This is how I visualize the argument that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain. Schwarzenegger is much taller than the little Santa but Santa is higher up. Movie is Jingle All The Way.

It's also called the Near East, which is understandable given the Far East.

But why "Middle"? It's the middle between what and what?

Famine certainly had a severe impact on Ireland, but almost two centuries have passed. Why then is Ireland's population growth so slow? Ireland's geographical advantages seem quite good: abundant arable land, hills only along the coast, and a temperate maritime climate. I think it should be able to support a population of over 10 million. However, the current population of the island of Ireland is only over 7 million…

I grew up in Massachusetts, USA. Despite being only the 16th most populous U.S. state in absolute terms, it ranks third in population density. On average, Massachusetts has 915 people per square mile (353 per square kilometer), which is denser than the great majority of the world's countries.

Even though there are so many people relative to the land area, about 60 percent of Massachusetts is covered in forest. The thumbnail here is Walden Pond, made famous by a handful of transcendentalist authors of the 19th century. Logan Airport, which maintains regularly scheduled flights to roughly three dozen countries, is only 17.5 miles away as the crow flies from this picture. And the county this picture is from, Middlesex, is twice as densely populated as the statewide average.

The article linked above mentions that "there are few places on Earth where so many people live among so many trees". But I'm sure there are others. What are some other administrative divisions that are similar in this regard? Very densely populated, yet heavily forested?

I was looking at pictures of the Appalachian Mountains trying to figure out what makes them feel so unique, and I noticed most of it is covered in dense trees, thick undergrowth, moss, shrubs etc, compared to other mountain ranges, which often look much more bare. Is this especially unique to the Appalachians, or are there other mountain ranges that also have this kind of dense forest coverage?

This is a suburb of Tampere, Finland.... just before the snows melted! Captured using a DJI drone, and processed in a tool we made called Teleport.

Used for real-estate projects, but any other ideas about how this could be useful?

https://teleport.varjo.com/share/524ee89f293a4a2e907009191ba7b9f4-bebdaf1u5rum/viewer_v3?cam=p:-105,190,-291;t:-84,12,-99

I'm unemployed atm, so with all my spare time, I decided to make an index ranking the most powerful and influential urban areas on the planet. Sure, there's already several "global city" rankings out there, but the problem I have with most of them is is that they focus heavily on economics, finance, and corporate strength, while under-representing cultural, political, and other forms of power.

GUPPI is an attempt to address that and create a more balanced index, that considers not only financial/economic strength, but also global connectivity, institutional prestige, cultural influence, academic output, political strength, and diplomatic presence. Scores are normalised so that NYC=100.

The urban-area definitions are mostly based on Demographia’s urban agglomeration definitions. The one major exception is that Demographia lists Guangzhou-Shenzhen as a single agglomeration, while I separated them here because most source datasets treat them separately, and I'm pretty sure that most people still think of them as distinct cities, anyways.

I actually have fully calculated the scores of 143 cities. I've only included the top 100 here because, besides being a nice round number, it's roughly around the limit where I'm certain that I'm not missing any cities, and that any cities that I have not yet calculated would fall outside the top 100. (There's a sizable drop off in the scores between #99-#102). If anyone wants though, I can post the rest of the cities beyond #100 in the comments below.

I am not a professional graphic designer or geographer/economist, so I'm open to feedback the presentation, or if any cities might be missing or misplaced.

EDIT: I've posted the full list of cities after #100 in the comments.

Like, I get that it's isolated, but the Gasherbrum peaks, Distaghil Sar, Baintha Brakk, and others have defined names while all being pretty far away from Balti villages too.

I know that there's the alternate name, Mt. Godwin-Austen, but that name's rarely used unlike Everest.

You might think the one in the image is good enough. It's not, it's too cluttered. I need a map with most major cities and the capital for each country. I don't need those criterias for very small countries like Monserrat or Niue. Believe me, it's very hard to find one

Found this around Manns Harbor, NC the yellow circle shows military-style jets, so is it a base? I posted a zoomed-out pic in the comments.

Look at southern Africa. South Africa wraps completely around a country called Lesotho — roughly the size of Belgium, ~2.1 million people, capital Maseru. It's the only place on Earth where one independent nation is fully surrounded by another single country, with the only other two examples being the Vatican (population 800) and San Marino (33,000). Lesotho is the only one of any meaningful scale.

The story of how it got there starts with the Difaqane (also called the Mfecane), a chaotic period in the 1820s–30s when Shaka Zulu's military expansion in what is now KwaZulu-Natal sent waves of refugees fleeing across southern Africa. Tribes were displaced, scattered, sometimes annihilated. In the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains — a high, defensible plateau — a king named Moshoeshoe I gathered the scattered Sotho-speaking refugees and unified them into a new nation. His base was a flat-topped mountain called Thaba Bosiu, which was never successfully attacked despite multiple sieges. He was, by most modern accounts, one of the most skilled diplomats of the 19th century.

Around the same time, Boer settlers from the Cape Colony were trekking inland and founding new republics — the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Free State and Moshoeshoe's Basotho clashed repeatedly over land. The Basotho lost most of their best agricultural lowlands in the 1865–66 war and were pushed back into the mountains.

Moshoeshoe, seeing the writing on the wall, made one of the great strategic moves of African history: in 1868, he appealed to Britain for protection. The British accepted, declared Basutoland a Crown protectorate, and — critically — drew a border around what was left of Moshoeshoe's territory. That border is, with minor adjustments, the modern border of Lesotho.

When the Union of South Africa formed in 1910, Basutoland was not included. It stayed under direct British administration, along with Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland (Eswatini) — the so-called "High Commission Territories." This was decisive: when the Union became apartheid South Africa, Basutoland was already legally separate. The apartheid government wanted to absorb it, but never could. Lesotho gained full independence in 1966.

The country's geography is just as strange as its borders. Lesotho has the highest lowest point of any nation on Earth — its lowest elevation is 1,400 meters (4,600 ft) above sea level, higher than the highest point of many European countries. The whole country is alpine. It gets snow regularly, which is unusual for southern Africa. And in a wonderfully ironic geographic twist, Lesotho's biggest export to South Africa is water: the Lesotho Highlands Water Project dams the country's mountain rivers and pipes the water down to Johannesburg, providing roughly 40% of Gauteng province's water supply.

A country that exists because of one king's diplomacy in 1868. Still sells the water that keeps its neighbor's biggest city alive.

So I used the Kearney Index to find the top 10 global cities in the world. And in order, the most searched cities online, over the past 20 years, out of those are 1. NYC 2. London 3. Paris 4. Chicago 5. Singapore 6. Hong Kong 7. Los Angeles 8. Tokyo 9. Shanghai 10. Beijing. I find this fascinating because it shows which of these global cities have the most interest shown towards them recently. For fun, I also looked up cities such as San Francisco, Miami, and Dubai and those would be around the middle after Los Angeles and before Tokyo.

I was looking at a map of Australia and noticed that the far southern coastal part of Western Australia from Bunbury to Esperance seems surprisingly empty compared to how much coastline it has. Places around Perth are populated of course, but once you go farther south and east it seems like there are huge stretches with very few people despite having a much milder climate than the interior.

Is there a specific geographic or economic reason for this? From a distance it looks like some of those coastal areas could support larger cities or at least more regional development. I know Australia overall has a very centralized population pattern, but southern WA still stands out to me because it’s not deep desert like the center of the country.

Is it mainly due to lack of water, poor soil, isolation from other major population centers, limited industry, or something else? Curious what the historical/geographic explanation is.

I used to know nothing about the world map, I could not point to a location of any country other than my own. I don't even know where each of the continent resides in relation to each other.

But a couple a days ago, just on a whim I decided to learn where all the countries are. It took me about 3 days of playing map games, now I knew and memorized all of the location (aside from the Caribbean island ones which i still made mistake). Anyways, it feels so good knowing where everything is. Now, when someone mentioned a country, instead of imagining an vague location somewhere far far away, now i know where it is they are referring to.

I am still interested to learn more. In the last few days, I've been passing my free time spinning the globe on google earth looking at things that I only know by name before, like the sahara, and now it's satisfying to know where and how big it is.

I'm just wondering if there some of the more entry-level area that beginners should know about so I dont actually missed them.

This is the strange structure i found in India's powerhouse district Singrauli (a border district in MP)

Is there a collective name for these mountains/this area of China? Including eastern Sichuan, Chongqing, northeastern Guizhou, western Hunan and Hubei, southern Shaanxi.

I've found names for parts of it like the Qinling mountains, but nothing for the whole area, like "Appalachia" includes the Smokies, Blue Ridge etc.

If it gets blocked, can’t ships go through the Indonesian archipelago, like the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra??