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The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection

• eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Requisite West Wing scene[1] on the subject (which is probably always going to be my top YouTube search because it’s fantastic). [1]: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY
  • pg_bot 6y ago
    The west wing should have had a map nerd on their writing staff. It's hard to believe a group of 4300 cartographers would come together and choose Gall-Peters over Robinson, Winkel-Tripel, or Kavraisky 7 as a replacement for Mercator. /s
  • gpanders 6y ago
    Cartographers for Social Equality was the very first thing I thought of when I saw this post!
• strstr 6y ago
  I added in some missing pieces [1]. There are probably others. [1]: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTI3MTAzMDM.NDg4OTk2MQ*MzAxMTgxMzM(MTMzOTI1NDc~!CONTIGUOUS_US*MTAxOTUzNjU.MjU1MzY4MTk(MTc1)MA~!IN*NTM3ODEwMg.NzMzNTExOQ)MQ~!CN*MTAzNjg2NTY.Njg2NTM4OQ(MjI1)Mg~!US-AK*OTg2MTA1Ng.MjAwMTA0MTc(MTk4)Ng~!US-HI*MTUwNjQ3ODQ.MTg5MjE1ODg)OA~!PR*ODgzNTIxNQ.MjQ4NDI5NDk)OQ https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTI3MTAzMDM.NDg4OTk2MQ*...
• eutropia 6y ago
  This spams your browser history something fierce. Can that be optional?
  • Orou 6y ago
    Agreed, it's a neat little app but having URL parameters work like this is very anti-user.
    • neolog 6y ago
      Disagree. The app's url scheme is stateless, which is great. Linear views of browser history is the problem.
      • javawizard 6y ago
        The problem is not so much that it stores state in the URL as that it uses window.history.pushState instead of window.history.replaceState.
      • quickthrower2 6y ago
        Do we really want to push the Git way of thinking onto joe-average web user.
        • deleted 6y ago
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      • Orou 6y ago
        How something functions is more important that how it is implemented. I'll take a stateful app that doesn't break history over a stateless app that does any day of the week.
  • lol768 6y ago
    It's not implemented correctly: function t() { b().then(function (e) { n.search('borders', e) }) } o.$watch('map.borders', t, !0), triggers a pushState instead of a replaceState. The fix is straight-forward, I think: function t() { b().then(function (e) { n.replace() n.search('borders', e) }) } o.$watch('map.borders', t, !0),
• deleted 6y ago
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• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  It's neat, but it breaks the back button, something fierce.
  • kbenson 6y ago
    It doesn't break it as much as it very liberally adds states for all the changes you make in the page, to the point it's hard to see anything in the back history except what you've done on that page. Go far enough back and you get back to the prior page though. It was sort of annoying.
    • dwighttk 6y ago
      but pushing the back button doesn't return the page to a previous state, it stays the same until you push it enough times to get to the previous page...
      • kbenson 6y ago
        Yeah, the app is broken in that respect (at least in FF, which is all I checked in), but it does eventually work. I guess whether that breaks the back button or not is somewhat dependent on your view of what it does and how it should work.
    • bdowling 6y ago
      When an app seriously disrupts a core browser feature like navigation to the point that it’s nearly unusable, I call it broken.
  • eightails 6y ago
    Most browsers these days give you a list of your history when you hold down the back button. Useful for sites that do this or to get out of redirect loops. But I agree, the sites behaviour is annoying and far from ideal.
  • bartread 6y ago
    It would be more palatable if going back updated the UI state to the previous location of the country you were dragging around, but this doesn't seem to work (at least not in Firefox). It's a cool project but this Back button behaviour is incredibly irritating. I ended up having to click the button about 50 times to get back here to the discussion.
• usr1106 6y ago
  Technically nice, but could be called a violation of the principle of least surprise that countries change in size as you drag. Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection ?
  • mdpm 6y ago
    I think that's the point? It's trying to display the difference between the most commonly used projection and the actual relative sizes of territories. (Forgive me if my snark detectors are misfiring, and have an xkcd) https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
  • gsich 6y ago
    Gall-Peters is not a pleasant map. If you want equal area, try Eckert IV.
    • andi999 6y ago
      Or get a globe.
      • usr1106 6y ago
        Doesn't help. You would need a globe with an "inner" map and an outer mostly transperent sphere that can be freely moved and display a country in a semitransparent manner. That way you can move the countries to compare over each other. And now might still want to freely rotate the upper one of them to get the best visualization.
    • afterburner 6y ago
      Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...
    • usr1106 6y ago
      Not pleasant for another reason than Peters being a communist praising the achievements of the USSR? I haven't studied the subject in detail, because an unsolvable problem is... eh... unsolvable. A quick web search did not bring up anything to compare those 2 (or others suggested here) on a quick glimpse.
• the_only_law 6y ago
  I knew Alaska was big, but holy crap! If you move the continental US from the southern most Alaska Islands to the top, it stretches nearly the entire east coast.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    You can place Alaska over Europe and it will touch Turkey, Spain and Sweden.
• swrobel 6y ago
  Anybody found contact info? I think I found a bug...
• leovailati 6y ago
  I wish there was a way to move Antarctica around.
  • computerphage 6y ago
    There is! Just type "antarctica" into the search box
    • leovailati 6y ago
      You're right! English is my second language, so I was typing "Antartica". I apologize for that.
      • computerphage 6y ago
        English is my only language. Its spelling is still terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_pronunciation even has "Antarctica" on its list of examples. "The words Arctic, Antarctic and Antarctica were originally pronounced without the first /k/, but the spelling pronunciation has become very common. The first "c" was originally added to the spelling for etymological reasons and was then misunderstood as not being silent."
• grecy 6y ago
  I spent three years driving 54,000 miles around Africa. [1] At 30 million square km, it's more than 3 times bigger than the US (which is 9.8 million square km including Alaska) This gives a brilliant visualization of how enormous it truly is. All of the US, China, India and a good bit of Europe fit inside it. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/ [1] youtube.com/theroadchoseme
• amanzi 6y ago
  It's fun to drag Antarctica around to see the true size of it. Slightly bigger than China but not by too much.
  • pmoriarty 6y ago
    ...and growing smaller every day.
    • amanzi 6y ago
      :-(
    • bigbubba 6y ago
      The ice shelves are getting smaller, but as the ice sheets melt, isostatic rebound should raise the land mass of Antarctica up, increasing the land area of Antarctica.
      • phaemon 6y ago
        Except that some of Antarctica is below sea level. On the other hand, the reduction of gravitational pull from the melting ice will actually cause sea level drop around Antarctica ( which obviously makes it worse for Equatorial regions)
      • doikor 6y ago
        The effect is much much slower then the melting though. For example Finland, Sweden and Norway are still rising up from the last ice age (over 10k years ago). Don't know the other countries numbers but Finland is rising at 3 to 9mm (more as you go up north the gulf) per year from Gulf of Bothnia. The land area of Finland grows by ~7km^2 every year because of this. Fun fact in parts of Finland the land rising from the sea is projected to be faster then the current sea level rise scenarios due to climate change (not the worst ones but the "middle of road" scenarios that play out when we actually do something)
        • bigbubba 6y ago
• guidedlight 6y ago
  Australia is really interesting. It’s about the same size as the USA or the entirety of Europe.
  • cm2187 6y ago
    And even rescaled russia is brutal
  • grecy 6y ago
    Australia is 7.69 million square km, and the 6th largest country in the world. That makes it 80.7% as big as the US (inc. Alaska) and 77% as big as Canada. Like Canada, as massive percentage of people live in a tiny amount of the landmass. For Australia it's about 95% of people in 5% of the landmass.
    • mrfusion 6y ago
      Why didn’t Australians settle in the closest points to Britain? Why sail all the way to the other side?
      • YarickR2 6y ago
        It was a continent-sized jail ; you keep your baddest of asses as far from you as possible
      • grecy 6y ago
        The climate and farming land are a lot more favourable in the South/East. But in honesty like most people "discovering" land, they just happened to bump into the continent where they did and set up shop.
        • hvdfhbj 6y ago
          The latter part isn't really true in this case, the east coast was the last part of the continent to be discovered by Europeans. The west and north had been explored and mapped centuries earlier by various explorers (Hartog, Tasman, Dampier) but it wasn't until Cook discovered the more agriculture-friendly south-east coast that the idea of colonisation started to seem worthwhile; just eighteen years later we had Sydney.
• Exmoor 6y ago
  Cool tool. I must say that I didn't expect to be surprised by anything here, and initially I wasn't. Yea, Africa is huge, I know. But then I grabbed the average size American state I live in south Central America for no particular reason and I was really shocked at how much larger some of those countries were than I expected.
• cambalache 6y ago
  "True Size" Try Greenland there.
• cm2012 6y ago
  Wow South America is so much bigger than expected. Brazil is as big as the USA.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Wait until you find out that their population is about 75% of the US one. Brazil just seems smaller because it's poorer and poor people have less disposal income for spending, travel, etc, they're less mobile so have a lower impact outside their immediate surroundings.
• forinti 6y ago
  Put Chile over Europe and it goes from the northenmost tip of Norway all the way down to Libya and Egypt.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    Put it over Australia and it’s only 30% longer. Australia is huge! btw, this site completely obliterates your browser history.
    • _AzMoo 6y ago
      Then put Australia over Africa and be blown away by the true scale of that continent.
      • phaemon 6y ago
        The contiguous United States are slightly smaller than the Sahara.
        • puranjay 6y ago
          Wow. That should lay rest to any questions about the slow progress of Sub-Saharan Africa in history. Crossing an expanse of desert that massive would be next to impossible before mechanized transport
  • flobosg 6y ago
    That gives you an idea of the diversity of climates within Chile.
    • forinti 6y ago
      Ate least they only need one timezone. Had they ended up in the longitudinal direction, they would have less climate changes but lots of timezones.
      • 6y ago
• Reason077 6y ago
  Not so high and mighty now, are you Greenland!
  • iso8859-1 6y ago
    Still covers the distance from Winnipeg to Monterrey. So if the US is high, Greenland is high.
• vmception 6y ago
  Iceland is both smaller and bigger than I thought.
• mabbo 6y ago
  If you put Canada so that Victoria, BC is in Portugal then Newfoundland is in Iran. Most Finland is covered. Ottawa is roughly in Egypt. Canada is actually really huge, is what I'm saying here.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    I had a co-worker that would say "Only a Canadian would brag about how big Canada is because the majority of it is empty land". What percentage of Canadians live within a short distance to the Canada/US border? 95%? More? This guy also tried to brag about how many Canadians live further south than a portion of the US citizens with Toronto being further south than Portland/Seattle/Minneapolis/etc. The thing that always impressed me growing up was how big Alaska is after the first time I saw it overlaid onto the rest of the US. A quick web search found a fun site: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/germany/alaska-usa https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/germ...
    • adventured 6y ago
      About 3/4 of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of their southern border with the US.
      • bluedevil2k 6y ago
        No, it’s 90% of the population. https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Canadians-live-within-100-miles-of-the-US-Canada-border https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Canadians-live-with... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/5/5/11584064/canada-population-map https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/5...
      • mabbo 6y ago
        We cling to them for warmth
        • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
• fishtoaster 6y ago
  A fun surprise for me was to take any small-ish country near the equator - eg colombia or the Dem. Rep. Congo - and drag it up to northern Europe. Turns out that many of them are bigger than the entirety of Scandinavia.
  • grecy 6y ago
    It's interesting you would call the Dem. Rep. of Congo a small-ish country given it's the 11th biggest country on Earth! I barely skimmed it when I drove across on the West Coast, but it was easily the biggest adventure of my life. Half of me wants to drive from East to West, Half of me is terrified. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8V3GdOcPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8V3GdOcPU
    • fishtoaster 6y ago
      Oh yeah, it's certainly not small! It just looks that way if, like me, you're used to seeing the mercator projection. :)
• ZeroCool2u 6y ago
  I still remember the first time I learned about this. I was watching the West Wing (Season 2 Episode 16[1] which explains the problem pretty quickly) for the first time in the early 2010's and was absolutely blown away that we'd never been taught about this in public school (U.S.A.). Having graduated High School and a couple of years through undergrad, and just then realizing that my entire perception of the relative size, and in some cases position(!), of the continents is basically just wrong. It was actually a generally useful thought exercise though, because it really forced me to confront the fact that I need to consistently reflect on whether my previous assumptions on even basic topics hold true. I'm not sure it would be worthwhile to advocate for changing the default projection at this point due to the logistics, but at least teaching kids about the issue, which can be covered in no more than a few minutes and is obviously not super complex, just so they're aware of it seems totally worth it! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
  • secondcoming 6y ago
    You could have just looked at a globe!
    • jmartrican 6y ago
      I have a globe and it does not do as good a job as this site or other visual tools that the OP was referring to. These new tools are way better at showing the difference in actual sizes.
      • tempestn 6y ago
        Tools like this one might be better at highlighting the flaws of map projections, but I don't see how anything could be better than a globe at showing the true relative sizes and shapes of countries, since it shows them as they actually are. In what way do you feel the globe doesn't show the differences between countries well?
      • aetherson 6y ago
        In what way does a globe not do a good job showing the true size of countries?
• dugmartin 6y ago
  It's fun comparing Luxembourg. It is roughly the same size as the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts where I live: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTMzMzUzODU.MTMxMDk2NjQ*MTA5NzU0ODk(MTA1MDYzNzM~!LU*NTg0OTM2Ng.MTE0MTQ3MTU)Nw https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTMzMzUzODU.MTMxMDk2NjQ...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • caf 6y ago
    There's a single cattle grazing station in Australia that's nine times the size of it.
• metafunctor 6y ago
  In this day of ubiquitous 3D acceleration, I think any digital map that lets you zoom out more than a hundred miles or so should be an accurate 3D projection. Students should be primarily shown a globe. A physical one, if possible! In fact, paper maps in study books showing a large part of the world should also be accurate 3D projections.
  • ufmace 6y ago
    I think Google Maps already does this at least
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      > I think Google Maps already does this at least It clearly doesn't - you can zoom out and see this for yourself. It uses an equatorial variant of the Mercator projection.
      • fireattack 6y ago
        Looks pretty good to me? I'm no expert of course, but at least it's not similar to Mercator at all. https://i.imgur.com/D6fMLop.gifv https://i.imgur.com/D6fMLop.gifv (Native vid: https://i.imgur.com/D6fMLop.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/D6fMLop.mp4)
        • SamBam 6y ago
          It is definitely the Mercator projection. Here is the first frame of your video overlaid on top of a standard Mercator projection: https://imgur.com/a/4cHi6Di https://imgur.com/a/4cHi6Di As for whether it looks "so bad," it's hard to tell from that video, because it's a small segment of the map, all in the northern-most latitudes. The Mercator projection is very shape-conforming (except close to the poles, as you can see from the huge top of Greenland), and its size distortions depend on latitude, so locally it's always going to be very "good" compared with a globe. You're not going to see any huge "errors" just comparing the before-and-after shapes of Greenland (although, again, the top of Greenland is very distorted there), or comparing its size to its closest neighbors.
• lawrenceyan 6y ago
  I'm surprised by how small Russia is and how large Africa seems to be.
  • llsf 6y ago
    The surprise to me was that DRC is bigger than Greenland. Greenland is way overblown. Africa is massive. I realized it when I flew from Europe to Johannesburg it was same as flying to Los Angeles.
• noodlenotes 6y ago
  What really surprised me is that the US is three times the size of India! (2.5x not counting Alaska.) I guess I'm used to hearing that the US isn't actually as big as we like to think so I over-compensated in the other direction.
  • thomasahle 6y ago
    I like playing Map Fight: https://mapfight.appspot.com/ https://mapfight.appspot.com/ with friends. After playing it for a while you get a pretty good feeling for most countries' relative size.
    • cosarara 6y ago
      What are the rules of the game? That is how do you "play" it?
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    Texas to Minnesota fits India so well. Ganges just south of great lakes, India's south eastern border roughly following Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
    • gameswithgo 6y ago
      True fact: texas is larger than the USA
      • dylan604 6y ago
        What are you smoking? Texas is part of USA. A part cannot be bigger than the whole. Now, if you said Texas Fact: Texas is larger than the USA, I would have bought into your humor
        • gameswithgo 6y ago
          you are using euclidian geometry rather than texas geometry
• oldgradstudent 6y ago
  Don't people have globes at school these days? Oh, and get off my lawn.
• Demiurge 6y ago
  The good thing is that Google Maps has switched to a 3D globe view when zooming out. Now even zooming to the latitude extremes, you get a good projection. Thanks to vector tiles :)
  • lhopki01 6y ago
    It doesn't switch to a 3D globe for me when I zoom out. I remember that Google Earth used to do this but never Google Maps.
    • dylan604 6y ago
      Try enabling the globe mode with the top button in the bottom right corner's buttons.
    • roelschroeven 6y ago
      It's an option, "Globe", in the menu.
• xaduha 6y ago
  No point using flat projections on the web, push for more interactive globes!
• emiliobumachar 6y ago
  Great project! I'd just like to mention an obsolete advantage of the Mercator projection, which I assume played a large role in its spread. Back before radio, GPS, and accurate clocks, navigation in cloudy days was really, really hard. Mercator allowed you to draw a line in your map between origin and destination, and its angle with the North in the map would match the physical angle you'd need to keep, with a compass, to go from origin to destination. It would not give the straightest possible path, but away from the poles it was close enough.
  • Finnucane 6y ago
    Yes, Mercator created his map to solve a real problem for the ships' navigators of his day. And it did, it was a big improvement over what they had before that. Like many innovations, it became widely adopted for uses beyond its original scope, which became somewhat forgotten.
  • isolli 6y ago
    Did they have accurate true north declination values at the time? Or were maps oriented (locally) according to magnetic north?
• nazgulnarsil 6y ago
  1. Russia is big but not quite as big as I thought 2. China is bigger than I thought 3. India is even smaller than I thought
  • ricardo81 6y ago
    It's probably bigger than you thought if you drag it down to the Antarctic, at least on my browser it covers about 90% of the planet. Bug obviously.
    • kuschku 6y ago
      That's actually not a bug, it's the definition of the mercator projection - everything at the poles is scaled infinitely. That's why the poles themselves are actually missing on mercator, as they'd be infinitely large. Without the cropping it'd just continue forever like this: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bf/26/a7/bf26a70c57a3eb00ecd3bf739ce6f953.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bf/26/a7/bf26a70c57a3eb00ecd3... So obviously if you move a country to the poles, it gets scaled larger and larger and larger.
      • ricardo81 6y ago
        I stand corrected.
• Blake_Emigro 6y ago
  Um, comparing two or more countries only works properly if they're all dragged to be centered on the equator.
  • tempestn 6y ago
    Or to any other latitude.
    • Blake_Emigro 6y ago
      Okay, I should have been more clear - to get their mostly undistorted size and shape, not equally distorted.
• fctorial 6y ago
  Hangs when zooming into vatican
• rriepe 6y ago
  Nice app. I wouldn't mind seeing continents and celestial bodies as options.
• kristopolous 6y ago
  One people probably don't know about: Indonesia is about as wide as or wider than North America at any point
• rdsubhas 6y ago
  Holy crap Iceland is teeny tiny. More than 2.5 times smaller than Gabon. https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTQ2ODE4OTY.MzI1NDkxOA*MzE5OTU2OTc(NjY4MzE5Nw~!IS*NzcwNzM4Mw.MzI3MjUxNDM)Nw https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTQ2ODE4OTY.MzI1NDkxOA*...
• nickik 6y ago
  I have a huge terrain based map on my wall. I took me a while to find a place I could a map of that size and in that kind of format. Unfortunately I had to make it Mercator, even if I don't really like that so much. If anybody know a place (Europe) where I can order high quality terrain maps, if possible where I can select the region and have lots of options, that would be nice.
• peterfield 6y ago
  Would be worth limiting the latitude scale to physically-real values LOL https://i.imgur.com/EmYKxVL.png https://i.imgur.com/EmYKxVL.png
• anonu 6y ago
  It might have been the Governor of Colorado who said if you laid a drape down over the state - and let it cover the mountains and valleys - and then stretched it out, it would be bigger than the state of Texas.[1] So it got me thinking for a while what the "true size" of a country is if you were to stretch it out. A mountainous country or region would technically have a larger surface area. I started thinking a bit about how you would go about calculating that. You would need some sort of topographical map and then run a bunch of surface area calculations (approximations) between topography lines. Sounds like a fun project but I never got around to look into it much.. [1] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/02/615975703/not-my-job-colorado-gov-john-hickenlooper-gets-quizzed-on-2020 https://www.npr.org/2018/06/02/615975703/not-my-job-colorado...
  • hvdfhbj 6y ago
    It quickly turns into one of those almost but not quite fractal problems. By the time you get down to the scale of individual grains of sand, you are having to make some tricky calls. If this grain of sand is sitting on top of this other one, do we count the full surface area of the top grain minus the point of contact, or do we declare that the grain is not actually part of Colorado but merely a grain sitting on top of Colorado? Whoops, the grain moved while you were thinking about it. Then once you've classified every single grain as in or out, you get down to the subatomic scale. Perhaps you could define the surface in terms of a single electronic density isosurface, but you'd be choosing your isosurface somewhat arbitrarily.
    • runeks 6y ago
      Well said. It’s the same problem you run into when measuring the length of a coastline. It has no “true” length.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    Right but mountains make it hard to travel. Whereas coastline, if you have lots of it you can have your house on the water not too close to the neighbor
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
• psanford 6y ago
  The Map Men covered a number of different map projections last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtBV3GgQLg8&list=PLfxy4_sBQdxy3A2lvl-y3qWTeJEbC_QCp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtBV3GgQLg8&list=PLfxy4_sBQd...
• omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  I almost hit 40 before hearing about the Mercator projection. My wife flew to Zambia for some charity work, and mentioned how long her flight from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe was. I was confused because I thought the distance between the two was about the same as the distance between the US east and west coast, and she pointed out that Africa is actually huge.
  • skrebbel 6y ago
    I don't understand, the US east coast is further from it's west coast than Ethiopia is from Zimbabwe (I checked my measuring with my finger on my son's globe).
    • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
      Haha, yup. If you go onto gmaps and drop in directions for Los Angeles to New York and Addis Ababa to Victoria Falls by car, the trip distances are within ~50-60 miles of each other. If you zoom out, the length of the trip between Addis Ababa and Victoria Falls only gets you to Chicago from Los Angeles, and the length of the trip from Los Angeles to New York will get you all the way to South Africa from Ethiopia.
• abanayev 6y ago
  Very cool, but flooding the browser history can be avoided - I don’t imagine deep-linking would be very common.
• Ansil849 6y ago
  I honestly cannot come up with any other explanation for why this is not taught in schools other than due to propaganda for Western powers.
  • csande17 6y ago
    FWIW I was taught about this, including a link to this exact website, in my US middle school. It felt a little silly at the time because even the ancient rolly-up map at the front of the classroom used the Robinson projection, which does not distort relative sizes nearly as heavily.
  • zokier 6y ago
    never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity "Stupidity" might be bit harsh here, but the principle applies.
  • kuschku 6y ago
    In Germany all schools use the Winkel-Tripel projection which avoids these issues entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Winkel-tripel-projection.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Winkel-t...
• throwmemoney 6y ago
  So the old saying that Japan could fit inside California is wrong?! https://www.laweekly.com/these-countries-could-fit-inside-california-map/ https://www.laweekly.com/these-countries-could-fit-inside-ca...
  • t0astbread 6y ago
    No, it's right? California, according to the site is around 424 thousand km², Japan 378 thousand. Japan couldn't fit in Cali's borders though if that's what you meant.
• wraptile 6y ago
  Another point that is often overlooked is that geographical _flat_ size is misleading and often irrelevant. The distance/area of 1000 kilometers gives you very little information without topographical/logistical context. i.e. knowing that it takes a 5 hour long drive between point A and point B or that area C has 2 million people living in it and has big undeveloped forest density is much more relevant than saying it's 200 kilometers apart or it's 100 kilometers m2 big. TL;DR: landmass alone is very uninteresting and misleading.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    I was thinking about the coast-line. Somehow more coast-line seems like more better places to live. And mountains? They increase the surface area but would seem to make living and travel more difficult.
  • jaclaz 6y ago
    There are anamorphic maps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram#Shape-warping_contiguous_cartograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram#Shape-warping_contig... but for whatever reason they are not common. I remember (but cannot find it right now) one of these maps of Europe that was based on the railway travel time between main cities that made it evident how time and distance are very different.
• galaxyLogic 6y ago
  According to this Antarctica seems to be the biggest of them all? Or at least much bigger than say USA
• michalc 6y ago
  A few years ago I made http://projections.charemza.name/ http://projections.charemza.name/ ... click and drag a Mercator map to rotate the world "before" the Mercator projection is applied, to see a whole range of "equivalent" projections. None of them look like the world to me, but they're just as valid.
  • zeristor 6y ago
    I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, thanks.
• maze-le 6y ago
  Whatever projection you choose, Russia will always be incredible huge.
  • larozin 6y ago
    But like Canada, most of that territory has too harsh climate to live in. Without such places it would be comparable with US.
• CodesInChaos 6y ago
  Is Mercator projection really that popular? I think I've mostly seen the Equirectangular projection and the Robinson projection (or a similar one). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection
• minusSeven 6y ago
  Add the ability to turn countries please. Otherwise its brilliant.
• cafard 6y ago
  There is a line in Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils running something like "More and more, Alun's life was coming to consist of being told what he knew, at dictation speed." A book on maps that I got in elementary school laid this all out clearly. Every few years since about 1980, someone announces it as amazing news.
• cousin_it 6y ago
  The same idea can be conveyed in one image with no interactivity: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/74/5e/12745ea9bb8bdf3892141023e30a98a6.png https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/74/5e/12745ea9bb8bdf389214...
• HeavyStorm 6y ago
  OMG everything you do on the site creates an entry in the browser history...
• occamschainsaw 6y ago
  Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
• AtOmXpLuS 6y ago
  [AtOmXpLuS](https://atomxplus.com https://atomxplus.com)
• rajnathani 6y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538