Dive into the archives.
- Off on a trip to Hokkaido
I will be spending the next ten days cycling around Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido with family. Regular readers may recall that I did a similar trip last year, and some pictures of the beautiful flora and fauna were posted shortly thereafter here.
The map of the recent trip and the planned trip can be [...]
- Metric system holdouts
Click for larger map
USA
Liberia
MyanmarVia Donklephant.
- Oceania: The “arc of instability” and the “Africanization of the South Pacific”
[Special guest blogger Phil Howison of Pacific Empire brings us his second installment introducing Oceania’s geography for our Oceania Day series. Enjoy! — YH]
Last week I wrote:
But by the 1980s, it was clear that the region was no longer entirely peaceful… Democracy appeared to be weakening, and one academic warned of “Africanisation,” forecasting a dark [...]
- Mapping piracy
The International Maritime Bureau has a live piracy map (based on the Google Maps API) which plots attacks and attempted attacks reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre. Each marker details type of attack, date and vessel type. The archives go back to 2005. The maps give you a good sense of the problem areas, [...]
- Oceania’s regions: Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia
[Special guest blogger Phil Howison of Pacific Empire brings us the second installment of our Oceania Day series. Rejoice! — YH]
The Strategist posted last week on conflict in Melanesia, a region within Oceania alongside Micronesia and Polynesia. To keep this series in context, we need to define these sub-regions, as they have distinct security [...]
- Nazi France
In research for my last post, I found this map on Wikipedia, a political demarcation of France from 1940-1944 under Nazi German occupation.
- Why am I not surprised?
A map of the signatory states to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Countries not signatories: Cuba, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Pakistan, China, Burma, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Brunei, and a few scattered states. Via Wikipedia.
Curzon’s notes: Laos and China have signed but not ratified the treaty, and none of you [...]
- Where is Europe?
The answer’s not so simple.
Where is Europe? Via Registan comes this post at A Fistful of Euros, which quotes this article at wikipedia:
The south-east boundary with Asia is not universally defined. Most commonly the Ural or, alternatively, the Emba River serve as possible boundaries. The boundary continues to the Caspian Sea, the crest of [...]
- Barnett on Diamond: “Comically Bad”
I happened upon this old post of Dr. Barnett on Jared Diamond’s Collapse and would like to take this moment to share with readers both Dr. Barnett’s comment and my response.
Thumbed through Jared Diamond’s Collapse recently, and while I liked the environmental analysis for what it’s worth, his take on politics and globalization is like [...]
- Living small
We at Coming Anarchy are enchanted by small or unrecognized polities in the process of becoming full-fledged countries. Recently Micronations — The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations was released to give adventure-travellers an alternative the run-of-the-mill UN-recognized states.
Here are countries where the national anthem is the sound of a rock being dropped into water, [...]
