When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to.
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.
The Concepción metro area is 1 million people, Valparaíso/Viña as well. Chileans love to point out that there isn't much outside of Santiago but it's not really true.
is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or less and how I could drive in and then back out of their downtowns in just a few blocks I was kind of shocked on how small most places are
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.
"BosWash" was the term E.F. Schumacher used for the east-coast conurbanation, in 1973. Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington. In Small is Beautiful: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful>
I thought the same thing when flying from west coast to east coast, but in a different way.
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.
That is a really nice bit of information communication. Hat's off! I feel like I learned a lot and that always makes me happy.
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".
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]
Interesting. I’ve had a pet research project that had a lot of anomalous cultural data points pointing into ancient Japanese pollination in places where many would be surprised by today’s “standard history.” It seems there’s deep connections across South America to Japan.
I was recently watching some YouTube videos about early contact between Europeans and Japanese. A lot of that was contact with Portugal, and from there they had contact with Spain and Italy, so they did go to Iberian colonies in the new world.
I'm also wondering if the Andes are steeper than the Rocky mountains? Some quick Googling suggests that might be the case but I'm not getting a definitive answer.
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.
My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
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.
Rather, go to Atacama, in Chile. It's a desert with pretty transparent air and little to no clouds, far from anywhere, and easier to traverse than a forest.
It's also rather closer to the South pole, so not as hot as Amazon.
Apparently the desert in Kashmir (I think Ladakh specifically) is also excellent for astronomy for similar reasons - a dry desert, cool due to its altitude, and also benefits from thinner air causing lesser distortion.
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 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.
The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.
Fair point about the exact terminology but those are tiny two lane roads with impassable grades for the majority of commercial traffic. The term highway has drifted in colloquial use (hence your use of the word “was”).
> My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
Pine Mountain Observatory, if you're on the West coast, has some of the darkest skies, best weather and stable atmosphere for good seeing. 24 inch telescope, too.
The problem with your takeaway is that you a) won't be able to realistically get deep into the amazon rainforest and b) the tree canopy would cover all of the sky ;)
I think the graphics have numerous sources and mostly/entirely aren't made by the post author. There are five different styles in the first six map images!
You should have very dry air for the best place, which I guess with all that Amazon rainforest thing, would not be your best option. Chile has the one of the driest deserts in the world.
I love these maps, it’s an awesome collection! I make data vis maps for my day job and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that each of these are completely bespoke, made by different people, using a unique technique - python, hand drawing, ArcGIS, Blender, and even R can be used to make these, and I usually use deck.gl
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
Not really, that would probably be the north of Chile on the Atacama desert, there's a reason why the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope and Vera C. Rubin are being built there.
Watching this footage of the Very Large Telescope in Chile was the first time I really grasped that we're all together on a rock tumbling through the vastness of space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ
The sky from the top of Mauna Kea is ridiculous, and it's pretty easy to get there: fly to the big island of Hawaii, then sign up for the tour, I think it's less than $100. The milky way is stunning.
Just check the lunar phase before you book. Made the mistake of being in Hawaii during the full moon, so we didn’t get much of a view of the stars on our Mauna Kea trip. Don’t get me wrong - the experience of visiting to the top and watching the telescopes opening up was worth the trip, but we missed out on a real stargazing opportunity.
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
My nomination for night sky viewing: Ölgii in western Mongolia (was there for the golden eagle festival). Clear desert sky, accessible by airplane, not a tiny town either.
How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I ask because the dialects spoken in Argentina and in Uruguay are practically identical, save for a few regional words. If the scale being used puts them at 0.35, then it makes me wonder about the usefulness of the scale.
Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries.
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.
Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".
You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]).
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.
> 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.
I agree. Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish are very close. I'd expect to have seen .85 or so. Argentine and Chilean Spanish are not that far apart either -- or at least they weren't 30 years ago.
I have no idea. Also there is no standard spanish even in Spain. Like Andalucian spanish and Domenican spanish have a lot in common but vary greatly with other forms of spanish.
When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
Yeah, I was wondering about these two countries myself. Also it was very strange to see the Peru and Cuba correlation, those two dialects are nothing alike.
People from both countries can speak a version of Spanish that is mutually intelligible. But if you go into a high school (or even listen to adults that are being very casual) then it'd sound wildly different.
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.
The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s).
> 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.
Disclaimer: I live in Chile, but not a Chilean national(nor of similar ethnicity), and certainly not a historian.
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.
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
Yeah, you are missing the backstory for that, which another commenter mentioned. Bolivia violated a treaty they had with Chile, and also had a secret alliance with Peru. They violated the treaty so they would go to war with Chile, and then team with Peru and try to conquer Chile. However, Chile had a very recently professionalized army and navy trained by the Germans, whereas Bolivia and Peru had peasants conscripted.
(To this day the Chilean armed forces are amongst the most trained in the world.)
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.
If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".
One of the most interesting drives in my life was Chile from the island of Chiloe to the Tatio Geysers in the Atacama. Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
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.
> Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
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.
I was recently in the big island and this was both unexpected and wild to me. The difference of a couple miles could have an enormous impact on the weather over time. We stayed a couple of days in Volcano Village and like clockwork it'd be rainy there but sunny or at least partly sunny just a few miles down the street. Then there are rain forests, cloud forests, deserts, and every thing in between.
And yet another place like this is in Southern California if you drive in an easterly direction starting on San Diego and ending in the Salton Sea, going through Ramona and Julien. You go from an area with a Mediterranean climate to temperate deciduous forests to coniferous forests to cold, high-elevation desert to hot, low-elevation desert (Anza Borrego Desert). This is all within about 50 miles (80km). It's a fascinating drive!
>so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity
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.
Torres del Paine in the south is pretty brutal to get to if you're not used to long flight but it is breathtaking. Definitely a bucket list trip if you enjoy nature and wildlife, hiking, etc.
It's nice, but unfortunately listed on nearly every tour guide of Chile, so these days it's flooded with tourists most of the time. You'll have a much better time seeing other places slightly off the beaten track.
Vancouver when the cherry blossoms are in bloom is interesting, the different elevations and the different progress of the trees is fun to pay attention to.
I travelled to Chile earlier this year and visited Atacama and Torres de Paine.
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.
Actually you can cross the entirety of Chile by car if you don't mind taking a ferry that starts in Puerto Montt and arrives in Puerto Natales. It is 4 day trip, but the scenery is gorgeous.
Regarding the rail system, Chile had a great rail system that went from Arica to Puerto Montt with lots of spurs going into inner towns. However it was slowly dismantled and now most of the rails are in disuse, or used for the transport of goods.
There is still a main rail for passenger transport, but most people prefers taking the bus or driving because of convenience.
Looking at the map of southern Chile, it's pretty obvious why this is so. It's just immense mountains and fjords. Building a road across that terrain would be a major challenge, requiring many bridges capable of surviving harsh conditions. All to deserve a minuscule population? Chile isn't Norway...
I tried to cross the border into Argentina north of Puerto Montt. I wanted to check out the Argentinian side for a day or two. But they wouldn't let me across the border with my rental car, and I got turned back. I suppose the rules are a little bit different in the far south?
I’m told that prior to industrialization there were areas along the Andes (in Peru for sure, presumably Chile as well) where you rarely if ever met the tribes living uphill or downhill from you. It was way easier to travel north and south.
Quite the contrary, the management of the different ecological floors was the specialty of the inhabitants of the Andes, even now. The same community owns and uses land at different altitudes, which can range from 1000 to 4000 meters above sea level. This generated an economy based on the exchange of goods along vertical lines.
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.
This author wrote a number of pretty influential essays during the early pandemic advocating for mask use, social distancing, and other mitigations. He's a trained educator, so the effectiveness of communication is definitely no accident:
My gf is a trained educator too with two masters somehow related to education. She teaches 8th grade English but has also taught highschool.
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.
Apart from a few other factors, the biggest one that stands out is not stringing you along in a click-baity way, instead just asking a question and giving a direct answer right after the question and in simple direct words.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
The author Tomas Pueyo grew up in a family of filmmakers. For his Stanford MBA he specialized in behavioral psychology, design, storytelling, and scriptwriting. I have to imagine that has some influence on his writing
Bingo. For all its flaws, Twitter threads can be a nice way of delivering a point. I think the character limit implicitly encourages a kind of brevity which you wouldn't get anywhere else.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post. A breath of fresh air among all the click-bitey and false buildup so common in content these days. PLEASE DO TRAIN THE GPTs ON THIS GUY
I thought it would be dense, but it was lighthearted and didn't take itself too seriously, and both shared information and fun questions to ask. I enjoyed the speculation which had not even a shred of political or social agenda anywhere in sight. Just pure fun.
I hate it. Seems to me it's full of clickbaits. "Find out what happens next", "What's going on?", "What's happening?", "So why is Chile so long, but not longer?".
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
Readit News
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz/
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
https://pmo.uoregon.edu/
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.
1: https://youtu.be/Hs-rgvkRfwc
2: https://youtu.be/Z660sool2L4?t=49
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.
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.
> 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.
https://time.com/5413887/bolivia-chile-pacific/
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up
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.
https://haubooks.org/reciprocity-and-redistribution/
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/obituaries/24murra.html
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.
https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/1807380049605091537
4th grade English
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.