How Old Is Your Globe? | Hacker News Reader

How Old Is Your Globe?

replogleglobes.com

48 pointsTomte18 comments

Well, mine has Abyssinia on it, in a nice shade of pink, and a large chunks of inland Africa are just this big old white expanse with some pictures of funky looking lions. Antarctica is made of brass as there's nothing important down there.

It's 1860something, when the last bits of terra incognita were being mopped up. Like to be reminded that only recently there was still wonder and mystery in the world.

When did white spots disappear from maps? Going by my parents' off-hand comments, maps showing Africa and South America still had big white blobs in the 1960s. Eventually they were filled in with satellite maps, but when was that? 1970s? 80s?

The only one I have with a white spot is from the mid 1930s (one of the few Globes in which all of Africa, sans Liberia, is a colony). There's a white spot on the southern bit of the Arabian peninsula, just north of Yemen / N Yemen / Oman.

> You will need the Flash plug-in to view [the products page].

How Old Is Your Website? :-)

(And the list is missing South Sudan, which gained independence 4 years ago…)

Perhaps not all globes show Kosovo as independent, but it's also missing Kosovo (2008).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Kosovo_declaration_of_ind...

Wikipedia has a great list that could help in dating both other websites with this kind of information and globes. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_map_changes

Kosovo may have declared independence in 08 but it still has many international members to convince, including a significant portion of the UN Security Council.

It's not a sovereign state at least not a recognized by the UN it lacks about half the votes it needs in the general assembly so it hasn't even been brought to the UNSC yet.

On this same note you could get claim that South Ossetia is an independent nation, and to be fair at least it has a permanent member backing it even if it's "just" Russia ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_A...

It's rather sparse since 2000. For example South Sudan in 2011 is missing in the list.

I got some island in the middle of the med that's called Atlantis on mine can you help me date this globe?

Ceylon caught my eye. It's the former name of Sri Lanka as well as being the name of a cross-platform language that's currently on the homepage.

Brilliant!

>Related: 13 people trying to figure out how old a globe is on Quora https://www.quora.com/How-old-can-this-globe-be

1948 for mine!

https://twitter.com/incanus77/status/659401447830777856

Discussed in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946430

Some areas are fractally similar on a smaller scale, or even more active than the world on average, think of the Spratly Islands, or the Balkan peninsula.

Ha! This is a game I play pretty much every time I see a globe for sale or in someone's house.

Isn't Burma Myanmar these days?

From Wikipedia: "Many political and ethnic opposition groups and countries continue to use "Burma" because they do not recognise the legitimacy of the ruling military government or its authority to rename the country."

My globe's so old it's flat.

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