Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
Why are there so many countries that end in -stan? In total 7 countries: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan include the suffix -stan in their names.
These countries have a combined population of nearly 280 million people (fewer than only China, India and the United States) and cover an area of 5.45 million square kilometers (7th largest in the world).
This is actually a bit of a trick question, as several European countries including: Armenia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Russia have no formal laws on what age people are allowed to consume alcoholic beverages. However, the map above (with a few errors) shows what age people have to be buy various types of alcohol.
According to Wikipedia these are the ages you’re allowed to purchase alcohol by country in Europe:
While I’m sure you know the Pacific Ocean is big, I’d say there’s a good chance you hadn’t realized how big, until you look at the map above. As difficult as it may be to believe, the Pacific Ocean is larger than the landmass of every single continent and island combined.
In numbers:
The map above shows where schools close for Jewish Holidays. Reddit user jonross14 explains more about how he created the map:
My wife and I created this map. A colored county means that at least one school countywide closes for Jewish Holidays, not necessarily all schools in the county. We also designated a county if they only closed for one Jewish holiday, for example Yom Kippur but not Rosh Hashanah, or if a district consistently gives a PD (teachers-only) day on a Jewish holiday. TL;DR if any district in a county closes school to students for any Jewish holiday they are included in this map. Enjoy!
If, like me, you’re not familiar with the major Jewish holidays they are:
Here’s the last post for awhile about flag colours. Previous posts have looked at The Shade of Red Each Country Has On Its Flag and Countries Whose Flags Contain Red and/or Blue. The map above looks at what happens when you blend all the colours from each country’s flag proportionally.
Somewhat surprisingly there is a relatively large variety of colours, given that red and blue so often appear on flags.
Below you can see what happens when you do the same thing for individual US state flags:
As we saw in a previous post, the vast majority of the world’s countries have at least some red in their flag. The next most popular colour is blue, with only a handful of countries having neither colour in their flag.
The following countries have neither red or blue, but do all have green:
Based on this popular post around the idea of how you can fit the population of the United States into various countries. The map above looks at how you could fit the population of North America into Europe, and still have several million people left over.
The map above simply shows the shade of red that appears on each country’s flag, assuming of course it has red on it. The data comes from here, which shows that 148 out of 192 countries (77%) have some red in their flags.
The reddest flags are:
Ever wonder what word most commonly appears in your State’s place names? Me neither, nevertheless the map above is really interesting. The overwhelming majority of states have the rather unoriginal ‘city’ as the most common word.
Ever sit on a beach and wonder what’s on the other side of the ocean? Well if you live anywhere in the Americas, the map above has your answer. It shows which countries are due east or west.
Perhaps most interesting countries on the map are Chile and Greenland, where it’s possible to sail right round the world and still end up in the same country.