REJECTED — ILLEGAL NULL AND VOID

Libya / Turkey MoU deal within hours after ratification at the Libyan House of Representatives has failed with more than 31 countries to reject it as illegal, null and void.

This is possible a world record of a rejected deal, a failure.

Dzudzuana cave in Georgia not only gave us the Dzudzuna Upper Palaeolithic genetic sample but is also where archaeologists unearthed the earliest known dyed flax fibres, dating back an astounding 36,000 years. Here's the genetic heatmap of how Dzudzuana UP genetically influenced others.

https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Passengers/itj6-vfiw

Compared to the previous post, I have made the following changes: I removed the category for countries where immigrants make up the majority of the population (such as those in the Persian Gulf); I also removed the United Kingdom from the category for nations founded by immigrants; and in their place, I have added countries in the New World that were not previously included (for example, Argentina).

Edit/clarification: without changing the shape of the continents

noes not include antartica for land area nor population

My wife and I are from Georgia. We lived through the 2008 war, so hearing people suggest that Ukraine should give up its territory for “peace” feels painfully familiar.

russia occupies around 125,000 km² of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova combined. That's roughly half the United Kingdom.

We built an interactive map where you can choose your own country and see what losing 20% of it would look like.

We hope it helps people understand that these aren't just lines on a map. They're people's homes, towns and lives.

You can try it here:
https://russianoccupation.netlify.app/

Sharing a multi-modal geospatial dataset and zero-dependency HTML5/Leaflet Web GIS viewer we built to unify 1,205 co-registered 1024x1024 map plates across 83 subterranean and strategic corridors (Rings 0–12, 0–500 statute miles), backed by 5 Continental USGS Geophysical GeoTIFF grids and 15 compiled PDF Visual Map Atlases.

Full technical breakdown, live interactive Web GIS link, and free 24-plate sample dataset are in the first comment!

I drew Europe from memory.... How did I do???

This amazes me how much humans can be able to chart down line on a sand down to the meter.

If you believe in the "butterfly effect"—the theory that an insect flapping its wings can trigger a hurricane on the other side of the planet—geopolitics has its own version. It is the story of how a 15th-century papal signature meant to separate Iberian galleons ended up erecting an abandoned train station in the middle of the Australian desert and creating a passive-aggressive feud over time zones.

Welcome to one of the most fascinating quirks of modern geography.

It all started with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. With the Pope's blessing, Portugal and Spain took a ruler, drew a straight line on the map of the Atlantic, and said: "Everything to the left is Spanish, everything to the right is Portuguese." A perfect, brilliant, foolproof plan. The kings were happy, the navigators had their routes, and peace seemed guaranteed.

There was just one small, almost insignificant design flaw in our planet's blueprint: it is stubbornly round.

The Iberians discovered this the hard way. While the Portuguese happily sailed east, rounding Africa toward Asia, the Spanish explored the west, crossing the Americas and the Pacific. Until, in the early 16th century, the inevitable happened. Somewhere in the middle of the Maluku Islands (modern-day Indonesia), the global paradise of nutmeg and cloves, the two fleets bumped right into each other.

It was that awkward cartoon moment where two rivals walk backwards away from each other and end up bumping heads. The Tordesillas line had wrapped around the globe and collided with itself on the back of the planet. Now what? Whose expensive-spice-filled island was it? To resolve the spherical panic, in 1529, they signed the Treaty of Zaragoza, essentially drawing a "zipper" on the other side of the world, an antimeridian to settle the score.

The legacy of this head-bumping is printed on the map to this day. Even before we get to Australia, try this: open a map and look at the island of New Guinea, just above the Australian continent. You will find a bizarre straight line cutting the island perfectly from top to bottom, dividing the Indonesian province of Papua from the independent country of Papua New Guinea. At first glance, you might not understand why it's there in the middle of mountains and dense jungles. The answer is simple: that colonial ruler (the 141st Meridian East) is, in practice, the exact opposite of the Treaty of Tordesillas inherited by the Dutch. If you zoom in really close, you will notice that the geometric perfection suffers a slight hiccup, making an awkward little curve to follow the bed of a small river called the Fly River—but that is a hilarious cartographic problem for another text.

What matters is that, in the 19th century, the British Empire was organizing its colossal and wild colony in Australia. Looking at an empty map in a luxurious London office, officials decided to create the province of South Australia. To avoid the hassle of inventing an eastern border to separate it from New South Wales and Victoria, they simply looked north and "pulled" the straight line from New Guinea downwards, slicing through the Australian continent all the way to the ocean. The border of a country that wasn't even a country yet had been drawn.

But drawing a straight line with a ruler in London is one thing; measuring the stars and driving stakes into the unforgiving Australian outback in 1847 was another entirely.

The surveyors of the time miscalculated and marked the border 3.6 kilometers further west than they should have. It seems like a small amount, but this slight deviation created a strip of thousands of hectares called "The Disputed Territory." For nearly 70 years, the state governments of Victoria and South Australia fought fiercely over this slice of land, threatening to arrest rival topographers for trespassing.

The dispute generated such a picturesque situation that when the two states decided to build a railway connecting their capitals, the line had to pass through this "no man's land." Unwilling to concede, both split the bill and built the Serviceton station exactly on the disputed border. It was an imposing, three-story station, erected in the middle of absolute nowhere solely as a neutral ground so locomotives and crews could be swapped without one state stepping on the other's pride.

Although the Crown in London finally resolved the feud in 1914 by handing the strip of land to Victoria, the legacy of this Iberian-British mess persists in everyday oddities for those who live there.

If you cross this border today, you will feel the bureaucratic jolt: South Australia has a fractional half-hour time zone (UTC +9:30), while Victoria adopts the full hour (UTC +10:00). Crossing the street in Serviceton means having to advance your car clock by exactly 30 minutes. Furthermore, due to strict state agricultural laws, there are inspection checkpoints on the roads along this border where inspectors stop cars just like at an international customs office, searching trunks to confiscate apples and bananas before the fruits "cross the line."

In the end, it all comes down to the butterfly effect: the Portuguese and Spanish just wanted to avoid going to war while trying to figure out how a round Earth worked. As a result, centuries later, Australian farmers had to go to the Supreme Court to find out whose land they were standing on, while eating sandwiches in a ghost train station, adjusting their clocks by thirty minutes, and hiding fruit from the neighboring state's inspectors.

Free and open source, no signup. The theme changes with the era. Borders before ~500 BC are approximate, and leader data is thin before 1600, so corrections are very welcome. Link in comments.

code: https://github.com/nsijwali/WhoRuled

All pixels are colored based on rgb where r=10(mean temperature of hottest month in Celsius)-100
g=(mean annual precipitation in millimeters)/8
b=-8(mean temperature of coldest month in Celsius)+125

Data is from https://www.prism.oregonstate.edu/normals/

I wanted to explore a different way of visualizing the geography.

This map represents all 30 NBA teams across 28 home markets, with cities connected according to the league's six divisions. Each division has its own shoelace color, with knots marking the cities and sneaker-style tags replacing conventional map labels.

The land is styled as basketball leather, the background as a worn hardwood court, and the black curved line separates the Eastern and Western Conference regions symbolically rather than representing an official geographic boundary.

A note on AI: The visual elements and textures were AI-generated, but a substantial amount of the work involved manually positioning, correcting and checking the city locations and connections against geographic references. The aim was to create an actual geographic visualization with an own tooling, not simply ask AI to invent a basketball-themed map.

The division colors are artistic choices, not official NBA colors.

Curious what you think of this approach to sports geography!

Bangkok 6

Tokyo 5

Copenhagen 4

Lima 4

London 4

Paris 4

Berlin 3

Cape Town 3

Mexico City 3

New York 3

Singapore 3

São Paulo 3

Atxondo 2

Barcelona 2

Bogotá 2

Dubai 2

Hong Kong 2

Munich 2

Rio de Janeiro 2

Seoul 2

Shanghai 2

Alba 1

-x-x-x

Brunico 1

Brussels 1

Buenos Aires 1

Cartagena 1

Castel di Sangro 1

Cusco 1

Dénia 1

El Puerto de Santa María 1

Fürstenau 1

Gardone Riviera 1

Getaria 1

Guadalajara 1

Healdsburg 1

Istanbul 1

Kobarid 1

Lisbon 1

Macau 1

Madrid 1

Modena 1

Mumbai 1

Mérida 1

Osaka 1

Oudenburg 1

Queenstown 1

Quito 1

Rubano 1

Saint-Vrain 1

San Francisco 1

San Sebastián 1

Santiago 1

Senigallia 1

Skillinge 1

Stockholm 1

Sydney 1

Tulum 1

Vienna 1

https://www.the50.com/

-x-x-x

Spain 9

Italy 7

Japan 6

Mexico 6

Thailand 6

Brazil 5

China 5

France 5

Germany 5

Peru 5

United States 5

Denmark 4

United Kingdom 4

Colombia 3

Singapore 3

South Africa 3

Belgium 2

South Korea 2

Sweden 2

United Arab Emirates 2

Argentina 1

Australia 1

Austria 1

Chile 1

Ecuador 1

India 1

New Zealand 1

Portugal 1

Slovenia 1

Switzerland 1

Turkey 1

Counts: 243 Indy, 80 Ikon, 60 Epic, 27 Mountain Collective.

Data notes: pass lists come from each pass’s website. Locations, elevations, lifts and runs come mostly from OpenStreetMap via OpenSkiMap, so figures are approximate. Some pins stand for whole regions (Les 3 Vallées, Dolomiti Superski), so a pass can cover more resorts than it has pins. Indy is downhill resorts only.