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The only flag of the world that is shredded by design
- smitty1e 5y agoInteresting bagpipe tradition[1] in Zamora. Here was decent example on YouTube[2]. Highland pipe aficionados will note a lack tenor drones, grips, and an emphasis on quavered notes. [1] https://bagpipes.fandom.com/wiki/Gaita https://bagpipes.fandom.com/wiki/Gaita [2] https://youtu.be/_vQYb7nFs0s https://youtu.be/_vQYb7nFs0s
- jrochkind1 5y agoIf you like that, check out the Balkan gaida too to go another step (or three) further from Scottish highland bagpipes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Zd0sQobM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Zd0sQobM
- bayindirh 5y agoAlso there's Turkish Tulum, played in the northern regions of Turkey.
- sigmaprimus 5y agoI like the concept and obviously others do too given the longevity of the flag but wonder what would this flag look like in a digital form? I have done a google search and the .GIF offerings are lacking to say the least. Any ideas on how this flag could be better portrayed digitally?
- gtirloni 5y agohttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Flags_of_the_province_of_Zamora https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Flags_of_the_pro...
- bombcar 5y agoThere are two country flags that are square - and at least Apple renders the emojis correctly.
- tcbawo 5y agoSpeaking of different flags, the state of Ohio is the only US state with a non-rectangular flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio Interestingly, it had no official flag until 1902.
- adzm 5y agoI really do love the swallowtail flag. It's instantly recognizable. Few other states have such well-known flags; Texas perhaps with the lone star and California with the bear.
- Breza 5y agoI live on the DC/Maryland border and I love both state flags.
- evanb 5y agoSome other instantly recognizable flags include Alaska (Big Dipper, though it’s hard to see from far away), New Mexico (sun symbol), Arizona (sunrise), South Carolina (palm tree), Tennessee (weird circle with stars), DC (white with 2 red bars + 3 red stars, Washington’s coat of arms), Maryland (nightmare that it is), and Puerto Rico (blue triangle with a star, 5 red/white stripes).
- labster 5y agoYou named all the best US state flags; it goes downhill pretty fast from there. Hawaii is okay (but what country are we in again?), and Maryland is an acquired taste. Anything with text is a bad idea, as it’s supposed to be seen from a long distance. California’s flag is recognizable without the text, which can’t be said of the other fifteen with text plus circles on a field azure. Dishonorable mention to the corporate logo that is the Colorado flag.
- samatman 5y ago> Hawaii is okay (but what country are we in again?) Hawaii, and if you're of a mood to disagree I suggest doing it quietly, and maybe just around the other haole.
- progre 5y agoThe list of trackers is 10 times longer than the article if you expand the cookie consent popup.
- nojs 5y agoOff topic, but articles like this are a good case study in whether Google should return articles written for the sole purpose of marketing and SEO or not. It’s quite interesting, and probably useful when you’re researching flags. On the other hand, it’s obvious that the Kobadoo wrote it as “content marketing” ie probably paid someone to write it who has no organic motivation other than that and no particular interest in flags. It’s easy to suggest Google just “remove the spam” but this can be a difficult conundrum.
- hansvm 5y agoIt's only a difficult conundrum if you posit that the goal of search is to produce a single result set. Google already allows you to drill down by publish date, by target locale and language, and by all sorts of other things. I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives.
- blowski 5y ago> I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives. Fascinating idea in theory, how would you do it in practise? Three concrete examples I’d be interested in putting on that axis: 1. I publish articles on my website to encourage people to pay for my consulting services. 2. Sites like dev.to, Quora, and StackOverflow. The authors aren’t necessarily doing it for financial reward, but the site is. 3. The Guardian explicitly encourages people to pay for its website, whilst also making it freely available. Where do you put these sites on an axis of “rewarded monetarily”?
- kzrdude 5y agoWikipedia while the donation banner is visible? :)
- hansvm 5y agoIn practice any solution is probably good enough so long as it actually differentiates those use cases. Just move the slider to the region of the web you're interested in :) Spitballing a little, if I had to manually put those on an axis I might rank them as: (0) Sites like the Guardian that think their content is good enough to stand on its own and ask for payment (I personally want that search slider to be able to remove/include sites trying to monetize things tangential to my query, and while the Guardian pretty clearly cares about money they're also likely trying to monetize the thing I actually want to see if they show up in my search results). (1) A tech-focused personal website that incidentally also has your CV and consulting rates. (2) Sites like StackOverflow where the user-generated content is probably similar to what it would be outside of the site, but a money-focused censorship/environment has filtered the nature of that content. (3) An AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management site self-linking all of its articles and prominently displaying your AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management consulting availability. Not everyone has my personal preferences. I could definitely imagine somebody wanting all of those to be some kind of roughly the same monetary reward ranking and maybe want a separate axis/categorization describing the type of monetization.
- aasasd 5y agoI've been using Anki to learn various kinds of geographic stuff, flags among them—and let me tell you, country flags around Europe sure could use some variation. I mean, I get it that flags were designed to be recognized from afar, with large fields of color, but now I have to memorize the order in all those tricolors like I'm doing middle-school rote learning again. Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that? Also, colors are actually hard to recognize in bad lighting because retina cones are hungry for photons. On your flag, slap some large contrasting shapes instead. Test it in grayscale, figure out what it's gonna look like on gift pens, all that jazz. The UK flag is awesome and pretty much unbeatable in this regard.
- yread 5y agoOr Netherlands and Luxembourg...
- darekkay 5y agoI've been learning the "Ultimate Geography" Anki deck as well and I'm using a lot of mnemonics. For your specific example: I link Ireland visually to the color "green", so its flag starts with green (from the left), while ivory is a yellow-ish color, so the Ivory Coast starts with orange.
- aasasd 5y agoAlas, mnemonics always seemed no-go to me, at least in the usually-advocated ‘use them everywhere’ approach—because I never had any memorable ones pop up in my mind. And if I made up some random ones, I would likely just forget their associations also. IMO Anki is a very different method altogether: it just keeps the info warm in the brain until it's burned into the memory—which is supposedly approximately one the ways memory actually works. OTOH I just learned that green and orange in the Irish flag stand for Catholics and Protestants respectively, while in the Ivory Coast flag, they symbolize some run-of-the-mill cliches. So now I'll know that when I see Catholics first, it's Ireland, and when I see “color of rich and generous earth”, that's Ivory Coast.
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- tromp 5y agoSounds like prime material for Sheldon Cooper presents Fun with Flags https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e8PGPrPlwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e8PGPrPlwA
- N19PEDL2 5y agoThe flag of Italian region Veneto is (partially) shredded too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Veneto https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia-DSCF9899.JPG
- PostOnce 5y agoSee also the war flag of the Republic of Venice, where the lion abandons his book for a sword. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Venice.svg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Republ...
- N19PEDL2 5y agoThe same pattern (lion with book vs. lion with sword) is still used today in the Italian maritime flags (civilian vs. navy). The navy flag also shows a crown above the shield.
- quijoteuniv 5y agoFinally «Fun with Flags» at HN!
- OskarS 5y agoI bet this flag is the bane of the existence of some developer maintaining a flag database or something. Like, having to rejigger the entire schema to fit this thing in, telling war-stories to the new devs coming in: "Kid, you don't even know how weird flags get...". At some point he'll write an article that's like "Falsehoods programmers believe about flags", and this will be the example for like seven of the points.
- viraptor 5y agoAnother option is calling it "OskarS presents: Fun with flags" (https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Sheldon_Cooper_Presents:_Fun_with_Flags https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Sheldon_Cooper_Present...)
- quickthrower2 5y agoI hope you don’t believe the other flags have the same aspect ratio.
- 867-5309 5y agothey'll run into flag being a language construct and have to rename variables fl4g
- herodoturtle 5y agoIf the dev used PNG / transparency they could stick to the standard rectangle and add transparent strips ^_^
- jaywalk 5y ago> the standard rectangle Nepal, Switzerland and the Vatican City would like to have a word.
- perihelions 5y agoEven the "normal-looking" rectangles aren't even close to standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aspect_ratios_of_national_flags https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aspect_ratios_of_natio... ("List of aspect ratios of national flags") Some fun examples: - Denmark, defined as the exact ratio 28:37 - Vanuatu, 19:36 - El Salvador, 189:335 - Togo, φ=(1+sqrt(5))/2
- sschueller 5y agohttps://blog.kobadoo.com/2022/02/the-history-behind-worlds-only-non.html https://blog.kobadoo.com/2022/02/the-history-behind-worlds-o... This is not correct. The Swiss flag is officially square not rectangular. The only exception is when it is display on an airplane fuselage otherwise it is supposed to be square.
- JeanMeche 5y agoA square is in fact a rectangle.
- petepete 5y agoOblongular is a word that's not used often enough.
- sschueller 5y agoTechnically true but from the way I understand the article they are implying Oblongular.
- yccs27 5y agoThen the mistake is not in their statement, but in your interpretation.
- dzqhz 5y agoYou should have used the word "actually"
- zinekeller 5y agoThe article is even wrong, while there is indeed a currently-flying intentionally-shredded flag, that's for Zamora the city and not Zamora the province (which was named for its capital, Zamora). I don't believe the province itself has its own flag, although Zamora-Chinchipe in Ecquador does have one!
- alvarado 5y agoAs local I confirm that this flag is used in every single official building in the province of Zamora, but it was never made official. The city of Zamora did. Some details (in Spanish): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%B1a_Bermeja https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%B1a_Bermeja
- zinekeller 5y agoThat's even more confusing!
- hackernewds 5y ago
- rob74 5y agoHmmm, when the Romanian (and some other) communist regimes were overthrown in 1989, people cut out the socialist coat of arms from the center of their flags. Now I'm thinking, maybe at least one of these countries should have had the good sense to make the hole in the middle of the flag official? Would have been a nice curiosity...
- DonaldFisk 5y agoIn the case of Romania, its having a hole in its flag would have made it easier to tell it apart from the flag of Chad.
- rob74 5y agoWell yeah, that issue is a bit contentious - Romania clearly has the older rights (having used that flag since (at least) 1848, but the catch is that when Chad adopted its current flag in 1959, Romania had the communist coat of arms in its flag. My opinion is that Chad should have done its homework and recognized that Romania might someday revert to the old flag. But maybe the francophile Romanians will follow Macron's lead and make the blue in their flags darker too, then they would be at least a little bit easier to tell apart. Not that they are really flown together that often...