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The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

blog.kobadoo.com

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Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#21
post #17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives. 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…

Wikipedia while the donation banner is visible? :)

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#22
post #11
post #7

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.

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.

For those wondering: “California Republic” comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Republic. AFAIK, no such republic exists today.

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

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'.

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#27

The flag of Italian region Veneto is (partially) shredded too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG

See also the war flag of the Republic of Venice, where the lion abandons his book for a sword.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republ...

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#28

The flag of Italian region Veneto is (partially) shredded too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG

See also the war flag of the Republic of Venice, where the lion abandons his book for a sword. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republ...

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.

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#29
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.

Re: The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

#30
post #29

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…

Another option is calling it "OskarS presents: Fun with flags" (https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Sheldon_Cooper_Present...)
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