A very tasty Iranian restaurant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but there are two flags of Iran. This one – the historical flag, used before the Islamic revolution of 1979, and today its use inside Iran itself is a political crime. The main difference from the official one is the emblem of the lion and the sun. Therefore, when Iranian protesters in Washington hold demonstrations, it’s interesting to see which flags they carry. If there’s four crescents and a sword in the middle, those are protesters from another camp 😉
For fun, I decided to make a matrix of who is friends with whom and who is enemies with whom. For each country-country pair, I asked Gemini which of the five categories the relations fall into: “at daggers drawn” (purple), “predominantly unfriendly” (red), “neutral” (yellow), “predominantly friendly” (blue), “friends” (green). Lisa said that “neutral” should be purple. Overall, the quality of Gemini’s assessments is quite good.
Among all countries, three red lines stand out. These are countries that are on very bad terms with many others. Well, you guessed Russia right. And what is the second country? Israel? No, it’s Belarus and Venezuela.
In the top five countries that everyone is friends with and who have many friends themselves, LLM included the USA, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Germany. There is an anti-rating – these are countries that have very bad relations (“at daggers drawn”) with many others. In this rating, Russia is in first place with 21 countries, and Israel is in second place with 18 enemies. Following them, with a significant gap, are Syria and the USA with 9 enemies each. There is also a separate Conflict Zone rating – this is the sum of red and purple. Russia, Venezuela, Belarus, Israel, USA, Iran, Ukraine.
There is a “pacifists’ club”. These are the ones who have no enemies at all, sorted by the number of friends. Rating: Bahamas, Vatican, Luxembourg, Angola, Singapore, Iceland, Jamaica, Tanzania, Zambia.
I was curious, what if I apply the formula: the enemy of my enemy is my friend? What would change? This led to new colors on the matrix – logic friends.
The most unexpected leader of the Master Pragmatists ranking was Taiwan (25 logical connections). Why so? In the logic of LLM, Taiwan is a country that is officially recognized by few, but because of its global opposition to China, it automatically becomes a “logical friend” for everyone who has strained relations with Beijing. This is confirmed in the Shadow Bridges section: Taiwan has 23 connections beyond its region. It literally “stitches” different parts of the world together through a common problem.
The report “Secret Partners” – a list of geopolitical oxymorons. These are pairs that are “at daggers drawn” in official news but are forced to be friends by Gemini’s calculation. For example, Afghanistan – USA/United Kingdom. Despite the status “rather bad relations”, Gemini’s logic sees them as “logical friends”. Possibly due to common regional threats (like ISIS) or dependence on humanitarian and back channels. Or here’s a strange alliance “Belarus — Hungary”. Nominal — different camps, factually — similar style of rhetoric and common “enemies” in Brussels. Eritrea — Ethiopia: Status “at daggers drawn”, but at the same time, they became logical friends.
In the report “Most Controversial,” the first places are taken by the USA, and then with a significant gap, Russia, and even larger – United Kingdom, Canada, Ukraine. These are countries with the highest Love x Hate product value. That is, countries that have many friends and enemies at the same time.
Another report – the indifferent ones. About them, LLM couldn’t say much, apparently because they bother no one (both literally and figuratively). There are, for example, Madagascar and Haiti.
I also tried to cluster by the strength of friends and got four groups of countries.
The largest cluster. Core: China, Russia, Iran, India, and BRICS+ countries, as well as almost the entire African continent (from Egypt to South Africa) and a significant part of the Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar).
The second cluster mainly included European countries. Core: France, Germany, United Kingdom. The algorithm determined Ukraine and Israel to be here. Logically: their survival depends on “predominantly friendly relations” with the European core. In this same club are Armenia, Georgia, and Serbia. Apparently, despite all the political swings, Gemini considers their ties to Europe more fundamental than any others.
The third cluster included the USA, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and, for example, Taiwan. Officially, it can be a “logical friend” to all of China’s enemies, but by “strength of friends,” it is permanently sewn to the American block. The Vatican also ended up here, which makes this club not only economic but also somewhat “values-based.”
The fourth cluster, the most compact and specialized, included countries of Oceania and Southeast Asia. Leaders: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore. This turned out to be a club of countries trying to balance in the most complex region of the planet. Here are almost all island states (Fiji, Samoa, Tonga).
I wondered why turkey is called turkey here and what it’s called in Turkey. In Turkey, it’s called hindi – turkey! Decided to see what it’s called in India. Haha, in Hindi, it’s called Turkish (टर्की). Let’s see in other languages. Portuguese – Peru. That means, for them, it’s Peruvian. In Spanish – pavo, which refers to peacock 🙂 “pavone” in Italian – peacock. In French – dinde, because this bird came from the West Indies (America). Comes from poule d’Inde – “hen from India/West Indies”. Greek – “Γαλοπούλα” “French bird”.
Reading Nabokov, there “…with the dash of the Danube in his veins…”. Turns out, Danube is Дунай. But that’s okay, trivial stuff, the interesting thing is something else. That Don, Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Donets, Dvina, and Disna essentially mean more or less the same thing – river. Apparently, the ancient people were not always rich in imagination when it came to toponymy. If you live by the water, you simply call it “River”. Over time, others came, heard this word, took it as a proper name, and altered it slightly to fit their accent. This way “River” (Danu) transformed into a dozen different names across the map of Europe.
The river Volga essentially is also just “river”. Okay, slightly different, “Volga” comes from the Proto-Slavic *Vòlga, which literally means “moisture” or “water”.
Also, it turned out that the Sahara desert is named so because Sahara (الصحراء) is desert. And the Gobi desert is called Gobi because Gobi in Mongolian is desert.
While googling, I stumbled upon another fun thing. There’s a place in England, Torpenhow Hill. The name is composed of four different linguistic layers: Tor — in Old English “hill”, Pen — in Cumbric “hill”, How — in Old Norse “hill”, Hill — in modern English “hill”. Result: “Hill-hill-hill-hill”. Likely, each new people arriving in this area didn’t understand that Tor, Pen, and How were already names for the hill, and added their variant of the word “hill”.
Today I read that the Third World countries were initially countries not part of NATO (First World) or the socialist bloc (Second World), that is, countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Ireland, and Austria. Some still use the term “developing countries,” where it is customary to include low-income countries, but, darn it, a developing country is actually a good definition. The one that has developed and stopped developing – that’s a signal. Incidentally, Qatar, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world, is formally considered developing.
It’s funny, at the CIS headquarters in Minsk 1) they still think that the CIS is alive (joke) 2) they still think that Ukraine is still there (never was part of the CIS, but officially left the CIS governing bodies in 2018). By the way, Moldova started the withdrawal process this year.
I first looked at a map of Venezuela around 15 years ago when you could fly there from Russia for a couple hundred dollars. I studied the map but never used it (though perhaps I should have).
At that time, it was the era of wild currency arbitrage, where the difference between the official bolivar rate “from the TV” and the real price on the black market reached astronomical proportions.
The scheme was simply brilliant: within the country, all airlines were required to sell tickets for local currency at the government rate. If an international flight cost a thousand dollars, it was converted into bolivars at the “pretty” official rate. But if you came off the street with a stack of real dollars and exchanged them at a money changer, the sum in bolivars needed to purchase the same ticket cost just a real hundred dollars, and sometimes even fifty.
The real fun began when intermediaries or acquaintances within the country got involved. You could book a ticket online through a local office, pay for it in bolivars through someone in Caracas, and then simply give them cash dollars when meeting, or transfer to a foreign account. The savings were so absurd that people flew business class simply because it was cheaper than lunch at Miami airport.
But cheap tickets were just the tip of the iceberg, because there was also something known as “raspao”. The state gave every traveler the right to buy a couple of thousand dollars at the cheap official rate on a credit card for spending abroad. Eventually, people bought cheap tickets, flew to the nearest islands, cashed in their currency quota, and returned home virtually rich, having sold these dollars on the black market for many times more.
Of course, this bonanza could not last forever and very quickly ended with a loud crash. Airlines quickly realized that their accounts were filled with millions of worthless-bolivars, which the government flatly refused to exchange for real currency. Planes flew half-empty, although all seats were officially bought out for currency quotas, and the government’s debts to carriers grew to billions of dollars, after which global giants simply began to massively leave the market.
But it worked for a while. I don’t remember exactly, somewhere between 2011 and 2014.
How such a breakdown between the official and unofficial rates lasted so long is beyond comprehension. The government could not quickly abolish the official rate because it supported imports of food and medicine. As soon as they acknowledged the real dollar rate, prices in stores would have skyrocketed immediately (which later happened). Flight tickets merely became a “collateral hole” in the system that everyone used while it was possible.
I slept through everything. What are you betting on 1) all the cocaine is ours now? 2) they’ll release them in exchange for a deal on rare earth metals and oil? 3) Maduro turns up in Saratov?
I’m checking out what open data we have in our county to play with data analysis over the weekend, and discovered, for instance, an open database of all 1.5 million trees in the county. The screenshot shows just a tiny part around my house.
It turns out that the incline (incline, or grade) – the steepness of a road or slope – has quite an obvious definition, but I never really thought about it. It means the ratio of the projection of a line on the terrain to the vertical plane to the projection of the same line on the horizontal. In other words, the magnitude of the incline equals the tangent of the angle between the rise of the slope and the horizontal (the tangent of the angle of inclination).
Thus, a “steep climb” sign of 10% indicates just about 5.71 degrees of inclination. This is arctan(0.1).
It also turned out that formally among specialists when reading the notation, the “%” sign is pronounced as “hundredths.”
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 