Interesting bagpipe tradition[1] in Zamora.
Here was decent example on YouTube[2]. Highland pipe aficionados will note a lack tenor drones, grips, and an emphasis on quavered notes.
I like the concept and obviously others do too given the longevity of the flag but wonder what would this flag look like in a digital form? I have done a google search and the .GIF offerings are lacking to say the least.
Any ideas on how this flag could be better portrayed digitally?
Speaking of different flags, the state of Ohio is the only US state with a non-rectangular flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio
Interestingly, it had no official flag until 1902.
I really do love the swallowtail flag. It's instantly recognizable. Few other states have such well-known flags; Texas perhaps with the lone star and California with the bear.
Some other instantly recognizable flags include Alaska (Big Dipper, though it’s hard to see from far away), New Mexico (sun symbol), Arizona (sunrise), South Carolina (palm tree), Tennessee (weird circle with stars), DC (white with 2 red bars + 3 red stars, Washington’s coat of arms), Maryland (nightmare that it is), and Puerto Rico (blue triangle with a star, 5 red/white stripes).
You named all the best US state flags; it goes downhill pretty fast from there. Hawaii is okay (but what country are we in again?), and Maryland is an acquired taste. Anything with text is a bad idea, as it’s supposed to be seen from a long distance. California’s flag is recognizable without the text, which can’t be said of the other fifteen with text plus circles on a field azure. Dishonorable mention to the corporate logo that is the Colorado flag.
Looked up the California one. I think it’s ugly, but when you compare with flags of states of the USA, the bar isn’t high.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_U.S._states_and_t..., it’s so bad that at least 8 states feel the need to write their name in large print on their flags (Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oregon, Iowa, California, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma; Illinois IMO is borderline large print), presumably because they fear people wouldn’t recognize it without that help.
Countless others have lots of unreadable details and small print. Wyoming, for example, would be nice if they removed that seal.
Delaware seems to have had a few flags in history that looked so similar that they wrote the date on it to make it easier to distinguish them.
Also on writing the name on the flag, North Carolina has its initials.
Honestly I'm not sure why Arkansas's flag has its name on it; it would actually be recognizable without it. It looks like the initial proposal didn't have the name written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Arkansas
Local flags can be quite interesting. That Ohio flag is beautiful, but a somewhat different result can be observed in the flag of Brown County, Nebraska: https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-ne-br.html
Off topic, but articles like this are a good case study in whether Google should return articles written for the sole purpose of marketing and SEO or not. It’s quite interesting, and probably useful when you’re researching flags. On the other hand, it’s obvious that the Kobadoo wrote it as “content marketing” ie probably paid someone to write it who has no organic motivation other than that and no particular interest in flags.
It’s easy to suggest Google just “remove the spam” but this can be a difficult conundrum.
It's only a difficult conundrum if you posit that the goal of search is to produce a single result set. Google already allows you to drill down by publish date, by target locale and language, and by all sorts of other things. I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives.
In practice any solution is probably good enough so long as it actually differentiates those use cases. Just move the slider to the region of the web you're interested in :)
Spitballing a little, if I had to manually put those on an axis I might rank them as:
(0) Sites like the Guardian that think their content is good enough to stand on its own and ask for payment (I personally want that search slider to be able to remove/include sites trying to monetize things tangential to my query, and while the Guardian pretty clearly cares about money they're also likely trying to monetize the thing I actually want to see if they show up in my search results).
(1) A tech-focused personal website that incidentally also has your CV and consulting rates.
(2) Sites like StackOverflow where the user-generated content is probably similar to what it would be outside of the site, but a money-focused censorship/environment has filtered the nature of that content.
(3) An AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management site self-linking all of its articles and prominently displaying your AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management consulting availability.
Not everyone has my personal preferences. I could definitely imagine somebody wanting all of those to be some kind of roughly the same monetary reward ranking and maybe want a separate axis/categorization describing the type of monetization.
I would love to be able to filter results to remove articles written purely for affiliate links - if I'm looking for a new washing machine, I want an impartial article from someone with industry knowledge, not someone who has taken the five most popular machines from amazon to post with Amazon Associates links
That’s a stretch.
I am certain that a square is a rectangle. A rectangle is a 4-sided polygon with four 90 degree corners. The sides can be of equal lengths.
You said the information was incorrect, but it isn't incorrect, and you've been moving the goalposts ever since.
Every rectangular flag has a specific aspect ratio and it's incorrect to make it wider or narrower than that. The Swiss flag isn't special just because that ratio is 1:1.
"So many sites" also gets most (or all) of the other flags wrong, because they pretty much always just fit the pattern on one size of rectangle. Which isn't any more correct.
>A square is a rectangle but ask the general public
I went to a church that called a "rectangle" a "square". It drove me nuts.
For context, after the first round of singing, someone would announce "kids go to children lessons, light up by the door with the green square (it was a rectangle)". They did this every service.
IMO, Google has continually trashed products that could have provided fantastic, human-curated signals for site quality. Reader, Bookmarks, several SERP experiments, and even FeedBurner could have given insight into sites that have high quality content.
The goal of google is not to provide good search results. Its to get you to view ads which make it money. The goal used to be about providing superior search but that changed a long time ago.
I've been using Anki to learn various kinds of geographic stuff, flags among them—and let me tell you, country flags around Europe sure could use some variation. I mean, I get it that flags were designed to be recognized from afar, with large fields of color, but now I have to memorize the order in all those tricolors like I'm doing middle-school rote learning again. Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that?
Also, colors are actually hard to recognize in bad lighting because retina cones are hungry for photons. On your flag, slap some large contrasting shapes instead. Test it in grayscale, figure out what it's gonna look like on gift pens, all that jazz. The UK flag is awesome and pretty much unbeatable in this regard.
I've been learning the "Ultimate Geography" Anki deck as well and I'm using a lot of mnemonics. For your specific example: I link Ireland visually to the color "green", so its flag starts with green (from the left), while ivory is a yellow-ish color, so the Ivory Coast starts with orange.
Alas, mnemonics always seemed no-go to me, at least in the usually-advocated ‘use them everywhere’ approach—because I never had any memorable ones pop up in my mind. And if I made up some random ones, I would likely just forget their associations also. IMO Anki is a very different method altogether: it just keeps the info warm in the brain until it's burned into the memory—which is supposedly approximately one the ways memory actually works.
OTOH I just learned that green and orange in the Irish flag stand for Catholics and Protestants respectively, while in the Ivory Coast flag, they symbolize some run-of-the-mill cliches. So now I'll know that when I see Catholics first, it's Ireland, and when I see “color of rich and generous earth”, that's Ivory Coast.
You're missing the main point of mnemonics, which is simply to help recall. Anki is designed to reinforce memories, but any additional context and connections help this recall.
The best way to learn is really to combine both: make once the effort to build a mnemonic for things that you don't remember easily or which you expect might end up confusing - and then use anki to reinforce this memory.
Our brain works with connections, and connections take effort to form, so all you do to form a single personal mnemonic by definition helps you build these connections, with the mnemonic then helping you later to again find this chain of neural connections that means 'flag of ireland'.
> Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that?
Presumably it is part of their tactical plan (the dreaded two-I's alliance). If you think you've beaten the Irish and they are retreating, bam, turns out Ivory Coast was actually headed your way.
I dimly recall trying to learn how to paint the Union flag (UK) for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. I came up with a novel variation that can best be described as "strangely brown". Mind you, it was quite hard to tell the difference between it being the right way up or upside down. Just like the real one!
A jack is something you fly on the back of a boat or ship (on a jackstaff). There are at least four local jacks that I can think of, eg the Army one which is red with a union flag motif in the upper left next to the staff. The RN has a white background with the union flag motif in the same place. Merk Navy - dark blue, RAF - light blue.
The Union flag is quite odd and in my opinion a masterpiece. It's not a jack.
The same pattern (lion with book vs. lion with sword) is still used today in the Italian maritime flags (civilian vs. navy). The navy flag also shows a crown above the shield.
I bet this flag is the bane of the existence of some developer maintaining a flag database or something. Like, having to rejigger the entire schema to fit this thing in, telling war-stories to the new devs coming in: "Kid, you don't even know how weird flags get...". At some point he'll write an article that's like "Falsehoods programmers believe about flags", and this will be the example for like seven of the points.
This is not correct. The Swiss flag is officially square not rectangular. The only exception is when it is display on an airplane fuselage otherwise it is supposed to be square.
The article is even wrong, while there is indeed a currently-flying intentionally-shredded flag, that's for Zamora the city and not Zamora the province (which was named for its capital, Zamora). I don't believe the province itself has its own flag, although Zamora-Chinchipe in Ecquador does have one!
As local I confirm that this flag is used in every single official building in the province of Zamora, but it was never made official. The city of Zamora did. Some details (in Spanish): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%B1a_Bermeja
Hmmm, when the Romanian (and some other) communist regimes were overthrown in 1989, people cut out the socialist coat of arms from the center of their flags. Now I'm thinking, maybe at least one of these countries should have had the good sense to make the hole in the middle of the flag official? Would have been a nice curiosity...
Well yeah, that issue is a bit contentious - Romania clearly has the older rights (having used that flag since (at least) 1848, but the catch is that when Chad adopted its current flag in 1959, Romania had the communist coat of arms in its flag. My opinion is that Chad should have done its homework and recognized that Romania might someday revert to the old flag. But maybe the francophile Romanians will follow Macron's lead and make the blue in their flags darker too, then they would be at least a little bit easier to tell apart. Not that they are really flown together that often...
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[ 0.75 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] thread[1] https://bagpipes.fandom.com/wiki/Gaita
[2] https://youtu.be/_vQYb7nFs0s
Any ideas on how this flag could be better portrayed digitally?
Hawaii, and if you're of a mood to disagree I suggest doing it quietly, and maybe just around the other haole.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_U.S._states_and_t..., it’s so bad that at least 8 states feel the need to write their name in large print on their flags (Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oregon, Iowa, California, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma; Illinois IMO is borderline large print), presumably because they fear people wouldn’t recognize it without that help.
Countless others have lots of unreadable details and small print. Wyoming, for example, would be nice if they removed that seal.
Delaware seems to have had a few flags in history that looked so similar that they wrote the date on it to make it easier to distinguish them.
For those wondering: “California Republic” comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Republic. AFAIK, no such republic exists today.
Honestly I'm not sure why Arkansas's flag has its name on it; it would actually be recognizable without it. It looks like the initial proposal didn't have the name written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Arkansas
It’s easy to suggest Google just “remove the spam” but this can be a difficult conundrum.
Fascinating idea in theory, how would you do it in practise? Three concrete examples I’d be interested in putting on that axis:
1. I publish articles on my website to encourage people to pay for my consulting services.
2. Sites like dev.to, Quora, and StackOverflow. The authors aren’t necessarily doing it for financial reward, but the site is.
3. The Guardian explicitly encourages people to pay for its website, whilst also making it freely available.
Where do you put these sites on an axis of “rewarded monetarily”?
Spitballing a little, if I had to manually put those on an axis I might rank them as:
(0) Sites like the Guardian that think their content is good enough to stand on its own and ask for payment (I personally want that search slider to be able to remove/include sites trying to monetize things tangential to my query, and while the Guardian pretty clearly cares about money they're also likely trying to monetize the thing I actually want to see if they show up in my search results).
(1) A tech-focused personal website that incidentally also has your CV and consulting rates.
(2) Sites like StackOverflow where the user-generated content is probably similar to what it would be outside of the site, but a money-focused censorship/environment has filtered the nature of that content.
(3) An AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management site self-linking all of its articles and prominently displaying your AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management consulting availability.
Not everyone has my personal preferences. I could definitely imagine somebody wanting all of those to be some kind of roughly the same monetary reward ranking and maybe want a separate axis/categorization describing the type of monetization.
Every rectangular flag has a specific aspect ratio and it's incorrect to make it wider or narrower than that. The Swiss flag isn't special just because that ratio is 1:1.
I went to a church that called a "rectangle" a "square". It drove me nuts.
For context, after the first round of singing, someone would announce "kids go to children lessons, light up by the door with the green square (it was a rectangle)". They did this every service.
Also, colors are actually hard to recognize in bad lighting because retina cones are hungry for photons. On your flag, slap some large contrasting shapes instead. Test it in grayscale, figure out what it's gonna look like on gift pens, all that jazz. The UK flag is awesome and pretty much unbeatable in this regard.
OTOH I just learned that green and orange in the Irish flag stand for Catholics and Protestants respectively, while in the Ivory Coast flag, they symbolize some run-of-the-mill cliches. So now I'll know that when I see Catholics first, it's Ireland, and when I see “color of rich and generous earth”, that's Ivory Coast.
The best way to learn is really to combine both: make once the effort to build a mnemonic for things that you don't remember easily or which you expect might end up confusing - and then use anki to reinforce this memory.
Our brain works with connections, and connections take effort to form, so all you do to form a single personal mnemonic by definition helps you build these connections, with the mnemonic then helping you later to again find this chain of neural connections that means 'flag of ireland'.
Presumably it is part of their tactical plan (the dreaded two-I's alliance). If you think you've beaten the Irish and they are retreating, bam, turns out Ivory Coast was actually headed your way.
That's far from the worst of it when it comes to national flags. Compare Indonesia and Monaco or Romania and Chad.
As for Indonesia, I learned to distinguish the shade. Still would prefer not to have to do that, of course.
The Union flag is quite odd and in my opinion a masterpiece. It's not a jack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e8PGPrPlwA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republ...
Nepal, Switzerland and the Vatican City would like to have a word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aspect_ratios_of_natio... ("List of aspect ratios of national flags")
Some fun examples:
- Denmark, defined as the exact ratio 28:37
- Vanuatu, 19:36
- El Salvador, 189:335
- Togo, φ=(1+sqrt(5))/2
Then should they be centered, left-aligned, top-left aligned...??
The fun never ends
This is not correct. The Swiss flag is officially square not rectangular. The only exception is when it is display on an airplane fuselage otherwise it is supposed to be square.