h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didnot know that about the The Union Flag, I have always called it the The Union Jack

Is that right about it only being a Jack if it is on the front of a ship,

( Am I going to get them in the pub later )

manda

Hello manda, and welcome to my page.

Yes, the flag itself is not a jack unless used as a jack to display licencing/ownership. Some ships fly under a "flag of convenience" meaning they are licensed in a different country than the original owner's one (for political/financial reasons). Have I just become a sad geek in your eyes then?

" a sad geek *

absolutley not

I realy like them sort of things, so if you are a geek, then lets be geeks together

I knew about the "flag of convenience" but not the "Jack"

so even the BBC get it wrong when they are talking about the " Union Jack " ( thats nice to know )

manda

I added a few more flags to the list late yesterday because you'd dropped by. I've put off doing the really complicated ones (other than UK and US) for obvious reasons. Are there any flags you would particularly like to have included? I noticed this was one of many subject areas not really covered by h2g2. My article requires too many (pseudo)graphics to ever make it into the Edited Guide though. Most of the things I would want to do are like that!

How about the flag for canada, i lived there for a few years as a child,and I got some good memories of there

it must take a long time to do each one, and you will have the problem of, it dont mater how many you put on there, you will always get someone that complains about not haveing there flag on there

but if you could put as many as you can on there I think it will be a realy good reference page that people would keep comeing back to

manda

Canada is one of those hard ones for which I would really want a GIF rather than TABLE art. You should see how much space the UK and US flags take up in the article source. All the other flags and the text are irrelevant in comparison.

Trust me to pick the hard one

I never do anything the easy way

manda

How about the UN flag SEF

I once heard a story about the Danish flag though I can't remember it very well any more. It was something like the King of Denmark had a dream in which he saw god holding a white cross up against a red background. I don't know if this is plausible (not the fact that god exists etc. but) as a story from which the story came, and thought I'd tell you.

Oh and a plausible flag: that of Nepal. It's interesting as it's a triangle.

I think the UN is an oxymoron. Even if the nations were united then they wouldn't be nations any more.

Yes, the story is of King Valdemar II of Denmark getting a sign from heaven before doing a bit more crusading. Under the current (at the time of writing and still now really) circumstances, I thought that legend was a bit too tasteless to include in the article.

I'm not sure why being a triangle makes Nepal's flag more plausible. Actually it is 2 triangles overlapped though. However, anything with diagonal lines in requires more TABLE lines and takes up huge quantities of article space (and presumably more processing time to display). It's unfortunate/stupid that we are not allowed to do our own GIFs for entries.

This entry may actually be plausible. I seem to remember a project planned by one of the Italics to provide h2g2 with it's own maps of the different continents, I think.

If you divided this up into different entries for each continent and did more flags and expanded the text a bit, then contacted the Italics, they might be interested (possibly even allowing for GIFs). I'll help if you want, though I don't know table art, you may have realised I'm not so bad with GIFs Is that the correct order, oh Wobbly One .

Oh dear I think your illness must be tarnsmitted by dirty internet connections.

I think it would have made a good Guide entry - though not under the current regime. Time for a revolution - or is that a mutiny? It depends on whether this is really the B-ark (ie a ship of sorts). In any case civil war is another oxymoron.

The division into continents is not a bad suggestion except that some countries have cheated by switching continents (during my life-time!) and some continents hardly have any flags. Also where would the truce one (which is one of my favourites) go?

I would have done many more flags by now if we were allowed GIFs so they didn't take up so much space. I could throw the fun marquee away of course since it requires more lines than you might expect. I had noticed that you were one of the more reliable people when it came to GIF transparencies but I wouldn't really need any help. It annoys me that some people keep on using JPEG when they should be using GIF. JPEG is really only suitable for photos and paintings (of which the CAs only do a few) and makes all the lines fuzzy in what should be clean diagrams (ie elsewhere in the guide) as well as being no use for non-rectangular shapes.

"dirty internet connections" - are you saying that you have an unsanitised telephone at your end! We need to break out one of those people from B-ark storage.

Sometimes we do have to use JPEG SEF. If there is an image with lots of gradients for example, or if the file is to big otherwise sometimes we have no choice.

I think in this case it's called a 'strike' seeing as we are 'w*rking' for the Italics in a way. (i.e. if everyone stopped writing articles they'd be a bit stuck)

As for your truce flag you have a special section of other common flags, e.g. truce flag, UN logo, h2g2 flag etc.

I did wonder if the truce flag could go in antarctica - a continent deliberately devoid of nations.

I don't think I'd be allowed an h2g2 flag (remember the issue of the charity sticker on which it took them about a week to say anything in the first place). However, that and the UN one is already straying into the area of logos rather than flags - which is an entry I might have done separately but is probably against copyright/trademarks.

Well you could group the truce flag with that of the Red Cross/Crescent. I'm pretty sure they can be counted as flags.

I've realised that I could split it into separate pages using my current stylistic groupings and keeping this original page as an alphabetical index of links to each flag. So then there would be "Flags of the World: the crosses", the tricolours, the pictures etc. Truce could go with Libya under plain. I wanted to do the communications ones too - plus heraldry, semaphor, braille and lots more. It looks like I'll mostly have to stick with doing them on my own website (though I'm probably running out of server space there).

You say the union flag is not symmetrical so people can laugh when it's the wrong way round, but it can only ever be the wrong way round if it is on a flagpole, which you don't mention...

You must have led a sheltered life then and managed to avoid seeing certain outfits for a start.

Whatwho? How do you mean?

Looking at your PS I see you ought to be old enough to have seen some, if not others.

Seen some what?

The only way the union flag can be the wrong way round is if a flagpole is indicated, as otherwise the flagpole could be on either side and so it can't be the wrong way round.