Strange Maps

Edit: Wow, comment turned out to be very long, background on lots of historical periods. tl;dr is that propaganda and flimsy motives is by no means a Nazi thing, not at all. It's standard operating procedure for most causes and almost all wars in history. History is re-written afterwards to make the story simpler and easier to follow, but most wars and fights had flimsy motives and two sides when they were started. Later, the loser is deemed to be "evil", and the winner's cause was just and never in doubt. Some history with links that might be interesting for other people who enjoy learning history.

Personally, I'm a large fan of learning about all sorts of things, and history is one of the things I love the most. What got me interested in history was learning about Sengoku Japan -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period

Now, the Japanese people have some strong ideas about Sengoku, but they're mixed ideas with conflict and debate about who the "good guys" were. It's funny because I'd made my conclusions and opinions on a number of the leaders of the era, only to find out that many Japanese people have much greater or worse opinions on certain people. By learning from a true outsider's perspective, I feel like I got more of the legitimate story than the propaganda. Besides, there's no debate as to the merits of the caste system, or whether power is better consolidated under the Emperor who is God-on-Earth, or the Shogun, who is ostensibly the chief servant of the…

California has a lot of problems, sure, but this article seems to blow many of them out of proportion. Some of the statistics sound shocking, but the author fails to make comparisons to other states.

The statistic that 95% of the people live in 5% of the land sounds bad, but I bet it isn't that much different than other states. Also, California looks big on a map, but you must remember that 45% of the land in California is owned by the federal government. That means that the land is generally off limits to housing people. Some people like park rangers and military personal might live on federal land, but very few do.
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/291-federal-lands-in-the-us/

I live in Santa Rosa and my biggest problems with California are prop 13 and the zoning laws that encourage sprawl. California planners don't seem to like multi-use zones, so strip malls and sprawling apartment complexes pop up all over. I want to live in an apartment in a livable, diverse community on the same street as stores and restaurants, but this is extremely rare outside of places like San Francisco.

I don't mean to suggest that I hold you personally responsible for submitting rubbish to Hacker News. I neither hold you responsible -- because people ought to be encouranged to share interesting things -- nor think your link was rubbish!

However, I personally don't find any of the individual maps particularly clever. It's originalish, but I prefer

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

It's a blog of real maps, so a slightly different idea. I've just submitted the latter, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of response that gets.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184439