Waterworld

Ours.

Photo cropped for emphasis from the one at the via.

Neighborhoods

via

The long and winding road...

... is 24Crankle-Stilwell Road in Guizhou, China (photographed during a hill climb rally.

Credit: China Foto Press/Barcroft Media, via The Telegraph.

Reposted from 2011 because I realized I've never blogged the song, which is one of my all-time favorites:

YouTube link.

"The Long and Winding Road" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1970 album Let It Be... When issued as a single in May 1970, a month after the Beatles' break-up, it became the group's 20th and last number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. It was the final single released by the quartet.

The main recording of the song took place in January 1969 and featured a sparse musical arrangement. When preparing the tapes from these sessions for release in April 1970, producer Phil Spector added orchestral and choral overdubs. Spector's modifications angered McCartney to the point that when the latter made his case in the British High Court for the Beatles' disbandment, he cited the treatment of "The Long and Winding Road" as one of six reasons for doing so. New versions of the song with simpler instrumentation were subsequently released by McCartney and by the Beatles.

Paul McCartney said he came up with the title "The Long and Winding Road" during one of his first visits to his property High Park Farm, near Campbeltown in Scotland, which he purchased in June 1966. The phrase was inspired by the sight of a road "stretching up into the hills" in the remote Highlands surroundings of lochs and distant mountains. He wrote the song at his farm in 1968, inspired by the growing tension among the Beatles.

Half of all Canadians live south of the red line

Yes, I know this projection distorts the relative size of subpolar regions, but the population distribution is still striking.

Via the MapPorn subreddit, where the discussion thread seems to focus on who stole the Great Lakes.

Google Streetview map

Almost no coverage of Germany and Austria except for major urban areas.

This gives me an excuse to ask a question.  I thought there was an app or a website or a command one could execute in Google Maps that would automatically scroll through the images from point A to point B without having to go click-by-click (which can be tedious).   If so, I've lost the link or the knowledge of how to do this.

Via the Europe subreddit.

Professional trucker records his travels

There's an app for this (Fog of the World).  Discussion at the Dataisbeautiful subreddit.

1.4 million lakes (10 ha or larger)

I'll save U.S. readers a click: 10 hectares (hectare = 10,000 square meters) is about 25 acres.  The map can be enlarged once at the MapPorn source, where I took a screencap of my favorite part of the country:

This is a perfectly valid map

Not perfect, actually, because the label "Svalbard" has been placed on an island in the Russian arctic, but still "valid" in the sense that north-at-the-top is a convention, not a scientific principle.

This map was created by Stuart MacArthur of Melbourne, Australia, and is commercially available.

With a tip of the blogging hat to long-time reader drabkikker.

Lighthouses of Europe

Via MapPorn.

Europe in 1500

Fascinating map, via the Europe subreddit.  If the image I've embedded doesn't allow you to zoom in for details like these -

- try going to the original and zooming there.  I added some zooming on my monitor to see fine details.

I've been unable to locate the source and would appreciate any info in that regard (especially re the accuracy of the depiction and whether the source is history-based or game-based.

World's shortest international bridge

Located here.  Via.

European locations with over 1,000 inhabitants

Best viewed after zooming larger.  Via the Europe subreddit.

Population density in Europe

Via the Europe subreddit.

A zoomable map of world population density.

One-sixth of the U.S. population lives in this megalopolis

More information about the Northeast megalopolis.

Via

Why India (and only India) is called a "subcontinent"

The answer begins with the topographic map above and discussed in an explainlikeimfive thread:

"Note that the use of the term 'Indian subcontinent' predates the discovery of tectonic plates.

The Indian sub-continent is bounded by mountains and other unfriendly terrain on all of its landward approaches.

This led to a degree of distinctiveness from the surrounding areas. Not only do Indians look different from the Persians/Arabs to the west and the Sinosphere peoples to the east, but they have a very different culture (or spectrum of cultures).

You rarely hear 'subcontinent' used in different contexts because there really isn't anywhere else like India in this respect. All of the various places you mentioned don't contain significant geographically isolated distinct peoples and cultures..."

"I'm looking at a list of the 108 tallest mountains in the world.

You know how many are in Asia?

108.

You know how many are between India and central Asia?

108.

You have to look at a longer list than that to find any mountain in the world that can compete with the ones that divide the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia."

Wikipedia notes that if Eurasia is regarded as a single continent, Europe could then be termed a subcontinent. 

Useful map of Kashmir

A region that will probably be recurrently in the news this year.  This map shows the disputed boundaries (which is basically the entire region).  Credit Washington Post.

Cool graphic of Lake Baikal and the Great Lakes

I don't remember if I've ever featured the Great Lakes profile (right portion of the graphic) in TYWKIWDBI before.  Redditor u/buak added in Lake Baikal for comparison.  There are various inaccurate aspects, but the overall depiction of relative depth and elevation are interesting.

From the discussion thread at the MapPorn subreddit, I learned that Baikal is home to some of the world's only freshwater seals:

The Saimaa ringed seal (Pusa hispida saimensis) is a subspecies of ringed seal (Pusa hispida). They are among the most endangered seals in the world, having a total population of only about 390 individuals. The only existing population of these seals is found in Lake Saimaa, Finland (hence the name). They have lived in complete isolation from other ringed seal species for around 9,500 years and have diverged into a morphologically and ecologically different subspecies of ringed seal.

Oasis

The Alma Oasis near Ubari, Libya.  Photo (presumably oversaturated, but striking just for morphology) via.

Railroad map of Australia

The routes are presented schematically rather than geographically (ala London Tube, MTA etc), but still interesting.  Via the MapPorn subreddit.

Canada is sparsely populated

This visualization may be slightly distorted by the projection for the map, but the point would still be valid.  Canada has about the same area as the United States, but only 1/10 the population.  And "Toronto is not a particularly dense city. A study released earlier this year ranked Toronto 19th out of 30 major cities in high-income countries in terms of density. It's not even the densest city in Canada, with Vancouver and Montreal both packing more people in per square mile."

Map via the dataisbeautiful subreddit.