At 1:34 PM -0400 05/12/2000, Darryl Shannon wrote:
>Wow. For an amazing eye-opener, check out the Korean peninsula. This
>is the only political border I've been able to spot. US/Mexico,
>Western Europe/Eastern Europe both blend together, other boundaries are
>geographic like India suddenly stopping at the Himalayas.
Is that the outer edge of Xinjiang that is a line there? I think so, and
yet I'm surprised to see the Xinjiang side of the border has more lights
than the Kazakhstan side. I know it's not the most populous region in the
world, but the darkness in Central Asia (North of the Himalayas) was a bit
of a shock for me, even though I kinda knew to expect it.
Something else that surprised me was the distribution of lights in North
America: I didn't think it would be so much more Eastern than Western.
>So here's one more indication that North Korea deserves the title "Real
>World Country that most closely resembles '1984'".
*grin* That's probably true, in terms of the literal stuff in 1984 like
ignorance and poverty used as a weapon against the masses. But it's funny,
I was looking at the opposite -- at the amount of light being put out,
rather than the lack of light. The disparities between light-output and
population are shocking if you think about it for a few moments, and think
about the general resource consumption that goes on around it in general...
I didn't think of _1984_ immediately, but in that novel, there is an inner
party who has real coffee and so on, while the masses simply have to do
without. The map looks different from that perspective.
Hmm. Depends what you're looking at and for, I guess. :)
