Slashdot Mirror
How Old Is the Average Country?
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?"
"England" may be 1000+ years old but 1) it's far from certain that it's the same "England" as today, and 2) it was a subsidiary of Normandy, Inc. for quite some time, pardon my Middle French.
Ezekiel 23:20
On the other hand, this site lists Austria as 1037 years old, Hungary as 1012. Please remind me, what country did that guy named Franz Joseph rule?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Adolescence is actually an excellent metaphor for the US. A mix of overconfidence and insecurity, for the wrong reasons in both cases.
Aren't they forgetting the Anschluss in 1938? Do we the independence date for France to 1944, when the Germans were kicked out and they got control of their coutnry back? When do you set a date for Italy? Unification in 1870, or with the establishment of the Roman Empire 2000 years earlier? How old is China? Was it established in 1949, 1919, 216BC or 2100 BC? How old is Egypt? 3 days, two years or 5000 years?