The British Foreign Secretary recently announced an agreement that will restore sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelagoto Mauritius. I don’t have enough context to understand what this means to the Chagossians in exile, but I can say this has huge implications for geography trivia — the sun will finally set on the British Empire for the first time in over four centuries!
When the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist, IANA policy says that all .io domains should also be eventually extinguished, as happened with .yu and .cs. However, the .su top-level domain still exists for the Soviet Union, so it would not be unprecedented for IANA to make an exception and keep .io around.
It’s easy to confuse the flags of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand if your eyes don’t know what to look for.
I had always distinguished between the two by the colour of the stars in the Southern Cross, but that’s sometimes hard to tell at low resolution. There’s a much easier way to tell them apart: AUS has a giant extra star in the lower left quadrant.
AUS 🇦🇺
NZL 🇳🇿
I’m on a quest to explore the creeks and waterways of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster. First, I need to understand how the topography of my neighbourhood determines the flow of water and the formation of streams.
A topographic map of the Burrard Peninsula.
Three main topological features define how water flows in the Vancouver-Burnaby-New West area:
a chain of hills running along səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard Inlet) from East Vancouver to Coquitlam, including Capitol Hill and lhuḵw’lkuḵw’áyten (Burnaby Mountain);
a ridge extending from t̕θəcəliʔqʷ (UBC) to sχʷeyəməɬ (New Westminster) along the southern half of the peninsula, with peaks at Little Mountain and the Metrotown area; and
weirdly enough, a barely perceptible incline between Nanaimo Street and Renfrew Street in East Vancouver.
These features divide the Burrard Peninsula into four watersheds, which determine where a falling raindrop will flow
north, into səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard Inlet),
northwest, into False Creek/English Bay,
south, into stal̓əw̓ (the Fraser River), or
east, through Still Creek, Burnaby Lake, and the Brunette River, before returning west via stal̓əw̓ (the Fraser River).
Most of the historic streams of Vancouver have been developed over, so rainwater now is mainly conveyed through storm drains and groundwater. In contrast, Burnaby still has plenty of streams carrying rain through its watersheds.
I’ll be exploring these streams and attempting to trace them from source to mouth. Stay tuned for more!
Shawn Mendes’ song “Lost in Japan” has had me geographically confused since I first heard it covered by Scary Pockets. If you haven’t listened to the lyrics, the song is about a person who is thinking about their crush and the possibility of taking a last-minute flight to Japan to see them.
The question I can’t get off my mind is: where is the song supposed to be taking place?
The chorus goes:
Do you got plans tonight?
I’m a couple hundred miles from Japan, and I
I was thinking I could fly to your hotel tonight
‘Cause I can’t get you off my mind
from which we can infer that
the crush is somewhere in Japan
the singer is outside of Japan, and
both people are close enough to an international airport for one to entertain the idea of flying to the other’s hotel.
The most likely candidates for airports within “a couple hundred miles from Japan” are in South Korea.
The area within 100 to 500 miles of a Japanese airport with year-round
scheduled international flights.
When I first considered the geography of the song, I was satisfied with that answer: couple of hundred miles, South Korea, that sounds about right. But then I noticed the opening lyrics:
All it’d take is one flight
We’d be in the same time zone
That would seem to rule out South Korea, which is in the same time zone as Japan. With the closest locations out of the picture, we have to stretch our interpretation of the song. Here are the possibilities I can see.
The singer could be in Shanghai
Shanghai is 500 miles (in different directions) from Okinawa and Kyūshū Islands. Shanghai Pudong International Airport was the eighth-busiest airport in the world when “Lost in Japan” was released, and has plenty of routes to both Naha and Nagasaki.
This is probably the most plausible answer if we make the thematically appropriate assumption that the lovestruck protagonist is downplaying the distance in order to convince themself that taking a last-minute flight is a good idea.
The singer could be in Vladivostok
Vladivostok is also within 500 miles of New Chitose Airport in Sapporo. This possibility is pretty funny, but unfortunately it’s ruled out by logistics. The only regular flight I could find between the two was only opened by Ural Airlines after “Lost in Japan” was released, and did not last long before world events shut it down permanently.
The singer could be in Taipei
There’s only one location that geographically fits the lyrics exactly: our protagonist is in Taiwan, and their crush is less than 200 miles away in Ishigaki on Japan’s southwesternmost inhabited archipelago.
With a creative enough interpretation, this is also consistent with the second verse:
Do I gotta convince you
That you shouldn’t fall asleep?
It’ll only be a couple hours
And I’m about to leave.
The singer is presumably in a hurry to leave because they have just checked the timetable for the only direct flight from Taipei to Ishigaki, which runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the tourist season. The flight is short enough that “a couple hours” is realistic if customs is quick.
The line about falling asleep is, of course, a request for the romantic interest to skip their usual afternoon nap, since China Airlines flight 124 arrives at 11:35am.
Vessel Finder is a map showing the current location of container ships, cruise ships, fishing boats, and other nautical vessels. It aggregates data from automatic identification systems which all sufficiently large boats are required to be fitted with.
In 1852, then-student Francis Guthrie wondered any if possible map required more than four colours. By the end of the century, Guthrie and his fellow colonists had drawn a map on Africa that needed five.
The Four-Colour Theorem says that, no matter what the borders on your map are, you only need four colours to make sure that neighbouring regions are coloured differently. The theorem doesn’t apply if you let some regions claim other disconnected regions as their own, and in fact the map of European claims on Africa required five colours by the end of the 19th century.
Francis Guthrie, who moved to the South African Cape Colony in 1861, could well have owned a map like the above. Five colours are necessary to properly colour the land that Britain (red), France (orange), Portugal (yellow), Germany (green), and Belgium’s King Leopold II (purple) decided should belong to them.
Five territorities in the center are key to the map colouring:
The boundaries between these colonies separate seven different pairs of empires. Borders between other African colonies account for the other three possible sets of neighbours:
