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The only flag of the world that is shredded by design

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

#71

Post by aasasd »

gerdesj wrote: post #68
aasasd wrote: post #14

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…

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!

I had to go recheck and assure myself that Union Jack is still rotationally symmetrical.

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

#72

Post by rob74 »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #63
rob74 wrote: post #62

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...

In the case of Romania, its having a hole in its flag would have made it easier to tell it apart from the flag of Chad.

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...

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

#73

Post by madcaptenor »

Someone wrote: post #22
adzm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), presu…

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

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

#74

Post by cafard »

labster wrote: post #39
evanb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 corpora…

Corporate logo?

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

#75

Post by gerdesj »

aasasd wrote: post #71
gerdesj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I had to go recheck and assure myself that Union Jack is still rotationally symmetrical.

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.

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

#76

Post by hansvm »

blowski wrote: post #17
hansvm wrote: 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…

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.

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

#77

Post by Breza »

adzm wrote: post #11
tcbawo wrote: 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.

I live on the DC/Maryland border and I love both state flags.
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