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The True Size of Countries
- graedus 10y agoThis is cool! I'm not seeing instructions on how to rotate the selected country. Edit: Ah, I see it now in the instructional video. My browser's video controls were obscuring it. You click and drag the compass in the bottom left.
- basseq 10y agoClick on the country and the compass rose will change color to match. You can drag the compass rose around to rotate the country.
- hcrisp 10y agoPresumedly that is how they came up with this graphic, which shows Africa encompassing nearly all of the US, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, India, China, Japan, and the UK in its borders: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/true-size-of-africa.jpg http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/true-siz...
- helb 10y agoPreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024
- manojlds 10y agoIt is surprising that a lot of educated folks don't know about this. I always run into folks who think Greenland is the biggest island. Edit: on Australia being continent - now I come across as a fool. But I hope people understood what I meant. Also, I have had to argue against folks who said Greenland should also be a continent since it is bigger than Australia.
- stuckagain 10y agoGreenland is the biggest island, by a large factor.
- bluedevil2k 10y agoIs Australia not an island?
- vkou 10y agoIt's a continent. Otherwise, we may as well call North America an island.
- peeters 10y agoWell, since you bring it up, Australia isn't connected to another continent by land like North America is (as are Europe, Africa, and Asia). You'd have to say "the Americas" are an island, or "Afro-Eurasia"
- thrownblown 10y agoYou people are silly. If Australia is an island, then Antarctica wins. 'Nuff said. ANTARCTICA 5,400,000 sq mi AUSTRALIA 2,969,900 sq mi GREENLAND 836,330 sq mi
- Retric 10y agoGreenland @839,999 square miles is the biggest island. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001783.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001783.html Unless your talking about Australia which is ~3.5x a big. (2,969,907 sq miles)
- bane 10y agoI'm actually talking about all of the Africa-Eurasia super-continent.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area Greenland is the biggest island.
- manojlds 10y ago> even though arguments can be made whether it is technically a continent, or merely part of a larger continent also called Australia A technicality. While people thinking Greenland is bigger than Australia is not, which is the point I was trying to get across.
- vkou 10y agoGreenland is the biggest island. Australia is a continent.
- halomru 10y agoThere isn't really a single universally accepted list of continents. Some count Australia as continent, some count it as part of Oceania. And some define the continent Australia as the country Australia plus all those islands that would otherwise be Oceania.
- reality_czech 10y agoActually Australia is a dwarf continentoid.
- worldsayshi 10y agoI'm a bit surprised the other way around. Greenland is bigger than I thought when I move it over Europe. And Iceland too.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> It is surprising that a lot of educated folks don't know about this. I always run into folks who think Greenland is the biggest island. If it's the only projection you've ever seen - and globes aren't all that common - it's a reasonable misconception. Kind of makes you wonder what other projections we're carrying around in our heads.
- theoh 10y agoWell, speaking for myself, definitely not the Futamura projections. Way too high a level of abstraction to remember.
- protomyth 10y agoDon't worry manojlds, I'm sure the Pluto people will back you up and demote Australia. I often wonder if it will matter in a couple of years. If we actually get to the point where walls are displays, then I would expect most schools will have a globe projected on the wall instead of a map. How long until we start with 3D animations instead of 2D drawings?
- howawaygoog 10y agosome definitions are arbitrary, for some people America is one continent, for some there are two, it's human-based, whatever is established in a culture, not math.
- sqeaky 10y agoThis is just a matter of semantics and word choice? Why isn't Eurasia (or Afro-Eurasia before the Suez canal) the largest island? Why not Greenland?
- vog 10y agoSmall nitpick: The country area is inverted if you move it near the poles. (Maybe because the orientation clockwise/counterclockwise changes implicitly.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- forinti 10y agoA few years ago I wrote (as a joke) some javascript to make a municipality of Brazil (Alegrete - RS) wander about the globe. http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.h... It's the largest of 497 municipalities in the state (it has an area of 7,804 km²).
- imdsm 10y agoThe UK fits within the Gulf of Mexico. http://i.imgur.com/aTnhSpp.png http://i.imgur.com/aTnhSpp.png
- mcguire 10y agoJapan is bigger than I thought; about the size of the US east coast.
- worldsayshi 10y agoSome countries seems to be impossible to move for me. Morocco and Ghana for example. Also, The Ivory Coast is only searchable by its French name, Côte d'Ivoire, while having its English name on the map. Edit: Oh, the move issue is not by country. When I reloaded I could move a country I previously couldn't.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI see it as Côte d'Ivoire on the map. I also find their insistence on nobody translating or even transliterating their country's name annoying.
- jstanley 10y agoThe projection is inconsistent: dragging a country over where it really belongs results in an outline that does not line up.
- ambrop7 10y agoFrom what I can tell, some of the pre-placed countries are rotated probably on purpose, you can unrotate them with the compass. I haven't seen the issue with any country added via the search.
- SamBam 10y agoThat's only the rotation. You can fix the rotation by clicking on the compass rose. But I admit, the first thing I did as well was to drag the sample outlines over their own counties, and thought it was messy how they didn't line up.
- dpierce9 10y agoFrom The West Wing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU
- slantyyz 10y agoDid anyone notice in the About dialog that the infographic "The True Size of Africa" was done by Kai Krause? Kai Krause as in Kai's Power Tools.
- qntty 10y agoFor a suprise: compare Dem. Rep. Congo to Alaska.
- jacobolus 10y agoMakes me want to get back to working on my conformal octahedral butterfly map project: http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg
- alva 10y agoThis really blew my mind. Thanks!
- moioci 10y agoJust for fun, I laid the UK over the eastern US with London roughly on top of Atlanta. Edinburgh falls very near Indianapolis. Now from Google maps, the straight line distance from Atlanta to Indianapolis is about 429 miles, while London to Edinburgh is 331. This leads me to believe that this tool is not accurately doing what it purports to be.
- madcaptenor 10y agoWhen I put London on top of Atlanta (which admittedly is hard to do exactly because the cities in the country getting moved around aren't indicated), Edinburgh lands in southern Indiana, somewhere between Louisville, KY and Evansville, IN.
- gsanghera 10y agoI could be wrong, but I don't think that's how it works. You're comparing the true size of UK with the flatmap projection of US. To do what you want, you need to compare the true maps of both countries - with the cities.
- SamBam 10y agoNo, because this map scales the country according to its latitude. So when you drag down England to be next to Atlanta, you're looking at the size of England with respect to Atlanta. The "true size" is just "true" in comparison to whatever it's on top of. So it should be accurate.
- gsanghera 10y agoOk yes. An accuracy issue then as it's probably using a simple algo for the projection. Stand corrected.
- bridge55 10y agoEveryone knows the ONE TRUE MAP PROJECTION is the Fuller Map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_projection_rotated.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
- grimmdude 10y agoAfter looking at this I just realized why maps showing airline routes always show arched lines.
- Benjammer 10y agoIt's a combination of map projections and airplanes using "great circles"[1] to navigate shortest distance between two points on a sphere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle
- jacobolus 10y agoCritique: http://www.genekeyes.com/FULLER/BF-1-intro.html http://www.genekeyes.com/FULLER/BF-1-intro.html
- jasonjei 10y agoI notice Puerto Rico and possibly some other territories are missing in the United States selection. Is that deliberate since PR is quite different from the US?
- pokemongoaway 10y agoThis makes me wonder if there's some sort of official world database for how national borders are drawn... -- how often they're redrawn -- how often they're updated -- if there are different/conflicting databases of border data Surely drawing each line wasn't as straight forward as it appears on maps - in history and in practice.
- rootlocus 10y agoDoesn't work anymore. Apparently they exceeded their google maps request quota: "You have exceeded your daily request quota for this API. To request more than 25,000 map loads per day, you must use an API key and enable billing: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key" https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
- pdxandi 10y agoThat's a pretty great problem to have. Not the limit, but getting 25k daily views.
- haberman 10y agoAre the shape changes accurate, as you drag north/south? I would expect horizontal borders (like the north border of the USA, which is along the 49th parallel) to stay horizontal as you drag. But in the tool the border becomes more concave as you drag it further south. Why is this?
- teddyh 10y agoI feel it is my duty to link to a very relevant xkcd: What Your Favorite Map Projection Says About You https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
- f137 10y agoCool! One suggestion and one complaint. I'd like to be able to select countries by clicking, rather than text input. After a couple minutes playing, the site filled firefox history with tens of entries, and I could not return to HN even after hitting back several dosen times.