Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Geography Has Always Surprised Me




Even when I was in high school and college, geography always fascinated me. For me, the least surprising in this list (only because I was familiar with Mediterranean Climates):

Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Cape Town, and Sydney are each thousands of miles apart and are known for having unusually pleasant year-round climates, and they are all almost identical distances from the Equator


Easily the most stunning for me:

About 90% of the world’s population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.


That simple piece of human geography just about floored me. Then, I thought about the major centers of commerce, the dominant nation states of the world, and the points of long-lasting crises, and suddenly it was no longer that stunning. And only I failed to take it all into account. Makes me recall comedian Paul Rodriguez's quote:

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."

3 comments:

  1. I was a poor geography student. All I can say after reading the list of facts is, wow, I never knew any of that stuff.

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  2. Here's another: the interior of Antarctica is considered the largest desert on the planet (as well as the highest, coldest, windiest of all of the continents). Only the coasts receives any rain for that land mass. ;-)

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  3. I know U.S. geography fairly well, but we never even had a world geography offering when I was in school!

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