The only flag of the world that is shredded by design
blog.kobadoo.com
blog.kobadoo.com
Nepal, Switzerland and the Vatican City would like to have a word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aspect_ratios_of_natio... ("List of aspect ratios of national flags")
Some fun examples:
- Denmark, defined as the exact ratio 28:37
- Vanuatu, 19:36
- El Salvador, 189:335
- Togo, φ=(1+sqrt(5))/2
Then should they be centered, left-aligned, top-left aligned...??
The fun never ends
It’s easy to suggest Google just “remove the spam” but this can be a difficult conundrum.
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 is.
3. The Guardian explicitly encourages people to pay for its website, whilst also making it freely available.
Where do you put these sites on an axis of “rewarded monetarily”?
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.
Every rectangular flag has a specific aspect ratio and it's incorrect to make it wider or narrower than that. The Swiss flag isn't special just because that ratio is 1:1.
I went to a church that called a "rectangle" a "square". It drove me nuts.
For context, after the first round of singing, someone would announce "kids go to children lessons, light up by the door with the green square (it was a rectangle)". They did this every service.
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.
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
Hawaii, and if you're of a mood to disagree I suggest doing it quietly, and maybe just around the other haole.
Also, colors are actually hard to recognize in bad lighting because retina cones are hungry for photons. On your flag, slap some large contrasting shapes instead. Test it in grayscale, figure out what it's gonna look like on gift pens, all that jazz. The UK flag is awesome and pretty much unbeatable in this regard.
Presumably it is part of their tactical plan (the dreaded two-I's alliance). If you think you've beaten the Irish and they are retreating, bam, turns out Ivory Coast was actually headed your way.
OTOH I just learned that green and orange in the Irish flag stand for Catholics and Protestants respectively, while in the Ivory Coast flag, they symbolize some run-of-the-mill cliches. So now I'll know that when I see Catholics first, it's Ireland, and when I see “color of rich and generous earth”, that's Ivory Coast.
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'.
The Union flag is quite odd and in my opinion a masterpiece. It's not a jack.
That's far from the worst of it when it comes to national flags. Compare Indonesia and Monaco or Romania and Chad.
As for Indonesia, I learned to distinguish the shade. Still would prefer not to have to do that, of course.
Any ideas on how this flag could be better portrayed digitally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republ...
This is not correct. The Swiss flag is officially square not rectangular. The only exception is when it is display on an airplane fuselage otherwise it is supposed to be square.