The True Size of Countries | Hacker News Reader

The True Size of Countries

thetruesize.com

193 pointsMitchhhs66 comments

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From The West Wing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU

Big block of cheese day is my favorite day.

One of my favorite West Wing moments. So good.

Everyone knows the ONE TRUE MAP PROJECTION is the Fuller Map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

After looking at this I just realized why maps showing airline routes always show arched lines.

It'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

Critique: http://www.genekeyes.com/FULLER/BF-1-intro.html

Just 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.

When 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.

I 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.

No, 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.

Ok yes. An accuracy issue then as it's probably using a simple algo for the projection. Stand corrected.

Doesn'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/...

That's a pretty great problem to have. Not the limit, but getting 25k daily views.

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.

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.

Greenland is the biggest island, by a large factor.

Is Australia not an island?

It's a continent. Otherwise, we may as well call North America an island.

Well, 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"

You 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

...I never said it wasn't? I was just objecting to calling North America an island.

He was referring to the fact that Antarctica isn't connected to any other continent either.

I know, and I never said it was--hence my confusion at being called silly for my post (which was purely objecting to calling North America an island, since it IS connected by land).

How? Isn't it connected to South America?

Modulo the Panama canal.

What about the two non-swinging bridges across the Panama Canal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Bridge,_Panama) -- soon to be three? If the man-made separation counts, the man-made connection should too.

It's not man-made land though.

If we want to be pedantic about whether or not the Panama Canal turns North America into an island or not, we can change the argument, and ask whether or not the Americas are an island.

What about just the eastern USA, then? It is fully split by rivers and lakes to the north and west, and oceans to the east and south...

Greenland @839,999 square miles is the biggest island. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001783.html

Unless your talking about Australia which is ~3.5x a big. (2,969,907 sq miles)

I'm actually talking about all of the Africa-Eurasia super-continent.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area Greenland is the biggest island.

> 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.

Greenland is the biggest island. Australia is a continent.

There 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.

Actually Australia is a dwarf continentoid.

I'm a bit surprised the other way around. Greenland is bigger than I thought when I move it over Europe. And Iceland too.

> 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.

Well, speaking for myself, definitely not the Futamura projections. Way too high a level of abstraction to remember.

Don'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?

some 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.

This 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?

A 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.h...

It's the largest of 497 municipalities in the state (it has an area of 7,804 km²).

Did 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.

That's a blast from the past.

http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024

This 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.

Click on the country and the compass rose will change color to match. You can drag the compass rose around to rotate the country.

Presumedly 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-siz...

The UK fits within the Gulf of Mexico.

http://i.imgur.com/aTnhSpp.png

Japan is bigger than I thought; about the size of the US east coast.

Makes me want to get back to working on my conformal octahedral butterfly map project: http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg

This 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.

Small nitpick: The country area is inverted if you move it near the poles. (Maybe because the orientation clockwise/counterclockwise changes implicitly.)

I feel it is my duty to link to a very relevant xkcd:

What Your Favorite Map Projection Says About You

https://xkcd.com/977/

Some 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.

I 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.

Are 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?

Cool!

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.

I 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?

The projection is inconsistent: dragging a country over where it really belongs results in an outline that does not line up.

From 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.

That'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.

For a suprise: compare Dem. Rep. Congo to Alaska.

This really blew my mind. Thanks!

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