Guess The Map

I was thinking signatories to an Antarctic treaty or something but that doesn't check out. Must be something regulatory though, given how the overseas territories of a country all line up.

I'm guessing some sort of environmental regulation.

Or banking regulations? It seems neither Isle of Man or the Channel Islands are green. Another oddity: Estonia and Latvia are green but Lithuania isn't.

None of the guesses are even close so far.

a clue: green means not

side of the road people drive on?

Do they have a side of the road in Antarctica?

Given Stan's hint, I'm guessing the green countries do not have a law discriminating against something that the other countries do. A bit flummoxed by Antarctica though.

Antarctica, remote Island Nations, Western Europe, Australia/NZ, that don't have something.

Most of these places are either isolated, tiny, or likely to have controls of some sort. So its some kind of bad flora/fauna/disease that they don't have

Lithuania and Poland the counter to that, if there are no border checks?

one of those guesses is right, cherry blossom!

No rabies?

CORRECT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_rabies#Rabies-free_jurisdictions

:( sigh

(I got dogbit this past week and have to get the rabies shots starting tomorrow)

oh no! just do it though, if you get symptoms it's too late :(

Yeah I know. I thought we found the dog but it was the wrong dog. Bleahhhhh

maybe I was a little bit too fast with my hint, I'm too eager to help sometimes :-)

Ha, nice one, Lithuania.

Woooooo! Thank you cherry blossom & StanM, wouldn't have got there without those prompts but it totally clicked into place and I was reasonably confident in the rabies guess.

Our bats would like a word with the author of this map

Part of the reason I was confident is because a few years ago I had to look up whether British bats had rabies (injured bat in the house). The emergency vet just called it rabies, but it's a different strain of rabies virus ("European Bat Lyssavirus") and so the UK can maintain its rabies-free claim (based on what the site I'm looking at right now calls "classical rabies", nice nice).

I remember being told as a kid that France had rabies, but googling it, it seems it's been free since 2001

I think pet passports were introduced at about that time? That would make sense as part of an international push to eradicate it.

Interesting. My doctor described us as free of terrestrial rabies, which is a cool way of saying bats. Apparently no strain of the rabies virus is older than 1500 years. It's originally from bats and shifted to foxes, dogs, skunks etc, which means it's being again contained to the original hosts. And apparently the vaccine served as a base for one of the Covid vaccines, described as a "deactivated rabies-virus Covid vaccine". Which I guess is why you hire people for marketing after scientists do their job.

https://i.imgur.com/FQQnZWE.png

Light pollution is too obvious probably?

hmm. europe, japan, south korea all lit up. usa and mexico around the same. cuba and north korea completely dark. i'm thinking it's some cultural thing like soccer players.

honestly the only thing that makes sense is population density

adam t. is on the right track

Is it misleading that it looks like a map of might lights, then, if it's a cultural thing?

Dhaka isn't lit up, though it might be covered by the country label

The Canary Islands are lit up

South Korea, Java, New Zealand are a couple of locations that seem more lit up than expected imho

Mauritius & Réunion, east of Madagaskar, too

South Korea is a hotspot, is it something like mobile phone use?

now pondering what south korea and southeast england have in common

does south korea have Nando's? I know Mauritus has like the most per capita in the world (don't ask how I know)

afaik continental Europe is Nando-less?