The US could indeed become the next italy, politically
a once great empire that crumbled
I was just thinking about this regarding climate the other day and found this interesting graphic on climate similarities in North America.
Were they limited in colours?
I’m aware of it, but it doesn’t work on this where non-connected pieces can have the same climate.
Further the size and proximity of Scandinavia as well as the darkness and size of Ukraine make them difficult to distinguish.
Too many colors on a map looks busy, as long as none are touching with the same color then it’s good. In fact, the fewest number of colors you can use without any touching is usually the best
More than 4 colours? In this economy?
ngl that could be a real map of territories after Trump is done cutting the US up and handing out the pieces to his buddies abroad.
Everybody’s wrapped up in the climate / weather discussion, but the thing that surprised me a bit more was the difference in sunset / sunrise.
I was working on an international team (i.e. a bunch of Americans + one dude from France).
Back in those ancient times, video calls with everybody’s face included weren’t necessarily the standard, and even when we did them, everyone was typically in an office environment.
Anyway, one late afternoon (for us in the USA) we did a team video call and our French counterpart was sitting outdoors in his back yard and it was still light outside. Although we knew it was 10 p.m. where he lived, it looked closer to the amount of sunlight we’d typically see around 7 or maybe 8 p.m. here in mid-latitude US.
It was kind of interesting, because even in the height of summer at the very highest elevations, it’s going to be very dark here at 10 p.m.
This was a cool thing about living in Seattle and any further north - in the summer it’d be dusk until 10pm. And the in the winter the sun would basically never appear. I guess it was less “cool” and more “insanity producing” but locals were used to it.
Location in the time zone is also a factor. France is near the far west of CEST.
For example Michigan is in the far west of EST. The sun rises 30-40 minutes later than in New York, and you do get light at 10pm in the height of summer.
Cameras are pretty good at taking in light and giving a false representation of how you’d experience it if you were actually there. You see it at televised sporting events where it looks like twilight but they have to tell the viewers at home that it’s full dark there. I’d imagine at 10pm, his web cam was just doing a much better job seeing than a human eye could.
I live just across the Canadian border (
belowjust above the 45th parallel) and it’s pretty bright at 10PM here also (that is around the summer solstice of course). So while the camera/software might have been boosting brightness, the difference in latitude still seems to make a big difference!
yeah, 16 hours of daylight during summer means even more time for the daystar to hammer us with its heat. and the flipside is 8 hours of sunlight during the winter and it getting dark by 4pm.
but those long, bright summer evenings are nice when it’s not 2138219219 degrees.
This is also a really great illustration of colorblindness. I actually didn’t even see Italy until I read the comment about the boot.
Thanks, didn’t realize until I read this lol
All the immigrants from Southern Italy coming to New York:
“It’s the same latitude, it’ll be just like home!”That actually really fucked up the first French attempts to settle the St. Lawrence river. They knew it was a similar latitude as Paris so they were completely unprepared for their first winter in Quebec City.
Comparing similar latitudes in north america to where i live in sweden is a wild experience. The average temperatures are double, sometines almost triple, during summer.
Which way? Because it gets incredibly hot in the Canadian prairie. There is no body of water to regulate temperature so the summers can get serious heat waves while the winter is absolutely frigid. Granted, Edmonton is still considerably further south than Stockholm.
On which scale? Because that kinda matters.
Celsius? Kinda hot but not necessarily deadly.
Kelvin? You’ve turned your city into an air fryer.
They live in Sweden so Celsius
It’s still an odd way to compare temperatures:
- Double of 1 degree is 2 degrees, so not very different.
- Double of 30 degrees is 60 degrees, so wildly different.
- Double of -20 degrees is -40 degrees, so a lot colder instead of warmer.
This is an example I use when I teach data types. It happens because the scale (F or C) is an “interval” scale. Its zero is not based on the absence of the property it is measuring, so you can’t apply a multiplicative transform to it like, “double”.
It is like lining up by height, calling the shortest person the standard and measure height of everyone else from that. So, the next tallest might be 2 cm, the next 4cm. But clearly the person we are calling 4cm is not twice the height of the person we called 2 cm.
Even if the scale was aligned with absolute zero - like Kelvin - it would not be able to describe temperature changes in the multiples primarily because our FEEL of temperature is what matters here. And since humans live in the approx. temperature ranges of -40 to 80 (using an extended range to cover cases like the Arctic/Antarctic stations, or saunas), the best scale to use would be a Celsius scale shifted somewhat to make 0deg the most optimal neutral temperature - which is, in my opinion, 16 degrees Celsius.
I mean thats completely valid criticism but it had a lot of shock value still.
Yes, the difference in temperature is interesting, I don’t want to seem dismissive of that. Just the choice of wording was also interesting.
yes
You’d think so, but without specifying the scale… it could be anything. ANYTHING!
Probably bananas though, according to my middleschool math teacher
Ever visit Phoenix?
I find that so crazy. I’m German and for us Italy is always the sunny south where it gets much too hot for us. The USA iseems more like us climate-wise. I’d always thought New York would be a little like Berlin. Crazy to see how far south most of the US actually is.
The weather in New England and upper New York is very much like German weather, and sometimes worse. We’ve had snow on the grounds since the 30th of November and it’s only barely reached 0C in the last week.
It was -15C a couple nights ago at roughly the latitude of Rome, next to the ocean too. And only about 50km northwest (inland) it went down to -25C.
This has been a colder December than average for the last decade, but we have mountains that regularly get meters of snow each winter, and they are way lower elevation than the alps too. Also as we all know the last decade has been stoopid warm.
Mt Washington has measured the highest wind speed in the world.
AMOC doing some heavy lifiting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
That one is getting phased out though.
Yeah I’ve been getting deprecation warnings about that every time I start
./the-beachIt still has a runtime dependency on AMOC
Also the Mediterranean acts like a huge heat buffer. It basically stops the polar winds from reaching southern Europe.
In addition to there being a huge mountain range in the way. The Alps block/slow down a lot of the cold air currents that do make their way down from the polar regions. That’s why cities like Turin and Milan still have cold climates in the north. Cold air still makes it’s way over the Alps but is slowed and is reheated as it travels south so cities like Genoa/Florence/Rome are much milder in the winter.
A large part of it is also simply the fact that at the midlatitudes westerlies dominate, which means that western Europe receives mild air from the ocean, while the US east cost receives more extreme weather from the continent.
The US is fucking huge. A lot of our weather up north is closer to yours, but we’ve got deserts, rainforests, Florida is just outside of the tropics, etc. There’s a huge variety of climates here. The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin. East to west it’s wider than Lisbon, Spain to Moscow, Russia. North to South it’s pretty much identical to Europe. (Technically Europe is slightly larger with the Scandinavian countries sticking out pretty far north.)
The US is fucking huge…The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin
It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went “wait a minute…”
Looks like a huge improvement
I mean, you’d lose most of the Appalachian Mountains which as one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world means losing a ton of ancient fossils that helped piece together the biological history of Earth. I’d also be curious how the glaciers would be impacted given how heavily they shaped much of North America
You also lose several major cities including Toronto and St Louis, Canada loses most of its habitable land (assuming the climate isn’t significantly impacted by the existence of a second Mediterranean Sea, which it definitely would be) Chicago is going to be quite different but probably an even more important port city in such a world. Las Vegas is now a port city, so probably less casinos and more just major city. My wife would be sad because the Quad Cities (a metro area on the Iowa/Illinois border) wouldn’t exist and she really likes that area. I’d be sad because the Mississippi River would be much short and therefore way less cool. But it’s a really wild concept that gets crazier the more you think about it
Lisbon is in Portugal btw. (But that doesn’t change the distances.)
Shit, you’re right. Too much EU5 playing as Castile, and then Spain, capturing Portugal.
I like to point out that New York to LA os essentially the same distance as Moscow to Lisbon, while Seattle to Miami os about the same as London to Baghdad. That’s why St. Louis was the furthest west MLB team until the 50’s. The logistics for US sports are insane
The crazy bit is how far north Europe is, relative to the climate we get. Almost everywhere else this far north is freezing
Imagine the chaos in Europe if the ocean currents fail to bring warm temps up from the tropics and the UK, Germany, etc all start to get weather similar to mid-northern Canada which even Canadians try their best to avoid.
I always pictured Berlin as like the Midwest but with less tornadoes
based on what i remember, NJ (and NYC) had weather pretty similar to budapest. now, i’ve never been to berlin but i cant imagine it’s that different from budapest, just a bit colder.
so yeah, their weather is weird :)
The USA iseems more like us climate-wise.
You’d think that knowing about Texas, New Mexico or Nevada? You probably have seen how it looks around Las Vegas at least.
great place to grow olives though. as many places with mediterrenean climates are.
New York is in line with Lisbon more or less
Gibraltar is about the same latitude as the Virgina/North Carolina state line. So southern Europe essentially ends halfway down the US Eastern seaboard
For context this puts Rome about north enough to get snow hurricanes were it on the American east coast
oh, does Italy not usually get snowstorms with cyclone structures
Well it does get snow.
Ocean currents do a lot more to even out the weather
Yeah thank you to the gulf stream. Too bad that global warming will make it disappear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also wind patterns. At the midlatitudes westerlies dominate. So the east coast has a continental climate (receives cold air in the winters, hot air in the summers) while the west coast does not (the oceans make the summers and winters mild)
You’ll see that the west coast cities on the same latitudes of their European counterparts have a very similar climate (as opposed to east coast cities, which have a very different climate than their latitude-counterpart).
So do the Great Lakes. Although, currently the lakes are generating their own weather.
This freaks me out.
Damn you could fit like 2 Two Sicilies in there. Which is likes 6 regular Sicilies
Two Sicilies is already in there though…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Two_Sicilies
Sorry, I’ve been playing too much Paradox grand strategy, and I’ve been seeing everything in maps and spreadsheets.
Why… why is Philadelphia spelled with an “F”?
Because thats how it is pronounced
Virginia Occidentale has a nice ring to it. It’'d fuck up John Denver too.
🎵 Portami a casa, vie di campagna 🎶
It’s translated into French it looks like.
Did you not notice “Virginia Occidental”?
They translated “west”, but not “new”.
translation of names can get pretty arbitrary. eg, which “new”-s would you translate among these: new york, new zealand, new hampshire, newfoundland?
In Italian we said Nuova York until, let’s say, the sixties. Virginia Occidentale is quite uncommon too, I have to say. It’s more common simply West Virginia.
People used to translate more than today
It’s Spanish, no? Philadelphia in French is Philadelphie.
my guess is Italian, in Spanish it would have been “occidental”
It is italian
It’s really fucking with me that almost everything is the exact same except for Filadelphia and Virginia Occidental. Just enough to look the same in English with like 2 tiny differences
The meme maker was threatened with a cease and decist order by Kraft-Heinz.
Why would you spell it with a ph?
I thought the boot was supposed to go below the mitten
When I was kid, I thought Greece was bigger than UK. I was wrong.
The west coast city I live in is just a little further north than Philadelphia and has a very Mediterranean climate so this puts that into perspective for me.
