I bet I could win bar bets with this factoid

World Cup final eight teams

This explains everything.  And it's accurate (tilt your head to the left...)

Addendum:  rotated...

(found in the discussion thread at the source)

Ethnicity map of the United States

To celebrate the nation's 250th birthday, the New York Times has created an impressive interactive map depicting the self-reported ethnicity of U.S. citizens as they recorded such in 2019-2024 U.S. Census.  Responses rhat included a race but not a specific origin group are not included.

In the interactive map, you can zoom in to drill down to specific subregions, apparently defined by census data rather than county borders:

And there is a map from the time of colonization:

Can you find the missing seven states in this map?

Take your time pondering this clever map from xkcd.  When you give up, there is a link to the answer at the Kottke via.  (New England is o.k.)  I thought six of them were easy, but the seventh was hard.

A curious landscape feature in Italy

Explanation at the geography subreddit.

Capitalle - new online geography game

I found this game today I think via Metafilter.  The game chooses a random world capital city and invites you to guess it within 6 tries.  After each guess you are informed whether your guess involved the correct continent, the correct hemisphere, whether the city is coastal or inland, how far off your guess is in term of distance, and whether the correct answer is a larger or smaller city.

So, in today's game my first guess was Kinshasa.  I then guessed Lima for a southern capital in another continent (forgetting its coastal location).  The final stage was to use the distances (see map at top of embed).  Sucre was closer, Asuncion even closer, but Buenos Aires further away, directing me to Brasilia.

I had to use a map for assistance.  

Sorry for providing a spoiler for today's answer, but you can go to the Capitalle app home page and click the "practice" button for a different random capital city.

My other posts about online geography games (with links): Geoguesser, Where in the U.S.A. is this?, Worldle, and Ghent University's test.  Several of these links are decades old and I haven't checked to see if they've undergone linkrot.

A guaranteed win for a "bar bet"

Bet someone they can't name the country with which France shares its longest border, and give them three or four guesses... "Germany? Spain? Belgium? Italy?..."

The answer is Brazil (on the border with French Guiana, which is as much a part of France as Alaska is part of the United States).  Map of "constituent lands."

Reposted from 2020 because I found it while browsing my old geography posts.

Neuf-Brisach, France is an octagonal city

"An aerial view of an octagonal fortress that forms one of the most extraordinary cities in the world. Constructed in the 17th-century by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a military architect serving King Louis XIV, the city in Alsace features evenly spaced bastions, perpendicular streets and star-shaped fortifications."    Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

One of the Photos of the Day at The Guardian.  Here's the Wikipedia entry.  And you can zoom in and see streetviews at Google Maps.

Geography quiz: Where is the westernmost point in Asia?

I didn't know when I encountered the question in a crossword puzzle.  The answer may win you a bar bet.

Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora - updated

I've always been fascinated by places like this.  The one in this image is the Monastery of the Holy Trinity at Meteora in Greece.  

Prior to the twentieth century, Holy Trinity had a very difficult approach, requiring crossing a valley and climbing through the rock outcrop to reach the building's entrance. Provisions were placed in baskets drawn up by rope-ladders (now with a winch). In present day, one can walk from Kalambaka for 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) along a foot track to reach the monastery, or use a winch-operated lift. There is a road from the back side of the cliff. It is currently reached via tunnels and 130 steps of stone. The grounds include a 2-acre (0.81 ha) garden at the summit.

When I first blogged Meteora fifteen years ago, I offered this observation:

Meaning ‘suspended in air’ the name Meteora includes the entire rock community of 24 monasteries. There were no steps and the main access to the monasteries was by means of a net that was hitched over a hook and hoisted up by rope and a hand cranked windlass to winch towers overhanging the chasm. Monks descended in the nets or on retractable wooden ladders up to 40m long to the fertile valleys below to grow grapes, corn and potatoes... the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only "when the Lord let them break..."

In ancient times building materials would have been winched or hand-carried; perhaps nowadays they use helicopters.  I can guess how human waste was disposed of in the 14th century; not sure how that is managed now.

Photo credit Michael Probst / AP, via The Atlantic.

Reposted to insert this awesome 70-minute video about all six monasteries in Meteora, submitted by reader Aleksejs:

It only takes about 9 hours...

Via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.  Reposted from 2015  because I'm tired of reading all the grim news.

A nation that is in all four hemispheres

Geography trivia for the week: identify the only country that straddles all four hemispheres of the earth:  north and south, east and west.  There is only one such country, in the Pacific.  On the other side of the globe the prime meridian coming down from Greenwich crosses the equator below the coastline of Africa, south of Ghana in international waters.  That point has been designated Null Island and has been marked in the past by a buoy.

Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0. Although "Null Island" started as a joke within the geospatial community, it has become a useful means of addressing a recurring issue in geographic information science.

Kiribati is the answer to the bar quiz trivia question posed above.  The equator and 180th meridian intersect in Kiribati's territory (though not on an island).

The Milky Way behind the Three Merlons

This was an Astronomy Photo of the Day last week.  I had to look up The Three Merlons:

The Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Italian for 'Three Peaks of Lavaredo'), also called the Drei Zinnen (German for 'Three Merlons'), are three distinctive battlement-like peaks, in the Sexten Dolomites of northeastern Italy. They are one of the best-known mountain groups in the Alps.

Hoodoo

This is the King of Wings outcrop in New Mexico.  The image was an Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Related: a tennis ball hoodoo

The only "decipoint" in the world

The graphic is pretty much self-explanatory, but there is extended commentary at Atlas Obscura.

The people who live in a volcanic crater

The video above is rather interesting.  It began when someone browsing Google Earth spotted a geographic anomaly in Madagascar and wondered who lived in this very isolated location.  What is interesting is how he went about collecting information and eventually recruiting a crew of locals with cameras and drone to investigate.  It's a long (24 minute) video which I speed-browsed using the video progress bar and my keyboard right arrow, but I stopped frequently to admire various aspects of the study.  I'll put a spoiler below these screencaps for those who don't have any time to spare (it's too bad our modern world is so packed with thingstodo that we can't find time to linger over interesting things, because there is so much to wonder at in this world).

The inhabitants are modern-day Madagascar farmers who discovered fertile soil and abundant water in this old caldera.

Demonyms

Image from a Reddit post, where the discussion comments are trivial.  Here's more information from Wikipedia:

A demonym (/ˈdɛmənɪm/; from Ancient Greek δῆμος (dêmos) 'people, tribe', and ὄνυμα (ónuma) 'name') or gentilic (from Latin gentilis 'of a clan, or gens') is a word that identifies a group of people (inhabitants, residents, natives) in relation to a particular place. Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place (hamlet, village, town, city, region, province, state, country, and continent). Demonyms are used to designate all people (the general population) of a particular place, regardless of ethnic, linguistic, religious or other cultural differences that may exist within the population of that place...

...demonyms are semantically different from ethnonyms (names of ethnic groups). In the English language, there are many polysemic words that have several meanings (including demonymic and ethnonymic uses), and therefore a particular use of any such word depends on the context. For example, the word Thai may be used as a demonym, designating any inhabitant of Thailand, while the same word may also be used as an ethnonym, designating members of the Thai people... 

Often, demonyms are the same as the adjectival form of the place, e.g. Egyptian, Japanese, or Greek. However, they are not necessarily the same, as exemplified by Spanish instead of Spaniard or British instead of Briton...

Several linguistic elements are used to create demonyms in the English language. The most common is to add a suffix to the end of the location name, slightly modified in some instances. These may resemble Late Latin, Semitic, Celtic, or Germanic suffixes, such as -(a)n, -ian, -anian, -nian, -in(e), -a(ñ/n)o/a, -e(ñ/n)o/a, -i(ñ/n)o/a, -ite, -(e)r, -(i)sh, -ene, -ensian, -ard, -ese, -nese, -lese, -i(e), -i(ya), -iot, -iote, -k, -asque, -(we)gian, -onian, -vian, -ois(e), or -ais(e).

Iceland viewed from a drone

What an amazing place. And all those hiking trails.  I do wish the videographer had spent more time lingering over some of those locations.  Via Laughing Squid, which I should visit more often.

"Flying over Iceland"

Flying over Iceland (Part. II) from Yannick Calonge on Vimeo.

Simply awesome (and be sure to click that fullscreen icon at the lower right).   Kudos to the drone pilot for including trekkers in the field of view to create a sense of perspective.

Reposted from 2016 because the landscape imagery is absolutely fascinating.

Via Nag on the Lake.

Two geography quiz questions

I missed two on my first read of the cartoon.  Answers are in the reader comments at the GoComics source.

Part two:  

Name the world capital closest to "Null Island" (0 degrees north, 0 degrees east) (five letters).

The number of letters is specified, because I encountered this while working the most recent Sunday NYT crossword puzzle.  Since I was on the clock, trying to finish in 20 minutes, I didn't take time to reason it out and wound up having to back into the answer via crossing clues.

More on Null Island.  You learn something every day.