By Atlas Al
All flags are created equal. Certain nationalities/cultures/peoples are not better or worse than any other nationality, culture, or people of the world. There is no point system to flagging. Hook up with a foreigner and you get their flag, that’s it. Certain nationalities, however, are harder to hook up with because of a very obvious country specific characteristic: population.
Flags represent a country’s national identity and sovereign claim to political boundaries among other cultural factors. What all sovereign states do not have in common is the same population.
Two months ago, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti leaving them worse off than before. Last month, Chile was struck by a massive 8.8 earthquake. Haiti – one of the world’s poorest countries – was ill-prepared for such a quake while Chile – a reasonably well off country – has some of the best earthquake prevention/infrastructure in the world. When news agencies reported what each quake scored on the Richter scale’s point system, we had a rough idea how strong the quake was and what kind of damage most likely resulted from it. An earthquake is an earthquake at the end of the day, but we somehow get a clearer picture of the whole situation when we attach numbers 1 through 10 to it.
Like seismologists who grade and study earth’s tremors, meteorologists study the patterns of weather systems and rate them. Scientists at the United States’ National Hurricane Center use a “tropical cyclone scale” that gives ratings to hurricanes from 1 to 5, with 5 being the strongest and least occurring.
Keeping in mind that all flags have the same value, there are two possible ways to put flags into certain “Flag Categories”:
First Method of Flag Categorization
The bell curve is one way for statisticians to study normal distribution and standard deviation.
Using the bell curve, we’re able to separate the world’s countries into six categories. Category 1 would be home to populous countries like China, India, and the United States; Category 6 would be home to countries with the lowest populations like Nauru, Palau, and San Marino; with the rest of the world’s countries somewhere in between.
| Category | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| # of Countries | 5 | 25 | 67 | 67 | 25 | 5 |
Second Method of Flag Categorization
The second method doesn’t use a curve system and is more or less equally distributed among 7 categories.
| Category | # of Countries | Population |
| 1 | 11 | Over 100,000,000 |
| 2 | 35 | 25,000,000 – 100,000,000 |
| 3 | 36 | 10,000,000 – 25,000,000 |
| 4 | 30 | 5,000,000 – 10,000,000 |
| 5 | 39 | 1,000,000 – 5,000,000 |
| 6 | 28 | 100,000 – 1,000,000 |
| 7 | 14 | Under 100,000 |
With Method One, it doesn’t matter what the population is of each country; the bell curve graph simply takes a percentage of the world’s total countries (193 countries) and puts them in the appropriate category. With Method Two, we mustn’t forget to adjust the population parameters as the population increases.
While both methods are good for determining how rare a flag is, I prefer and use the Second Method.
According to the Seismic Flag Grading Scale, the rarest flag I’ve been with was from the Republic of Ireland – a Category 5 of roughly 4.5 million people. Although I’d like to hook up with a Category 7, it hasn’t happened yet. Because flag radars are location specific, maybe I have to wait until my next trip to shag a Category 6 or 7.
Not sure when or where my next trip will be, but it’ll be seismic.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] one’s Hardware/Software, Walking Talking Human Flags, the “El Dorado of”, Country Brands, Seismic Flags (i.e., Flag Categories 1-7), and Wannabe [...]