Alasdair Rae Profile picture
Maps, stats, data, cities, density, elections, gifs, geo + QGIS training with Map Academy - founder of Automatic Knowledge

Nov 7, 2021, 13 tweets

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'random Canadian-Scottish geography questions you can answer quickly while having your breakfast at the weekend'

- I may also have calculated the Scottish-Latitude population of Canada while I was at it, surprisingly low

plus, not everyone knows that the northern bits of Shetland are further north than the southern tip of Greenland - and even when you hear this you are duty-bound to check it yourself on Google maps because it sounds made up

the answer to my vital question, thanks to some 10km gridded data, is that a little over 570,000 people would appear to live at Scottish latitudes in Canada, and I think we can all sleep easy now

open.canada.ca/data/en/datase…

to end this little 'We the North' thread, I'll add in a global Scotland-latitudes donut map with a few places labelled - area shown in bright circle is roughly between 54.63 (Mull of Galloway) and 60.85 degrees north (Muckle Flugga)

putting together more training datasets and finding out all sorts of interesting 🤓 stuff that I probably sort of already knew but hadn't seen in a latitude donut map before

probably should include New Zealand latitudes in this thread as well

north isn't actually a direction at all but a state of being, a mindset, a way of life and did you know more than 2,000 people live in Longyearbyen in Svalbard (an entirely visa-free zone, as it happens - see the Svalbard Treaty)

I've never been, but Svalbard Museum did once send me a very warm hat! (made in New Zealand)

these different polar coordinate systems are a) quite a good way of teaching/learning about projections, b) an interesting way of looking at the world, and c) good for making 'what's at the top vs what's at the bottom' comparisons - e.g. 👇

one last tip for anyone looking to try this - in QGIS you can just right-click > Copy Coordinate > and then hit the Map CRS - option to identify any lat/long you want, or Set Custom CRS... to add a different coordinate system to the list and copy lat/long - it's quite handy

I'm planning to do a little write up of methods on all this on my blog fairly soon, including how to very quickly create a glowy globe in QGIS with just a few layers of free data

adding Nova Scotia to this thread, as suggested by @Arnold_Platon

borrowed the colours from the very excellent Nova Scotia flag, obviously

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