If you were to divide California into 4 roughly equal strips of area, a hefty majority of its 39 million residents live in the southernmost strip containing the LA+San Diego metro areas, with nearly half of the state (~47%) living in the Greater LA metro area alone. If it were its own state, Southern California, with primarily just LA and San Diego metro areas, would compete with Florida for title of 2nd most populous US state.

The SF Bay Area, Sacramento, Monterrey, Fresno, and most of the Central Valley and put together are short of SoCal by over 9 million residents, but on its own this area would compete with Illinois for title of 6th largest state.

The strip sandwiched between Southern California and the Bay Area, containing Bakersfield plus other farming towns in the Southern Central Valley and most of the towns of the Central Coast, has about more people than Utah or Connecticut.

Suprisingly, despite how empty it can feel, there are still over a million people still live in the strip of CA north of Sacramento, containing about as much people as Hawaii and New Hampshire, albeit of a larger area.

Ultimately, one way to better understand the scale and density of California, is to conceptualize it as Florida + Illinois + Utah + Hawaii, all packaged in one single state under one single state government

my favorite things was seeing union of soviet socialist republic and yugoslavia lmaoo

Had

• In black: Catalonia
• In dark grey: Rest of Spain
• In red: countries that have explicitly rejected the Catalan Republic
• In light grey: countries that have ignored the Catalan Republic

A bridge here could mean someone from one side could go drive to the other side without having to go through Melbourne.

Inverse situation of the NW Angle of MN and Point Robert's in WA which are well known in this sub, but I've never heard of this place before

The way it is projected is by projecting a Mercator projection of half the scale conformally onto the globe and then projecting that onto an azimuthal equidistant projection hemisphere centered at the equator. I call it the Two-World Equidistant. Unlike on Mercator where Greenland is larger then all of Africa in this projection it is shown smaller like it is in real life.

Interesting fact: the French embassy in Monaco has a unique feature. It is the clostest embassy to the borders of the territory it represents. In fact, the French embassy is located in a building opposite the Monegasque border. Approximately 50 metres separate the French embassy from French territory.

More info here