6 issue of the New Yorker. Over vast expanses of empty Alaska, just a tiny bit of Russia is visible on the horizon. Et voilà: Palinworld.

That’s an oversimplification of the pot-kettle-black kind. Since her elevation to vice-presidential candidate, Palin has speed-dated half a dozen foreign heads of state at the UN. She exchanged views with Henry Kissinger (although that probably left him with most of the work). The Republican team had her ‘quarantined’ to stop the death by a thousand gaffes and to allow her to cram for the vice-presidential debate on October 2 with her Democratic opponent Joe Biden. After that debate, she was generally judged to have passed that test (if only because she enjoyed the benefit of low expectations).

At least she managed to do what many other more experienced politicians don’t manage: to pronounce the name of Iran’s president with surprising accuracy. Ahmadinejad. Now there’s a populist with a down-home folksy manner, an extremely religious world view and an electoral success that has confounded and frustrated the better-educated classes at home and abroad. Les extrèmes se touchent?

Many thanks to Tony Pappas for providing an image of the New Yorker cover.

 

(*) Strange Maps tries to be nonpartisan and apolitical, but insists on being anti-nonsense.

315 - “Each Person Is A Nation Unto Himself”: Rocaterrania

“Fantasy is like fruit and dessert, and reality is like meat and potatoes and green beans,” says Renaldo Kuhler. The 76-year-old artist is speaking at the beginning of a trailer to an upcoming documentary about his work. Kuhler had a lifelong career as a graphic illustrator, earning a living rather than a reputation. But the unillustrious illustrator,  sporting the long, white beard of unheeded prophets and out-of-fashion philosophers, had another career, a brilliant and secret one.

Since his teens, Kuhler has been pouring all his private anguish and artistic energy in a project that has remained secret up until now. That project is Rocaterrania, an imaginary country somewhere between the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and the St Lawrence River on the border between the US and Canada. 

The boredom and isolation of a youth spent on a ranch out in Colorado drove the young Kuhler to fill notebook after notebook with illuminations of his own private country. Despite its slightly latinate name, Rocaterrania was founded by Eastern European immigrants (Kuhler himself is the son of a German immigrant). And despite the somewhat saccharine appellation reminiscent of Ruritania, Kuhler’s country is all but peaceful, prosperous and quiet.

Reflecting his own inner turmoil, Rocaterrania experienced revolutions aplenty, suffering under the successive rule of presidents, dictators and czars. Many figures are as stark and tragic as any in a Dostoevsky novel. And then some. There even was a female ruler who went around the streets, catching urchins to castrate them. 

“Each person is a nation unto himself, and what he does with that nation is up to him,” Kuhler explains at the end of the aforementioned trailer, that offers a brief and intriguing glimpse into the grim fairytale he constructed in the far reaches of his imagination.

It’s no wonder Kuhler was reluctant to publicise the existence of his troubled ‘inner country’. But it is a shame - the illustrations of the people and places in Rocaterrania look fantastic. And in any case, now there’s the upcoming feature-length film, also called Rocaterrania, by documentary-maker Brett Ingram. 

This map shows the location of Rocaterrania on the St Lawrence River, and its borders with the US and Canada. Multicultural Rocaterrania possesses a corridor to the river, in which is located the town of Katerin Shtot (sounds Yiddish, or at least looks like it because of the phonetic spelling). A large, uninhabited area to the west is called Westerwald (German). A town on the east bank of Lago Eldorado (Spanish) is the town of Novo Tyumen (Russian), on its west bank is Biala (which sounds more Polish), and further west are places called Serbia, East New Serbia and Black New Serbia.

Rocaterrania as a New World dystopia with an Eastern European flavour: this is somewhat reminiscent both of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon’s allohistorical detective novel set in an Alaskan homeland for the Jews) and of The Jew of New York (a graphic novel by Ben Katchor about a real-life, failed attempt to found a Jewish utopia in… upstate New York).  All of which reminds me that I urgently need to find a good map of Birobidzhan - Stalin’s gift of a ‘national home’ to the Soviet Union’s Jews… Generous enough, if that particular piece of real estate hadn’t been located in deepest Siberia…

Many thanks to Brett Ingram for providing me with this map of Rocaterrania. And many thanks to Jonathan Zuber for putting me on the trail of this wonderful country. More information on Rocaterrania, the documentary here on Mr Ingram’s website (here’s a link straight to the trailer). 

(Illustration by Renaldo G. Kuhler. Used with permission from the Collection of Brett Ingram)

314 - Watch the Road: World’s Earliest SatNav

 

 

Satellite navigation (SatNav) is a lot older than previously thought. In fact, it’s even decades older than man-made satellites themselves. This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.

The technology - a curious cross between the space age and the stone age - consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be ’scrolled’ (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.

The system has several obvious drawbacks - a limited number of available journeys, and the inability of the system to respond to sudden changes of direction. Also: no warning of road works or traffic jams ahead. 

Not that there were that many traffic jams in 1920s Britain. The Routefinder, one of many bizarre patented gadgets now on display at the British Library, didn’t take off because there were too few drivers, i.e. potential customers, at that time in Britain. Or maybe also because it was a bit impractical, distracting drivers from what they were supposed to watch - the road.

Many thanks to Toni Hudzina for sending in a link to this story (here on ananova).

313 - A Handy Map of San Francisco Bay

The metropolitan area surrounding San Francisco Bay, better known as the Bay Area, includes over 100 cities (San Francisco, Oakland and San José being among the most populous) and counts about 7 million people. It is the 4th-largest metropolitan area in the US and the 47th-largest in the world.

Many non-locals will be surprised to learn that San José is the largest city in the Bay Area (having surpassed San Francisco in the 1980s). Another lesser-known fact is that a map of the entire Bay Area can be created using nothing more than two functioning, interlocking hands (preferably your own).

This ‘Handy Map of San Francisco’ does not say why or whether it is absolutely necessary to paint your right thumbnail black to create the effect of San Francisco.

Many thanks to Adam Koford for sending in this map, found in a 1938 Cartoon Guide to California by Reg Manning.

312 - The Population of China’s Provinces Compared

China is the world’s most populous nation (1). That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which is just under 20% of all humans alive today), that figure is still too big to mean much beyond that China is ‘number one’ (2). This map compares the population of China’s provinces (plus the ‘renegade province’ of Taiwan), autonomous regions and municipalities with those of whole countries, and thus helps shed some light on that issue.

Here, for easy reference, is a list in descending order of magnitude of those Chinese territories (their population in brackets) followed by the foreign country they compare to.

1. Guangdong (113 million) Germany plus Uganda (3)
2. Henan (99 million) Mexico
3. Shandong (92 million) Philippines
4. Sichuan (87 million) Vietnam
5. Jiangsu (75 million) Egypt
6. Hebei (68 million) Iran
7. Hunan (67 million) France
8. Anhui (65 million) Thailand
9. Hubei (60 million) U.K.
10. Guangxi (49 million) Burma/Myanmar
11. Zhejiang (47 million) South Africa
12. Yunnan (44 million) Colombia
13. Jiangxi (43 million) Tanzania
14. Liaoning (42 million) Argentina
15. Guizhou (39 million) Sudan
16. Heilongjiang (38 million) Poland
17. Shaanxi (37 million) Kenya
18. Fujian (35 million) Algeria
19. Shanxi (33 million) Canada
20. Chongqing (31 million) Morocco
21. Jilin (27 million) Afghanistan
22. Gansu (26 million) Saudi Arabia
23. Inner Mongolia (24 million) North Korea
24. Taiwan (23 million) Yemen
25. Xinjiang (20 million) Madagascar
26. Shanghai (18 million) Cameroon
27. Beijing (16 million) Angola
28. Tianjin (12 million) Cuba
29. Hainan (8 million) Austria
30. Hong Kong (7 million) El Salvador
31. Ningxia (6 million) Sierra Leone
32. Qinghai (5 million) Slovakia
33. Tibet (3 million) Jamaica
34. Macau (0,5 million) Cape Verde

Some obvious conclusions (from a non-expert, non-Chinese point of view):

• Most of China’s main administrative subdivisions are literally unheard-of in the rest of the world, save for some obvious exceptions like Tibet, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
• The names of some provinces sound especially indistinguishable (or at least  are rather indistinct to western ears): Hebei and Hubei; Shanxi and neighbouring Shaanxi;  not to mention Jiangxi and Guangxi; or Hainan, Hunan and Henan.
• The well-known pattern of heavy population density on the coast and lesser density inland belies the fact that even in the most far-flung provinces, the populations are not exactly tiny (Xinjiang: 20 million, Inner Mongolia: 24 million), Heilongjiang: 38 million, Yunnan: 44 million), except in Qinghai (5 million) and Tibet (3 million).

This map was sent in by Isaac Lewis, who was “inspired by the map that did something similar for US states and international GDPs (here and here) in order to “get a perspective on just how many people 1.3 billion actually is.”

“Mostly the provinces and their labels are very close in population,” Mr Lewis explains. “The largest difference is between Henan province (98.7 million) and Mexico (106.7 million). Other than that, they’re mostly within 1 or 2 million of each other.”

 

———-

(1) The world’s least populous nation? The British dependency of Pitcairn in the Pacific, by some reckonings (50 inhabitants). Or the Vatican (800 registered inhabitants, very low birth rate) by others. The smallest non-dependent, ‘real’ nation? How about Nauru, another Pacific island nation, with about 10,000 inhabitants.

(2) The Indians, by the way, are number two, with 1.1 billion people (or 17% of the world’s population). India is slated to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation in a few decades’ time. 

(3) See note in bottom left hand corner of map.

311 - Transnistria, A Soviet Fly in Geopolitical Amber

 

Now that Russia has recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the improbable phantom nation of Transnistria (1) might be gearing up for its own fifteen minutes of geopolitical fame. Like the aforementioned breakaway regions of Georgia (itself a former Soviet republic), Transnistria is a bizarre splinter off  the old Soviet block, and now a client state of Russia.

Transnistria occupies the sliver of Moldovan territory hemmed in between the river Dniester (2) in the west and the Ukrainian border in the east. It is about 400 km long, from north to south, and typically no more than 20 km wide, sharing its snake-like look on the map with a few other nations, notably Chile, Norway and the Gambia. Except that Transnistria doesn’t appear on most maps.  No other country recognises the independence of this freak accident of world politics, not even Mother Russia - at least not yet (3).

The birth of Transnistria is an indirect result of the death of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, Moldova was one of the 15 constituent republics that gained its independence. Moldova, which shares language, culture and history with neighbouring Romania had the distinction of being the only Romance-language Soviet republic. Its ‘western’ orientation hasn’t helped it integrate into Europe, as the Baltic states have done: Moldova remains one of the poorest countries on the continent, notorious for corruption, smuggling and prostitution. 

It may be argued that Moldova’s near-failed-stateness is the cause - or the effect - of its conflict with Transnistria. That strip of Moldovan territory was heavily industrialised in Soviet times, and populated with migrants from other parts of the Soviet Union: Russians, Ukrainians and others. That typically ‘Soviet’ mix of nationalities felt no desire, post-USSR, to be integrated into a state dominated by Moldovans, and looked east for protection.

Cossacks and Russian regular troops helped Transnistria fight its brief war of independence from Moldova in 1992. Since then, the rogue republic has remained virtually unchanged, frozen in time like a Soviet fly in geopolitical amber. Lenin statues still adorn the Transnistrian town centres, and the main ideology seems to be nostalgia.  

The self-declared republic’s regime is styled as ’super-presidentialism’ under the leadership of one Oleg Smirnov (4), who managed to obtain 103.6% of the votes in a particular district during the 2001 election. Transnistria still has a large manufacturing base, and profits greatly from non-regulated exports (or ’smuggling’, if you’re into the whole brevity thing) and other activities that thrive best in the twilight of disputed sovereignty, including arms manufacturing.

Transnistria might yearn for the sunny Soviet past, but those days are not returning. These days, it’s one of Russia’s westernmost outposts, an illegal, southern mirror site to Kaliningrad, which sits uncomfortably on the Baltic coast, completely hemmed in by the EU member states Poland and Lithuania. Transnistria is similarly surrounded by Moldova and the Ukraine, which has in the past exerted pressure on the small statelet as a way of getting back at Russia.

A notable example was the gas crisis of 2006, in which Russia suddenly and dramatically raised the price of its gas exports to Ukraine - a warning to its newly-elected, pro-western president  Yushchenko not to stray too far from Moscow’s sphere of influence. Ukraine retaliated by instituting measures to stem Transnistria’s illegal exports, strangling the local economy. This mechanism of war by proxy might make Transnistria a more ‘convenient’ flashpoint in a future conflict between Russia and the Ukraine than the Crimea, the sovereignty of which is directly disputed between both countries.

This map taken from this page at moldova.org  - “Moldova’s best international gateway”.

 

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(1) Official full name: Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Also known as Transdniestria, Transdniestria and Pridnestrovie (the latter its Russian short name). Some official Moldovan sources insist on not using the region’s self-chosen name, but instead refer to it as the ‘Administrative-territorial unit of the Left Bank of the Dniestr’.The implication is that using the name chosen by a wayward territory for itself opens the door for its official recognition.. This is reminiscent of the insistence of some Arab sources to refer to Israel as the ‘Zionist Entity’. 

(2) Hence the breakaway republic’s name, literally ‘across the Dniester’. The river’s name derives from ancient Sarmatian, and can be translated as “the near river”. The Dnieper River, from the same source (linguistically, not hydrographically), means “the far river”. The old Greek name for the Dniester is Tyras, which still survives in the name of the Transnistria’s capital, Tiraspol.

(3) Tellingly, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have recognised Transnistria’s independence.

(4) Real name.

310 - The World, Justified

 

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are a pair of young Brazilian artists, working in their home country and in France. Some of their work explores fonts and maps. Typography meets cartography in this little work, entitled ‘The World, Justified’.

It shows the world we live in as only one of four possibilities, the others being a left-aligned, centred and right-aligned world. Our world is a justified one, i.e. aligned with both left and right margins.

One could make all sorts of geophilosophical comments about these alternate possibilities. Or about the fact that the world we live in is neither left, right nor centre, but ‘justified’. Could it really be that, as Voltaire’s Candide asserted, tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles (’Everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds’)?

Many thanks to Eric Angelini for sending in this map, found in its original context at the aforementioned artists’ website, detanicolain.com (click on the red line).

309 - Around the World at Twice the Speed of Fogg

It took the hero of  Jules Verne’s 1873 novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ exactly that amount of time to circumnavigate the globe. Phileas Fogg leaves London on 21 December 1872, accompanied by his manservant Passepartout and arrives back in the British capital after what he first believes to be 81 days; but having crossed the International Date Line and thus having gained one day, Fogg still manages to win the bet - £20,000.

The bet was to prove that the completion of a new railtrack in India made it possible to travel around the Earth in four score days. The advent of air travel in the early twentieth century obviously would diminish the travel time required for such a feat - the current record for fastest circumnavigation still stands at 32 hours, 49 minutes and 3 seconds (set in 1992 by an Air France Concorde).

It’s still possible to travel around the world without airborne transportation, of course. And here also the travel times have greatly diminished since Phileas Fogg’s era. This map is a proposal for a round the world trip, only travelling by boat and train (as Fogg did), starting at and ending in New York. The trip would only take 42 days. Here’s the itinerary:

• New York - Chicago (train)
• Chicago - Seattle (train)
• Seattle - Vancouver (bus - granted, there were no buses either in Fogg’s time)
• Vancouver - Anchorage - Tokyo (boat)
• Tokyo - Osaka (train)
• Osaka - Shanghai (boat)
• Shanghai - Beijing (train)
• Beijing - Moscow (train)
• Moscow - Brussels (train)
• Brussels - London (train)
• London - New York (boat)

The longest leg of the trip would be the freighter line from Vancouver to Tokyo via Anchorage (13 days), the most expensive one would be the London to New York boat tyrip on board the Queen Mary 2 ($2,449).

In total, the trip would cost $5,312 (which converts to about £2,900 in today’s money). This map, found here on Very Small Array, an excellent map/infographic-oriented website, dates from 5 May 2005. Be warned that current prices may differ. And send a postcard.

Blogger Pulled Out Alive From Trainwreck of Economy

Dear all,

Blog posts of the “I am sorry I haven’t been posting any messages of late” kind are annoying and redundant, a bit like going round someone’s house to explain why you can’t come visit them. I shall therefore keep this intervention brief.

Thanks to all who enquired about my being alive and well. I am both. The radio silence on Strange Maps was not due to my incarceration, institutionalisation, hospitalisation or expiration. Nor was it the by-product of an extended holiday, although that obviously would have been preferable to the other options.

I’ve spent most of the last couple of weeks absorbed by such non-map-related activities  as paying bills, and earning the money to do so. And I suspect I’m not the only one finding that an increasingly time-consuming proposition, given the current trainwrecked state of the economy.

Radio silence is now over. I shall return to a more regular schedule of blogging. Should you wish to contribute to the regularity of this blog, consider making a donation via the appropriate button on the right. Or not. Freedom might not be free, Strange Maps still is.

In either case, enough of all this non-cartography. On with the maps!

308 - The Pop Vs Soda Map

When on a hot summer’s day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink.

The article was written by Luanne von Schneidemesser, PhD in German linguistics and philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English.  And although there might be weightier issues in life (or even in linguistics) than the preferred terminology for a can of soft drink, there’s nothing trivial about this part of the beverage industry.

“According to an article last year in the Isthmus, Madison’s weekly newspaper, Americans drink so much of the carbonated beverages sold under such brand names as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Mountain Dew, and 7-Up that consumption averages 43 gallons per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States,” Von Schneidemesser begins her article. “The Statistical Abstract of the United States (1994) confirms this: 44.1 gallons per person in 1992, compared to the next most consumed beverages: beer (32.7 gallons), coffee (27.8 gallons), and milk (25.3 gallons).”

It must be that ubiquity of soft drinks that has made this pop vs soda map the single-most submitted map to this blog, sent in by over 100 contributors. The map details the areas where certain usages predominate.

• coke: this generic term for soft drinks predominates throughout the South, New Mexico, central Indiana and in a few other single counties in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. ‘Coke’ obviously derives from Coca-Cola, the brand-name of the soft drink originally manufactured in Atlanta (which explains its use as a generic term for all soft drinks in the South).
• pop: dominates the Northwest, Great Plains and Midwest. The world ‘pop’ was introduced by Robert Southey, the British Poet Laureate (1774-1843), to whom we also owe the word ‘autobiography’, among others. In 1812, he wrote: A new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn. Even though it was introduced by a Poet Laureate, the term ‘pop’ is considered unsophisticated by some, because it is onomatopaeic.
• soda: prevalent in the Northeast, greater Miami, the area in Missouri and Illinois surrounding St Louis and parts of northern California. ‘Soda’ derives from ‘soda-water’ (also called club soda, carbonated or sparkling water or seltzer). It’s produced by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in plain water, a procedure developed by Joseph Priestly in the latter half of the 18th century. The fizziness of soda-water caused the term ‘soda’ to be associated with later, similarly carbonated soft drinks.
• Other, lesser-used terms include ‘dope’ in the Carolinas and ‘tonic’ in and around Boston, both fading in popularity. Other generic terms for soft drinks outside the US include ‘pop’ (Canada), ‘mineral’ (Ireland), ‘soft drink’ (New Zealand and Australia). The term ‘soft drink’, finally, arose to contrast said beverages with hard (i.e. alcoholic) drinks.

This map was found here at the popvssoda website, dedicated to gathering info on the usage of pop, soda, coke and other variant terms throughout the US.

307 - Higher, Faster, Stronger: the Olympic Medals Map (2004)

It will be some days yet before the Summer Games of the XXIXth Olympiad in Beijing draw to a close, so the medal count is still not complete. Host nation China seems on course to achieve its goal of dominating the medal tables, having built up a strong lead in the number of golds, but is still slightly behind the US in the total number of medals.

This map shows the complete medal count of the previous Summer Olympics in Athens, and is one of several on this page of the New York Times website. The number of medals per country is morphed into a medal map for each of the modern-era Summer Olympics, starting with Athens in 1896.

In Athens in 2004, The US dominated the medal counts in gold, silver and overall categories. Here is an overview of the Top 10 (country; number of gold, silver and bronze medals; total), sorted by total number of medals:

 

1. US (36, 39, 27, 102)
2. Russia (27, 27, 38, 92)
3. China (32, 17, 14, 63)
4. Australia (17, 16, 16, 49)
5. Germany (13, 16, 20, 49)
6. Japan (16, 9, 12, 37)
7. France (11, 9, 13, 33)
8. Italy (10, 11, 11, 32)
9. South Korea (9, 12, 9, 30)
10. Great Britain (9, 9, 12, 30)

 

Host country Greece came in 15th (6, 6, 4, 16) and the bottom of the table was made up of Eritrea, Mongolia, Syria and Trinidad and Tobago, each winning just one bronze medal.

Many thanks to all who sent in this map.

306 - The Genetic Map of Europe

Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would be indistinguishable from each other. Which means that forensic scientists now can use DNA to predict the region of origin of otherwise unknown persons (provided they are of European heritage).

These are among the conclusions to be drawn from a genetic map of Europe, produced by the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), published in Current Biology’s August 7 issue. In its Science section, the New York Times devotes an article to the study, and reproduces the genetic map.

The discovery that autosomal (i.e. non-gender-related) aspects of DNA may be used to predict regional European provenance of unkown individuals was made by prof. dr. Manfred Kayser’s team of forensic molecular biologists. In a press release, the Erasmus UMC stated that this might potentially be helpful in resolving so-called ‘cold cases’.

The genetic map of Europe was compiled by comparing DNA samples from 23 populations in Europe (pictured on the right-hand side map).  Those populations were then placed on the ‘genetic’ map according to their similarity, with the vertical axis denoting differences from south to north, and the horizontal one from west to east. The larger the area assigned to a population, the larger the genetic variation within that population.

When compared to the actual map, the populations kinda sorta maintain their relative position to each other. Two observations spring to mind immediately: the fact that most populations overlap so intimately with their neighbours. And that Finland doesn’t. Some other observations:

• The extent of genetic variation is greater north to south than east to west.  This may be a result of the way Europe was colonized by modern humans, i.e. from the south, in three successive waves of migration (45,000 years ago, where before there had only been Neanderthals; 17,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age; and 10,000 years ago, with the advent of farming techniques from the Middle East).
• The