I find that so crazy. I'm German and for us Italy is always the sunny south where it gets much too hot for us. The USA iseems more like us climate-wise. I'd always thought New York would be a little like Berlin. Crazy to see how far south most of the US actually is.
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Ocean currents do a lot more to even out the weather
Yeah thank you to the gulf stream. Too bad that global warming will make it disappear ¯\(ツ)/¯
Also wind patterns. At the midlatitudes westerlies dominate. So the east coast has a continental climate (receives cold air in the winters, hot air in the summers) while the west coast does not (the oceans make the summers and winters mild)
You'll see that the west coast cities on the same latitudes of their European counterparts have a very similar climate (as opposed to east coast cities, which have a very different climate than their latitude-counterpart).
This is also a really great illustration of colorblindness. I actually didn't even see Italy until I read the comment about the boot.

I was just thinking about this regarding climate the other day and found this interesting graphic on climate similarities in North America.
Were they limited in colours?
Too many colors on a map looks busy, as long as none are touching with the same color then it's good. In fact, the fewest number of colors you can use without any touching is usually the best
Everybody's wrapped up in the climate / weather discussion, but the thing that surprised me a bit more was the difference in sunset / sunrise.
I was working on an international team (i.e. a bunch of Americans + one dude from France).
Back in those ancient times, video calls with everybody's face included weren't necessarily the standard, and even when we did them, everyone was typically in an office environment.
Anyway, one late afternoon (for us in the USA) we did a team video call and our French counterpart was sitting outdoors in his back yard and it was still light outside. Although we knew it was 10 p.m. where he lived, it looked closer to the amount of sunlight we'd typically see around 7 or maybe 8 p.m. here in mid-latitude US.
It was kind of interesting, because even in the height of summer at the very highest elevations, it's going to be very dark here at 10 p.m.
Location in the time zone is also a factor. France is near the far west of CEST.
For example Michigan is in the far west of EST. The sun rises 30-40 minutes later than in New York, and you do get light at 10pm in the height of summer.
This was a cool thing about living in Seattle and any further north - in the summer it'd be dusk until 10pm. And the in the winter the sun would basically never appear. I guess it was less "cool" and more "insanity producing" but locals were used to it.
Comparing similar latitudes in north america to where i live in sweden is a wild experience. The average temperatures are double, sometines almost triple, during summer.
On which scale? Because that kinda matters.
Celsius? Kinda hot but not necessarily deadly.
Kelvin? You've turned your city into an air fryer.
They live in Sweden so Celsius
It's still an odd way to compare temperatures:
- Double of 1 degree is 2 degrees, so not very different.
- Double of 30 degrees is 60 degrees, so wildly different.
- Double of -20 degrees is -40 degrees, so a lot colder instead of warmer.
This is an example I use when I teach data types. It happens because the scale (F or C) is an "interval" scale. Its zero is not based on the absence of the property it is measuring, so you can't apply a multiplicative transform to it like, "double".
It is like lining up by height, calling the shortest person the standard and measure height of everyone else from that. So, the next tallest might be 2 cm, the next 4cm. But clearly the person we are calling 4cm is not twice the height of the person we called 2 cm.
You'd think so, but without specifying the scale... it could be anything. ANYTHING!
All the immigrants from Southern Italy coming to New York:
"It's the same latitude, it'll be just like home!"
Why... why is Philadelphia spelled with an "F"?
Virginia Occidentale has a nice ring to it. It''d fuck up John Denver too.
It's translated into French it looks like.
Did you not notice "Virginia Occidental"?
It's Spanish, no? Philadelphia in French is Philadelphie.
my guess is Italian, in Spanish it would have been "occidental"
The meme maker was threatened with a cease and decist order by Kraft-Heinz.
The US could indeed become the next italy, politically
a once great empire that crumbled
I already knew. My dad lives in southern France and naar him is a sign near the road where the 45th parallel crosses.
That's the border between the states and Canada...
For context this puts Rome about north enough to get snow hurricanes were it on the American east coast
oh, does Italy not usually get snowstorms with cyclone structures
The west coast city I live in is just a little further north than Philadelphia and has a very Mediterranean climate so this puts that into perspective for me.
This is related to why the French settled in Quebec iirc. The French king didn't want to send settlers too close to already-established Spanish colonies such as Mexico or Florida, so he ordered that French settlers would settle in the Americas at the same latitude as the métropole, as he thought the climate would be the same.
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