Why is Java so weird?
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
It makes steel brittle.
Always look on the bright side of life.
While the article does an excellent job diving into the topic, it still leaves some questions unanswered. Because if Sumatra has mountains and volcanos and lots of rain, why are there no rivers bring all that nutrient soil from the mountains to the plains? That still sounds like an ideal situation for agriculture to me. I guess it doesn't work like that for some reason.
But if rain at the equator flushes away all the nutrient soil, then why doesn't that happen at Java? It may not be squarely on the equator like Sumatra and Borneo, but it's still pretty close. Does that not receive a similar amount of rain?
Interesting personal detail: Years ago we've been on vacation to Java and Bali. Friends of ours were working for a couple of years in Jakarta, and we visited them, but also took the opportunity to visit the rest of the island. And Java is indeed incredibly crowded. From the train trip across the island, we saw people everywhere. Rice fields as far as the eye could see. We've been to Bandung and visited an unbelievably smelly volcano there, and even the volcano, despite it's incredible stench, was crowded.
I assumed it was mostly for political reasons that Java was so crowded, because people do tend to flock to cities, which develop faster, and attract more people. So in that sense, the Indonesian government moving to Borneo in order to avoid the overpopulation of Jakarta and draw more people to Borneo and develop that region, sounds like a great idea. But if it's really because of food production, that new capital on Borneo might become incredibly dependent on Java.
Also, my grandmother lived on Sulawesi for most of her youth. There's even a statue of her father there somewhere.
(I too expected the article to be about the peculiarities of the programming language, on which I have plenty of opinion, but I guess that's for another discussion.)
I just hope they build a decent city and don't half-arse it, but knowing Indonesia...
> But if it's really because of food production, that new capital on Borneo might become incredibly dependent on Java.
This is true for a lot of places; New York City is also dependent on the rest of the United States for food, Berlin on the rest of Germany, London on the rest of the UK, Auckland on the rest of NZ, etc.
Now that you mention it, could be that that was the real reason.
> This is true for a lot of places; New York City is also dependent on the rest of the United States for food, Berlin on the rest of Germany, London on the rest of the UK, Auckland on the rest of NZ, etc.
Yes, but if food dependency wasn't a issue, then there would be no reason for Java to be so much more populous than anywhere else in the region. They could have settled in more strategic locations. I guess moving the food around still matters.
"How a coastline 100 million years ago influences modern election results in Alabama"
https://starkeycomics.com/2021/06/11/how-a-coastline-100-mil...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186005
Looks like Wired magazine did a similar piece back in 2017.
https://www.wired.com/story/alabama-election-results-voting-...
Geology shapes agriculture shapes social patterns shapes politics.
* I can't update the submission title to avoid confusion.
On volcano, I could talk about one particular volcano here, mount merapi. It regularly coughed some lava, not too big to cause countrywide panic, enough to fertilize the land around.