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The True Size Of
- greenpizza13 7y agoThis is really useful and interesting. Thank you!
- dang 7y agoThread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024
- enjoyyourlife 7y agoAll threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thetruesize.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thetruesize.com
- m10i 7y agoThis is a bit off-topic, but one aspect (among many others) of HN that I really appreciate is that there aren't any snide remarks pointing out how this is a repost (I'm not suggesting that's what you're doing); no one here cares. If you've seen it before, great, perhaps you could contribute to the conversation in this current thread based off your learnings the last time around. If you haven't seen it before, here you go. I hope it always stays this way.
- Stratoscope 7y agoDan (dang) is one of the mods here and a chill dude, so you won't see many snide remarks from him. :-) In fact it's encouraged to post links to previous discussions. It doesn't mean "you shouldn't have posted this duplicate", it means (or should mean) "if you find this interesting, you may find these previous discussions interesting too."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- slowhand09 7y agoI honestly didn't know. I didn't search for it. Just posted vi the bookmarklet. BTW, would be a cool feature to add to the bookmarklet, to say previously posted, post again y/N.
- farisjarrah 7y agoI think I broke Canada.... I dragged it all the way to the South Pole and it exploded to the size of the whole world.
- saagarjha 7y agoThere probably should be a check so you can’t drag a country below 90°.
- yorwba 7y agoThere's no wall at the South Pole, so dragging a country across should just make it come back on the other side. That's actually what's happening here, except that the color ends up on the wrong side of the outline. My guess is that the drawing code tries to correct the orientation of its input to avoid drawing shapes inside-out, which fails when the outline stretches across the full width of the map.
- programmer_dude 7y agoYou can't fool me round-earther. /s
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 7y agoWarning: this utterly destroyed by navigation history.
- kccqzy 7y agoJust don't use inappropriate map projections. Problem solved. Any respectable map publisher would use something like Winkel-Tripel or Robinson for a map of the world.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoAny respectable publisher includes multiple projections of the world in their atlas, with an explanation section describing each at the beginning (i.e. which one is angle-preserving, which one is area-preserving, etc). It’s beyond me why people seem to be baffled by the area distortion of the Mercator projection - is this not taught in high school geography classes in the USA?
- journalctl 7y agoWe were never taught it, as far as I can recall. I had to start playing around with GIS stuff before I really learned about map projections.
- seniorivn 7y agoKnowing that it is area distortion projection and overcoming your prejudice if you've never seen anything else isn't the same thing. For example European people have a feeling that something is wrong with the map when Europe portrait as small as it actually is.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago>if you've never seen anything else Which is pretty strange, considering most classrooms and even homes have a globe laying around. Maybe I’m just severely overestimating the scientific knowledge of the average person.
- frutiger 7y agoI would hazard a guess that people’s intuition with shapes on a flat surface works better than their intuition on a curved surface, even though a globe is physically available.
- cyberferret 7y agoI like that you can compare individual US states to various countries, but it would love to be able to compare individual Australia states as well (Hint: I live in AU). It was interesting to see that Alaska is about the size of Western Australia. Having always heard that we can fit 20 United Kingdoms in the Northern Territory (the state, oh, all right, territory, where I live), I wanted to check that out for myself against the UK and other countries.
- mkl 7y agoAccording to Wikipedia, the UK is 242,495 km², and Northern Territory is 1,420,970 km², so you can only fit it 5.86 times. The whole of Australia is 7,692,024 km², so you can fit the UK 31.7 times in that.
- mstade 7y agoAs a Swede, it was mind blowing to see that California is nearly the same size area wise, but about four times larger in population. Plenty of room for us to grow still! Also interesting to see both Russia and USA fit inside of Africa, more or less.[1] I always thought Russia was much bigger. [1]: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY2NjQzMjQ.MTYzNzcxMQ*Mzc2NTY1Nw(Mzc2NTY1Nw~!CONTIGUOUS_US*MTQ0NzM0Mjk.MjU4NjcwODY)MTA~!RU*Nzk3NjE2NQ.OTEyNDc4OQ)MTE https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY2NjQzMjQ.MTYzNzcxMQ*...
- lordnacho 7y agoWhat I thought was interesting was that the south of Sweden is as far away from north of Sweden as it is from Rome.
- mstade 7y agoAlso, the distance between the northern and southern tips seems to be around the distance between Chicago and New Orleans, which is a road trip I did earlier this year. Even did the drive back, by way of the great smoky mountains and other sights – great trip! Clocked 3330 miles, thankfully the rental included unlimited miles! Edit: the reason I mention this is because I've wanted to do the north to south – or vice versa – Sweden trip for years, just always thought it was too long to do on my own. For some reason (Mercator projection, let's just be honest) I didn't think Chicago to NOLA would be that big a deal. It wasn't trivial, but also the distance wasn't really that bad, so I think I finally will do the cross Sweden trip at some point now.
- seniorivn 7y agoThe worst thing about Russia in that regard is that Russian people think it's much bigger too, and if you exclude uninhabitable territories, it gets even smaller. But establishment liked to bargain about geographical size for centuries so it's really hard to change the narrative now.
- frutiger 7y agoIt may not as big as it looks due to Mercator, but Russia is still the world’s largest country by a very large margin (almost a factor of two).
- pixelmonkey 7y agoThe one that really shocked me was typing "Russia" and then dragging Russia over the United States.
- franky47 7y agoFinding out that Russia is just as wide as Africa is tall was a nice surprise as well.
- forinti 7y agoI did something like this as a joke some time ago, but I used the outline of a Brazilian municipality (Alegrete) and wrote a parody of Saramago's "Jangada de Pedra" (The Stone Raft). http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.html
- escapecharacter 7y agoI wish I could compare municipalities. I just moved Toronto -> New York and it's been fun to wrap my head around a new urbanscape.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoI used to play with this site like a year ago when I was traveling. It's funny to see we always assumed some countries are much smaller/larger than what they are only because we got used to the structure of the traditional map
- wyclif 7y agoMy 8-year old son told me about this site. It's the first site I've ever discovered based on my kid's word-of-mouth. He's crazy about geography and loves to compare the area of different countries and make trick questions out of the comparison: "Daddy, which is bigger, the Philippines or the state of Arizona?" (Answer: they're almost the same size)