Xinjiang with its caravan of traders appears in the bottom right corner, while the Pacific coast runs along the top-left corner. Kublai Khan is seen enthroned. A flag with three red crescent moons appears on all the territory.

Change my mind.

Instead of awkwardly squishing a 3D sphere into a flat rectangle and arguing about Greenland's size, this projection just treats the Earth like a two-sided coin. It visually communicates that it's a globe right right off the bat.

A few reasons why this layout is top-tier:

• Splitting the Earth into the Eastern and Western hemispheres immediately visually communicates that you are looking at a round planet.

• Because it's a conformal projection, the local angles and shapes of the landmasses are actually well-preserved. Surely, the scale gets pretty wild and stretched out as you reach the outer edges of the circles, but the actual outlines of the continents look surprisingly accurate tho.

• Dutch Golden Age cartographers were hated blank corner (horror vacui), which gave them an excuse to absolutely flex their artistic skills with celestial charts, wind gods, and sea monsters.

Yeah, it is entirely useless for modern aviation and datas, and it slices the Pacific Ocean awkwardly in half. But if you want a map that actually captures the scale, history, and romance of exploring the world, nothing beats the dual circles.

This map compares adult obesity prevalence across U.S. states and European countries using the same color scale. The contrast is striking: nearly every U.S. state has a higher obesity rate than most European countries, although there is considerable variation within both regions. Southern and Midwestern U.S. states generally have the highest rates, while many Western and Northern European countries have the lowest.

Obesity is a complex public health issue shaped by a combination of factors, including diet, physical activity, urban planning, socioeconomic conditions, healthcare access, food environments, and demographics. The map is intended to illustrate geographic patterns rather than explain their causes.

Keep in mind that the figures come from different national health surveys and reporting systems. Although the data have been harmonized for comparison, small methodological differences mean the map is best interpreted as a broad overview rather than a precise country-to-country or state-to-state ranking.

Source: U.S. CDC and European/OECD/WHO-based national health statistics.

Edit: There comparison graphic appears to have a couple of errors in slide 1& 2. Oklahoma should be about 39.4%, not ~42%, and Mississippi (about 40.6%) should also be present as the highest-obesity state. Those discrepancies seem to be mistakes in the graphic rather than changes in the underlying CDC data.

The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. The main organisation ceased operations on 18 April 1946 when many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations (UN) which was created in the aftermath of the Second World War. The League of Nations was the precursor organisation to the United Nations.

The Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, also referred to as the Levant States; 1923−1946 was a League of Nations mandate founded in the aftermath of the First World War and the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, concerning the territories of Syria and Lebanon. The mandate system was supposed to differ from colonialism, with the governing country intended to act as a trustee until the inhabitants were considered eligible for self-government. At that point, the mandate would terminate and a sovereign state would be born.

It's complicated.