🇪🇸 TONIGHT: Geomob Barcelona!

We can’t wait to bring the Barcelona geospatial community together tonight, 21 Oct.

Speakers:
Jonathan Conn – Where in the World Is My Money?
Lorenzo Becchi – Green City Index: How Green Is Your City?
Alexander Semenov – BCN Livability Map
Anton Wenemoser - CoMaps
Andrés Aranda - Mapit IoT

A huge thank you to our venue partner COWORKIDEA, and our global sponsor @opencage@osm.town!

Want to attend? You can still sign up! https://thegeomob.com/post/oct-21st-2026-geomobbcn-details

**#geomobBCN**

Wow, very exciting news, the Irish 🇮🇪 Government announces plans to make Eircodes open data!

Obviously the exact details will matter, but this is great

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/launch-of-intelligenceapplied-programme-to-support-irish-workers-and-business-to-adopt-ai/

Many thanks to Dermot McNally for making us aware, we'll watch this closely

Tickets Alert: Tours of UCL’s maps collection

An opportunity is coming up to explore one of the UK's last surviving university map libraries and see its collection up close.

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tickets-alert-tours-of-ucls-maps-collection-93336/

@opencage not only that, the river connecting it with the Mekong "flows" "upstream" in the rainy season:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonle_Sap?useskin=vector#Volume_fluctuation_and_flow_reversal

You can find all of our #OpenStreetMap interviews (going all the way back to 2014) here: https://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/osminterview

Doing something interesting with OSM and want to be interviewed? Please get in touch.

After a brief hiatus our #OpenStreetMap interview series is back!

This time we spoke with Sofia Pahaoja of Touch Mapper, a website where you can create tactile maps for visually impaired people for free using OSM data

https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-interview-touch-mapper

Couple things to know about leap seconds, which have ceased to be as of this week:

* Unix timestamps are defined as seconds since epoch minus however many leap seconds have happened so far (!)
* There have been 27 leap seconds, with the last one in 2016.
* Negative leap seconds were a possibility and could have broken everything. No more.

https://www.bipm.org/en/cgpm-2026/resolution-5

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1x6uhya/bipm_announces_the_end_of_leap_seconds/pgylixh/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

RE: https://en.osm.town/@opencage/117445449312278446

Seems like the #OpenStreetMap community has a lot to work here if #WaterWaysMap is going to be more complete (or more broken :) here :-P

https://waterwaymap.org/#map=11.05/14.0839/105.8512

This week in #geoweirdness it is back to Asia.

Previously we've covered Thailand 🇹🇭 and Vietnam 🇻🇳, so today we consider the geopolitical oddities of three countries with intertwined histories and unique geographies: Laos 🇱🇦, Cambodia 🇰🇭, and Myanmar 🇲🇲.

1/

13/ The Wa State is a self-governing region and de facto independent state made up of two remote districts, one bordering China 🇨🇳, the other Thailand 🇹🇭

In practice Wa State operates like a small Chinese-influenced country, using the Chinese yuan and Mandarin, the central Myanmar 🇲🇲 government has little to no control here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_State

#geoweirdness

12/ Myanmar 🇲🇲 is often listed with the US 🇺🇸 and Liberia 🇱🇷 (and, in some aspects of life, the UK 🇬🇧) as a country that hasn’t officially adopted the metric system.

Traditional units are still common in daily life, though the government has been slowly moving toward metric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement

#geoweirdness

14/ That brings our look at the #geoweirdness of mainland Southeast Asia 🇲🇲🇱🇦🇰🇭 to a close! What have we missed?

If you enjoyed this thread please share it (so critical here in the fediverse) and have a look at the many others linked over on our blog: https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

If you liked this you may enjoy our threads about:

🇻🇳 Vietnam: https://en.osm.town/@opencage/115133798226980951

🇨🇳 China https://en.osm.town/@opencage/114166463386958370

🇹🇭 Thailand https://en.osm.town/@opencage/115033422470732114

3/ Laos 🇱🇦 is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia.

This historically limited its economic development but also forced it to be a key crossroads between neighboring: China 🇨🇳, Vietnam 🇻🇳, Cambodia 🇰🇭, Thailand 🇹🇭, and Myanmar 🇲🇲.

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, on the Mekong where Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar meet, is a Chinese-run casino zone on a long-term lease. It largely runs on Beijing time and Chinese yuan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_Special_Economic_Zone

#geoweirdness

10/ Finally, let's consider Myanmar 🇲🇲 (often still referred to as Burma) a country of about 54.2 million people. It is an ethnically diverse nation, with 135 distinct ethnic groups officially recognized, though a single group - the Bamar - makes up the majority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity_in_Myanmar

Unlike Laos 🇱🇦 and Cambodia 🇰🇭, Myanmar was under British 🇬🇧 colonial rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rule_in_Burma

#geoweirdness

6/ Heading down the Mekong, we reach Cambodia 🇰🇭, which has a population of about 16.7 million people.

Part of the extended river system is the Tonle Sap lake. This unique lake expands and contracts dramatically with the seasons, growing from about 2,700 in the dry season to over 16,000 km² in the wet season.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonle_Sap

#geoweirdness

2/ We'll start with Laos 🇱🇦, a nation of approximately 7.6 million people.

Its population is diverse, with over 60 different recognized ethnic groups. The largest ethnic group (53%) is the Lao, who live predominantly in the lowlands. 🇹🇭 Thailand’s northeastern Isan region is home to roughly 20 million people of Lao heritage, several times the ethnic Lao population of Laos itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_people

#geoweirdness

10/ 🇲🇲 Myanmar’s coastline has its own geopolitical peculiarities. In the Bay of Bengal, the Coco Islands belong to Myanmar but are located just north of 🇮🇳 India’s Andaman Islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_Islands

Their strategic location has led to decades of rumors and reports of China 🇨🇳 building a signals intelligence facility there, creating diplomatic friction.

#geoweirdness

4/ A bizarre feature of 🇱🇦 Laos's map is Si Phan Don, or the "4,000 Islands," a vast archipelago in the Mekong River in the country's southern border region with Cambodia 🇰🇭.

The river here widens dramatically and then splits to create thousands of small and large islands. It's a perfect example of a liquid border creating a unique and complex landscape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_Phan_Don

#geoweirdness

11/ In a major act of administrative weirdness, 🇲🇲 Myanmar's capital was moved from Yangon (also known in English as Rangoon) to the newly constructed city of Naypyidaw in 2005.

The new capital's remote, central location was chosen for strategic reasons,. Civil servants were given very little notice. Many people believe astrologers chose the timing. The city is famous for its enormous, nearly empty highways, some with 20 lanes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naypyidaw

#geoweirdness

5/ 🇱🇦 Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is one of the world’s last communist one-party states, alongside CN 🇨🇳, VN 🇻🇳, CU 🇨🇺, and KP 🇰🇵.

Imprecise 🇫🇷 French colonial-era maps, covering remote regions, mean the border was never fully demarcated after independence, leading to periodic tensions and military standoffs over territorial claims.

In the late-80s Laos fought with neighbor Thailand 🇹🇭 over rival claims to forest resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laos%E2%80%93Thailand_relations

#geoweirdness