What is the size of Yemen? (2024)

Yet! Ansarallah is really on a roll these days. I would be lying if I said I don't want them to succeed. After more than a decade of watching them persevere through bombing and starvation, it's honestly quite inspirational.

Ah I'm glad. That's much better than the solution I had in mind of using the sand from the desert to expand the land into the sea to add extra 100k km of land area, to hide all this embarrassment under the rug.

Something about eyeballs and all bugs being shallow...

I actually measured the size of (parts of) Yemen on maps a week or two ago, trying to figure out the population density of the Houthi-controlled areas, which contain the majority (~70-80%, hard to say exactly as the population distribution has been changing rapidly in the past decade) of Yemen's population in about 1/3 of it's land.

Although I do hope too that people don't lose their sense of meaning and curiosity too much, it's worth keeping in mind that this article was published in 2024 which was a very different world from now. Curiosity requires energy, and it'll be hard for a creature relying on energy for survival to justify using their own energy for some activity when there's a more energy-efficient way to reach a specific goal. But just like going to the gym makes your body healthier despite the fact that this requires energy, thinking on your own will be increasingly important for maintaining a healthy mind and the sense of self.

Imagine how much of published science is statistically significant only due to clerical errors and mistakes in calculation...

(See e.g. The misreporting of statistical results in psychology journals; Bakker, Wicherts; Behaviour Research Methods; 2011.)

These kinds of issues have existed since the first human started recording what they owned, and will probably continue plaguing us until the last one dies.

A bunch of countries are suspected of undercounting their population because so many people are living "off the grid" or deliberately overcounting to get more funding. Probably some of the cases are real and some are just conspiracy theories.

Well, this is a pretty perfect usecase for AI (although it's also easy to just get shapefiles from NE and do it yourself, obviously).

Interestingly all of UAE, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have significant discrepancies between the World Factbook and their shapefiles (in every case overestimating), probably all related to not having had a demarcated border in the Rub Al Khali.

I will write you every day.

(I suppose people downvoting this don’t know the reference. Way to make us feel old :) )