Why is Chile so long?
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.
I think this is where you gave it away. Nobody will believe this and we're all moving to south Chile now.
1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile.
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.
My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.
Others won’t share that definition.
It's sprawled more since.
Apparently the term was coined by Herman Kahn in 1967: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash>
In california a postage-stamp sized lot is a million dollars, yet flying over endless land all day in a plane at 600 mph, I couldn't help but think it might all be a scam.
You can learn more here https://elsemieni.net/megavision/
[Cerveza Cristal theme]
One quibble. At the end it mentions why Mexico's west was of interest to the Spanish, but neglects possibly the most important part - it was where the Spanish galleons from the Philippines first landed after the grueling trip across the Pacific as detailed beautifully in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle".
Samurai were documented as guards on galleons brought to Mexico. It needs to be a movie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Pan_(novel)
Shogun is about Japan in the Samurai period and Taipan is about Hong Kong a few centuries ago.
Both novels are about those periods and about Westerners interacting with those countries at that time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell
[
Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys".[21] The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).[22]
]
Gradual elevation is certainly easier to build roads across than a cliff, and might be another reason there's less east-west divide in North America.
> Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America.
> You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land to their west is Chile.
And going north<->south is so easy, that anyone doing it could likely cover the whole country pretty quick. So odds are, if there were two countries in that area, there would be just one pretty quickly.
Definitely one of those ‘geography defines the culture and the borders’ situations.
That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.
That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.
The stars seemed to shine 10x brighter than other places, even those without light pollution.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the interior of Australia is STAGGERINGLY the best for stargazing. It's not even close.
This was a single 8 second exposure. [1] and I'm not a great photographer. The milky way was so bright it kept me awake in my tent.
I've been on a dark ship in the middle of the ocean and that was pretty good for stargazing, though I guess Australia might be a tiny bit better due to less reflective surface (compared to the ocean)?
I found your description inspiring.
I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.
US 40, 6, and 50 would like a word.
They weren't connected by an interstate before that. But you said "highway". US 6 was a highway, and it ran through the exact same Glenwood Canyon.
Check out Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park
For the North American peeps, check out the western part of the US.
*edit: and forecasts https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/
This one is more mobile-friendly, IMO.
We have zero snakes and very few dangerous spiders and you'd have to try very hard to find them, they're rather shy.
Also, we make great coffee and beer.
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other.
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...
Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language.
I think it might actually mean unintelligible. If you read on the term "dialect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect it says in part:
> There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language.
The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity.
Not a linguist though.
As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends.
On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
I met my ex-wife in Madrid where I lived for 4 years and where she was from. That's where I learned Spanish as a second language. After we moved back to California, we obviously met and spoke to many Mexicans over the years. Zero problems communicating for her, ever. Spanish is still Spanish.
Also, the Spanish Royal Academy for the language logs every word from Iberia to Mexico and the Patagonia at their online dictionary, so everyone can guess the meaning of a local word in the spot.
Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard".
> I understand it to be based on Castilian.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"...
It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
A: Yes
> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.
The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions.
>In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta [es] (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Chile/The-War-of-the-Pacifi...
The result? Bolivia lost all of its coastline, and Peru also lost its southern territories.
You can summarize the war as in Bolivia and Peru fcked around, and then found out.
Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest.
The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was California-like. Very temperate in Summer, and very green. Lots of pastures and rivers.
The region becomes progressively more "Mediterranean" as you move further north; one gradually sees fewer pastures and woodlands, more vineyards, olive trees, and fruit orchards. Santiago is on the far northern end of this Mediterranean zone. The great wine regions are generally to the south and west of that capital city.
A few hours north of Santiago and all is desert -- but it's a fairly live desert, with all sorts of succulent plants and many types of flower. Most of the road traffic in these parts comes from copper miners and their work trucks.
Continue north and you're in a dry, mostly empty, moonscape. Antofagasta and Calama are nice enough towns, though, and the interesting drive from the former to the latter takes just two hours but sees you rise from sea level to +2000m. It's such a gentle and relentless slope that you barely notice it. Nothing at all like driving in the Alps.
I broke something in my rental car when I continued to the geysers at +4000m, but it was worth it.
Another place like this, perhaps lesser in scale, is the Big Island of Hawaii. Its latitude means the trade winds are blowing from the same direction year-round, bringing moisture to the windward side (e.g. Hilo, HI with 120" average annual rainfall) and leaving the leeward side dry (e.g. Kailua-Kona, HI with under 20" average annual rainfall), on the other side of massive volcanoes. And you can go from the ocean to almost 14k feet in elevation in an hour's drive; this may be one of the only places in the world where you can do that.
All of this means that as you move around Big Island, based on the precipitation, humidity, and elevation, you're going to see wildly different environments mere minutes' drive from each other. It truly has to be seen to be believed.
Yes. Just mountain climbing in northern Patagonia (between Bariloche & Villarica, really only 100mi of north-south distance) became my favorite part of the world for your reason. In a single day (or two), we could walk in the dry, dusty bottom of a canyon dug out by glacier melt, cross through a humid jungle, rest on the shores of an alpine lake, pick your way across a massive rocky field of a'a lava, up a glacier and look down inside the caldera of an active volcano.
The only other place I have been that come close to having that amount of diversity of terrain in a limited area might be the Tetons/Yellowstone.
I love Chiloe and Los Lagos region. I would buy a “southern summer” house there if I didn’t have kids in school.
The thing that boggled my mind was that you can't drive between the two without a very long detour through Argentina. Chile has literally no road linking the northern part with the southernmost part without going outside the country.
It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there. A long, slim country is ideal for high speed rail.
See one of my other comments in this post regarding the rail in Chile.
That would require the upper class to mix with the poor. Not acceptable in Chile.
It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/the-overnight-coronavirus-exp...
She can't write or communicate at any level beyond typical hairdresser. Considering it's very hard to fail out of most upper level education unless you simply don't do the work at all, we really should stop giving people so much credit for just getting degrees.
It's what you do with it that matters and how you devote yourself on your own time that makes people great. And that's what the previous commenter was doing. Trying to give credit to some education system someone went through is taking away from the person that actually made something of themselves, almost always by themselves.
Side note, I graduated with a MechE degree from UC Berkeley. Decent grades. I can honestly say I learned almost nothing. I just did a ton of work they wanted. If I made something of myself in the engineering field, I promise it wasn't because of UC Berkeley.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
4th grade English
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
I was briefly disoriented when I stayed on the North coast of Cyprus where the situation is the opposite.
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?
Edit: s/Columbia/Colombia/; s/expensive/expense/
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
As a Chilean living in the US, seeing this on HN made my day - it’s not often the rest of the world (outside of South America) remembers we exist.
I have to say though that Chilean spanish is commonly considered quite hard to understand, they speak really fast with lots of mannerisms and "can't understand a single thing of a Chilean speaking" is a common meme in Argentina at the very least.
And even that data is kind of suspect, based on a simple glimpse at the screenshot, which shows idioms for "ISN'T IT?". Colombians definitely would say all of the following, unlike shown in the table:
A cada quien le va según quiere Dios, ____
- cierto?
- no?
- o no?
- si o no?
From my experience, (Portuguese native speaker who learned Spanish) Colombian Spanish is much easier than Mexican. And the worst Spanish, by far, is from the Dominican Republic. Chile is not that bad, it is quite close to Argentinian, actually.
Indigenous language effecting Spanish is something that would effect everyone in South America, so even if you remove Spain from the table, Colombia, Chile, the Caribbean and Costa Rica will all stand out about how "different" they are from the rest of South America, probably from their physical barriers separating them from the rest of the continent.
Oddly enough, albeit anecdotal, this is true everywhere; in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south. That said, if it's also true for Chile then it means it's not related to the climate.
Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south
If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
Source: I lived there
Better source: https://www.marcachile.cl/en/interesting-facts-about-chile-a...
The Antarctic claim is taken seriously, though. It comes from The Treaty of Tordesillas
If I had to come up with an excuse for not having trains, I'd chose that.
"el weon weon, weon."
Is a polysemic word, but when used as adjective means "somebody with big balls"; by extension "somebody that spends the day sitting on their own testicles, unable to carry them"
So a huevón is "a lazy lad", "a douchebad" or simply "a dude" (colloquially and vulgar, but also playful if applied to a close friend).
The word is a minefield, some people will feel amused, other insulted, and is a faux pas with women. Better avoid it unless you know what you are doing.
Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific.
Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter.
Back then, guano was the world’s main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate).
"""
That fertilizer produced iconic advertising in mid XX Century Portugal and Spain: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertisin...
I never quite figured out what it meant.
As a native Spanish speaker, I find this quite interesting. For me, Chileans are within the category of "easy to understand" while I might struggle a bit understanding some accents that the article qualifies as easy or normal.
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
Also, I had no idea Chile is sooo long.
Technically New Zealand is the exposed portion of a continental sliver.
If you imagine the full graph of all countries horizontally and vertically, there would be a lot of overlap (the PR column and DR row, and the DR column and PR row). So to save that redundancy, for all countries except Spain (very top) and Argentina (far right) you have to look around a bit to see where it crosses any other given country.
I miss the Inca though. Talking about Chile without mentioning the Inca Empire is like talking about Italy without mentioning the Roman Empire.
For example, my wife learned English later in life and can understand neutral/midwestern American fine, but has tons of trouble with southern and northeastern regional accents.
Looks like they're rating "difficulty" as "difference from Spanish in Spain". Considering that Spaniards only represent about 10% of the total Spanish-speaking population, I'm not sure that's fair.
These memes are popular in Latin America, it's definitely not just a Spain thing.
Argentine Spanish is the strange one, due to the heavy Italian influence.
See also “chilean empire map” (it’s not serious).