The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection | Hacker News Reader

The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection

thetruesize.com

556 pointspicture266 comments

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

You could have just looked at a globe!

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.

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?

In what way does a globe not do a good job showing the true size of countries?

The biggest problem with a globe is that it is round.

In this case, that means you can’t see all of it at once, which means you’re relying on your visual memory unless you actually pull out calipers.

Seems like this could be easily fixed. Make the countries on the globe removable (magnetic?). Then they could be moved over other countries to get a direct relative comparison in the same field of view. Similar to what the OP web site is enabling.

Or have a conventional printed globe but that has a clear "shell" with an engraved map that can be freely positioned to overlay any part of the "shell map" atop any part of the conventional globe surface.

I have no idea how the mechanism allowing this globe within a globe would work.

As flexible screens get better maybe a globe whose entire surface is a touch-sensitive display that allows gesture control of the map content?

A possible issue with this is that due to the spacing between the two concentric globes the countries on the external one will appear bigger than the ones on the internal one.

Perhaps the engraving on the outer shell would need to be done on the inner surface?

> Make the countries on the globe removable (magnetic?

Countries as jigsaw puzzles pieces, made with soft Silicone, should work as well

yes, you're very clever ;). https://xkcd.com/977/

I am wondering, are globes rare where you live? They do not suffer from any distortion. Changing maps does not help, there is a theorem that no faithful planar map of a sphere exists, the video is a bit short on this.

For kids (and adults!) the LaapFrog interactive globe is superb.

Not sure how much they've retained, but when they were younger, my kids could pinpoint every country on the globe, and knew the capital of every country.

Edit: The model we had was much less sophisticated than that currently available (no screen or videos). It had, for example, fun speed games where it would name countries and you had to find them on the globe and tap them with the stylus, competing for who could find the most countries in a set time.

I was excited to buy one for my kids, but apparently they may not have improved since then :-( https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RJ4ZQ1SDMKLNU/

I'm guessing there's a term for products that get worse by virtue of being "enhanced".

They really should reintroduce the old model, just with updated political geography.

You can't generally see two countries next to each other on a globe. The globe itself is accurate, but a human looking at a globe sees an orthographic projection up to binocular perspective, which is only accurate near the center. So you can't compare India to Brazil for example.

Sure you can, you just rotate the globe back and forth. You can even measure and compare it roughly using your fingers.

Use two globes?

And I wonder why inflatable ball globe are not that common? Much better than globe on axis.

They are in every single classroom in the US. A lot of kids, like the parent poster, just never look at them.

Thats interesting. Here they usually are not in classrooms, but at home.

No, they really aren't. While there was a globe or two in different classrooms, most classes that needed maps of sorts had pull-down maps.

Once we reached middle and high school, most classes didn't have maps. If I were building a modern school, I might not put physical maps in any classroom equipped with modern projection tools and smart boards.

> They do not suffer from any distortion.

You must be from the northern hemisphere. Globes seem to be mounted upside down usually, Antarctica belongs on top.

Is there a truly rationale basis here (other than “magnetic north” which is equally arbitrary and has rotated)? I’d argue since the vast majority of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere, it generally makes sense to put that at the top, all else being equal.

On the contrary, it makes the most sense to place some point of the equator on top, so that you can rotate to look at any part of the globe you want, surely?

It's a lot easier to add the rest of the solar system if it rotates around the Earth horizontally, and you need that to explain the day/night cycle, seasons and tides.

Call me weird if you must, but I would prefer a globe rotate in the same fashion as the planet does: around the poles.

That's perfectly compatible with the poles being on the sides and the equator being on a vertical plane. In fact, many globes can be tilted to this position and the main rotation still happens around the poles.

Granted, but surely that would place "all points" on the equator "on top" rather than "some point"?

You're right, I spoke imprecisely. Some point on top to begin with, any other equatorial point you want with a quick spin.

They all do, but you can have more than one dimension of rotation.

Look at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085K2ZPWB/ .

You're still free to spin the earth backwards, though.

Interesting, so a globe on a 90 degree axial tilt rather than a 23 degree one. I'm sure I've seen such (either fixed at 90 degees or variable from 0-90 degrees), but I can't see any after a quick browser online.

no, just most people lives on top that's all.

For one, the southern hemisphere is mostly water.

But if the majority of the population lives in the northern hemisphere, shouldn't that make it heavier and thus flip the earth, placing the south pole on the top?

I think there is, actually: The Milky Way Galaxy. South is "down" towards the center, North is "up" towards the exterior. It was a revelation to realize this after growing up looking at the Milky Way in Northern Europe, that we're somewhat stationary in relation to the galaxy.

Can you explain this more? I do not understand this

The galactic center roughly aligns with the constellation Sagittarius, which is considered a southern constellation.

If you try to do milky way astrophotography in the northern hemisphere you quickly find out you are limited to the late spring / early summer, because you want to be seeing the southern sky at night. Most of the year the sun is too close to Sagittarius during daylight hours, making viewing impossible.

On what basis do you pick a definition for a globe being "upside down"?

certainly not the right-hand rule.

right hand rule for orital motion instead (or am i as usual getting this wrong)

it was mostly a joke, since the right-hand rule is itself an arbitrary convention.

I think you are right though; "up" and "down" are defined by applying the right-hand rule to the orbits of the planets around the sun, not their rotation about their own axes. this is why we consider venus to spin "backwards" as opposed to being "upside down". this does lead to an odd conundrum in the case of uranus, whose axial tilt is almost a right angle. which of uranus's poles is north?

> the right-hand rule is itself an arbitrary convention

This may not be true - if magnetic monopoles exist, choice of handedness becomes linked to choice of magnetic sign convention.

The claim there is no distortion all depends on one’s perspective. Top, bottom and, obviously, size have been chosen.

Distortion shares a root with torsion, twisting.

Scaling something evenly is not distortion, nor is placing it upside down, or otherwise changing its orientation.

There is no sense or perspective in which the orientation of a globe can be said to distort the shape of its features.

I believe the other commenter is referring to a distortion of mental perspective, not geometry, and honestly I’m buying it. It’s so strange to look at a globe upside down, even though there’s nothing unnatural about it.

I honestly thought I must have missed something big until I got to your comment... It seemed painfully incongruous in my mind to equate the demonstrably geometric ‘distortion’ artifacts directly resulting from a lower dimensional representation of a sphere ... to the mathematically unrelated notion of orienting the observational frame of reference. 2D maps literally distort and misrepresent the spatial arrangement of our planet’s surface in a metaphysical sense. Globes do not suffer from this distortion of space in their spherical approximate representation of the planet. The latter seems to be the the most salient point of the thread given whether you use an actual globe or a virtual one such a Google Earth... both of which are ubiquitously common and available ... it seems practically irrelevant (if nevertheless interesting) to consider the distortion of a 2D map as an actual “problem”. And whether or not one agrees with that, it’s wholly unrelated to whether you choose to hold your 2D map or 3D globe upside and any other orientation relative to your observational frame of reference—the former remains geometrically distorted in an egregious manner and the latter not.

Hahaha. I was wondering if I shd mention this. Of course north is up (like on any map :-)). On a more serious not this is probably really a political bias, but a lot of globes can be taken out and rotated in the frame (maybe with tooling). So one shd check before buying if the north bias can be cured.

But then you need to stand on your hands to read the labels

Sports is good, isnt it

That would be cruel. The turtles would be unable to right themselves and could possibly die.

I've had a globe since I was a young boy. I have an illuminated one in my study now. How better to explain "Great Circle" air travel?

No projection is accurate. Cartographers generally recommend against rectangular map projections. The Mercator is better at local shapes, because it's conformal, which is a not-often-mentioned advantage. Conformal maps have the property that accuracy consistently improves as you zoom in at every point. The tradeoff is that the discrepancy between regions separated by large distances can be much worse. Because the Mercator both works locally and supports loxodromic navigation it has remained popular.

One alternative I like is using a conformal projection divided into hemispheres. You can get much less distortion at the cost of a single interruption. Eg:

https://postimg.cc/N5nZ18CF

If it makes you feel any better, I remember both explicitly learning about this in middle school and being blown away when I first saw a visualization of the effect 10 years later.

At school it was just something you know and regurgitate as fact. After a visualization like this, you understand what you learned.

I taught this in 6th grade social studies in Ohio (a state in the USA) two years ago.

A reasonable interpretation of the standards should see this being taught in all 6th grade social studies classes across Ohio.

SPATIAL THINKING AND SKILLS

Content Statements:

3. Geographic tools can be used to gather, process and report information about people, places and environments. Cartographers decide which information to include and how it is displayed[0]

There were a number of videos explaining this concept. I remember this one from Vox [1] in particular resonating with the students.

So while we might have been short changed (I grew up in Ohio), the curriculum is improving.

[0] http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Learning-in-O...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ

In our case (VA), it was the 5th grade curriculum where we discussed map projection shortcomings, as part of world history. (For timing, this would have been about 2000).

5th grade for me too, with lots of memorizing features, drawing our own maps, learning different map projections... This was the early 90s, NJ

One thing that could be done is for schools to actually teach geography.

It’s extraordinarily relevant to history and current affairs. It gets a bad reputation because there is of necessity a significant amount of memorization. Knowing rivers, cities, mountain ranges, climates, the relative size and population of cities and countries really enhances your understanding of both historic and current events.

And I really hate to be one of those the-US-is-really-terrible-at-this guys, but it’s been my experience that the US is really terrible at this.

I never learned much about mapping or map projections until university, I still think it's one of the most valuable things I learned there and one of the things I learned actually worth the money.

We had a couple courses on manual mapping, surveying, geography, compass reading triangulation, all that stuff. How to draw a map by hand based on compass and survey data.

By far some of the most awesome stuff i've learned. I agree, more stuff like this should be touched on in high school. Mapping is such a large yet underappreciated part of society.

When I went through high school (in Australia) the memorisation parts of geography had long since gone out of fashion, and what had replaced them was a series of "case studies" where you learned about the lifestyles of some obscure group of people elsewhere on the planet for a few months before forgetting about them entirely.

At least memorising the capital cities of every country on Earth gives you some kind of big picture knowledge that you can build on in later life.

I'm almost 50, and we did a geography project in grade 5 on Brazil. I still remember a lot about that project, despite a lot of that information being completely out of date now (My instinct is to still say cruziero as the currency of Brazil even though it's wrong). I've never been to the country and probably never will just out of lack of interest, but it's funny how some things stick with you.

I'm confused at the "didn't learn it in school!" comments. I went to an average public school in lower-middle class area in the US and remember learning lots of geography. Memorizing rivers, mountains, major cities, national parks etc., and yes multiple forms of map projections. 5th grade in particular really hammered it home. We even had to draw maps. This was the early 90's.

Being old I have noticed that a lot of people swear they didn't learn this or that in school. Even though they were to the same school as me. I think it's down to selective memory, it was just not registered because there was something more interesting at the time. Youth only being humans after all.

I think it comes down to what interests you. Nuggets like how different map projections impact size and shape of the earth is the kind of thing I would never forget.

Other kids could discuss specific goals, matches, titles and football players; sometimes from foreign leagues. Even though I vaguely enjoy watching the odd match, the details would instantly be lost to the ether.

Was this the entire world, or just the US?

My public school matches everything on your list except map projections, but it is possible I just did not pay attention to that...

I was taught world geography, just have no memory of different map projections

> It gets a bad reputation because there is of necessity a significant amount of memorization.

Ah, the joys of having to memorize all the counties and then all 50 states and their capitals. Never again.

> And I really hate to be one of those the-US-is-really-terrible-at-this guys, but it’s been my experience that the US is really terrible at this.

We could do better but it's not like we don't learn geography. We learn state and national geography. I supposed world geography could be emphasized more.

I had high hopes for geography at secondary school but dropped it at the first available opportunity.

As a small child I spent a lot of time memorising the atlas, not just the maps with the towns/rivers/capitals but also the pages that went before that about what countries exported what, what countries imported what, how the continents had changed over millions of years, the flora and fauna as well as the volcanoes stuff.

At school there was no teaching of the towns/cities/countries it was just about how volcanoes and tectonic plates worked. Which was far too boring for me.

If you know towns, cities and countries at the atlas level then it is knowledge learned by rote. If you find yourself living in a cosmopolitan city such as London where you meet people from all over the world then you can find this information useful. Even if you have never been there yourself you once knew a place well enough to remember the name so there is genuine interest in finding out what it is like to live there.

I wish they taught this geography of place names as a subject because it could be the one subject that kids who like memorising stuff could do well at.

Oh great, the Gall-Peters projection.

The Gall-Peters projection is just as problematic as the Mercator projection. Actually, it is arguably more problematic because it doesn't have any compelling features that it does better than other world-scale maps.

The best world-scale maps are going to be along the lines of the Robinson projection, where you give up on trying to pretend that the world atlas is a rectangle. You're going to be screwed any way you go about it. Cylindrical map projections suck at large scales, because one of the directions is being stretched way too much. Conic map projections are good at intermediate scales (state-to-continent size), but when you expand the map to large sizes, the distortions at the edges become too great to bear.

The Gall-Peters projection is an equal-area map, but it goes about this in an especially annoying way. The areas near the equator are made excessively tall and skinny, and near the poles, they are excessively short and wide. And it turns out that human beings are really not good at comparing sizes of rectangles that have drastic aspect ratios in different orientations. The spaghettification of countries doesn't lend itself to a visually pleasing map, and it really obfuscates useful tidbits such as "Maine is closer to Africa than any other US state", which is pretty clear in virtually every other world map. To top it off, it was presented to a cartographic conference as the map that's better than Mercator at a time when all cartographers were already using non-Mercator maps and complaining about lay people relying on Mercator maps for world projections.

I think the Waterman butterfly projection is my favorite:

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

Mine is Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

Great for showing the relative sizes of continents (and also visualizing how all the continents are nearly one contiguous landmass), at the cost of chopping up the oceans.

Second favorite is the Peirce quincuncial map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection , which tiles the plane.

The Dymaxion map is very interesting, I was a bit surprised just how connected the continents actually are.

Pangea theory is much more obvious when you look at that map.

Also it is interesting that it is as if the whole "land" of the world is basically a big island in the middle of the ocean.

That looks pretty tough on New Zealand.

The parent comment never endorsed Gall-Peters.

It's unclear whether they were simply made aware of different projections through the show or if they thought Gall-Peters was the ultimate solution, as you assumed.

They did link to a video entitled Gall-Peters though, so it's clearly on topic.

>And it turns out that human beings are really not good at comparing sizes of rectangles that have drastic aspect ratios in different orientations.

I keep wondering, if there are a map like Mercator projection, as reference since everyone is familiar with it, but provide size that is relatively accurate but not 100% area accurate like Gall-Peters projection.

i.e It is a map that is not accurate by an metrics or projection in any shape or form but a better Mercator ( Normal ) Map with slightly more accurate showing of relatively size.

It is only used to provide some sort of better mental model without using the Globe. Rather than Direction And Traveling ( Mercator ), true Size, ( Gall-Peters ).

The Robinson projection is probably what you're looking for. It was explicitly created to try to balance these two extremes.

I also think that the Robinson is probably the best candidate for an accurate "default" map of the world. There are projections I prefer but the Robinson retains the recognizablity as being obviously a map of the world.

Robinson or Winkel tripel are probably the best here. Aitoff, Mollweide, Kavrayskiy, Wagner, etc. are all decent choices here as well.

One commonality all of these projections have is that they are pseudocylindrical instead of cylindrical: lines of longitude are not depicted as straight lines but as curved lines, with the curve being more pronounced the further from the central meridian you are.

Had a mid-sized globe at home growing up. It wasn't attached to anything so you could pick it up and rotate it any direction. This gave me a pretty could sense of how big any o the continents and countries were, more than anything.

American here. My underfunded school taught us this in 6th grade. We even cut orange peels to learn the different projections.

That was the 90s. Public schools have really gotten shitty.

Totally with you -- and I have a rant on this that expresses your same indignation![1] Sadly, the alternatives are also bad, albeit for different reasons; damn this cursed sphere!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5jCXdTYJYc#t=30m35s

You know if we could all just agree on the flat earth thing it would be quit a bit easier. Gravity wouldn't make a whole lot of sense though.

Bah easy, the flat earth is accelerating through space at 9.8m/s/s ;)

That's much too fast, the turtles underneath can't walk that fast, and there's a whole lot of them

This is very good, explaining much better than I could possible do. Thank you.

Also, I remember reading about AuthaGraph World Map[1] from the architect Hajime Narukawa[2] which won The Good Design Grand Award[3] back then, creating a new world map displayin each contry, including Antarctica and the North Pole shown in its entirety.[4]

[1] https://totravelistolive.co/authagraph-world-map/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajime_Narukawa/ [3] https://www.g-mark.org/ [4] http://www.authagraph.com/top/?lang=en

Thank you for sharing this. I'm ashamed that in all my years on this planet I thought that Greenland was nearly as big as the whole of Africa.

I think I'd over compensated - I was surprised to find that Greenland is nearly as big as India.

In Europe everyone has a word atlas for geography class, and the various projections are explained literally on the first page.

Oddly, in my US elementary education we spent a lot of time in 4th and 5th grade learning about different kinds of maps and their trade offs. Perhaps my classes were anomalous?

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.

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.

Did they have accurate true north declination values at the time? Or were maps oriented (locally) according to magnetic north?

A few years ago I made

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.

I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, thanks.

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.

I think Google Maps already does this at least

> 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.

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 (Native vid: https://i.imgur.com/D6fMLop.mp4)

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

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.

Sorry I wasn't clear.

The first frame is the Mercator projection; the whole conversion (See GP: "..I think any digital map that lets you zoom out more than a hundred miles or so should be an accurate 3D projection" and then the reply "I think Google Maps already does this at least") is about now on GMaps you can enable "globe" option, which uses a more accurate 3D projection.

The video shows before/after enable globe option.

I remember it doing this as well. But I just tried it now and it doesn't anymore.

It's an option now. Toggle the globe icon.

That's weird, me too, I could swear it used to do that. It doesn't do it now though, and I can't find any option to make it do that again. Oh well.

It does if you enable "Globe" in the menu.

> I think any digital map that lets you zoom out more than a hundred miles or so should be an accurate 3D projection

But there is no such thing as an 'accurate' 3D projection onto a 2D space is there? What do you want them to do?

For a digital map, you can show a simulated globe (like what Google Maps does).

If you have a world paper map, though, there's no real way around inaccuracies. You can trade off one inaccuracy for another, is all.

Google Maps does not do what you are saying it does. Try it for yourself. Zoom out. Look at the size of Greenland. It’s just a variant of the conventional projection you’d use on paper.

And even for systems that do adjust the projection based on where you’re looking, such as Google Earth, that simulated globe is still... just a projection. It’s got the same issues in that areas and sizes are distorted.

Google Maps used to show a globe at low zooms by default: https://9to5google.com/2018/08/03/google-maps-globe-zoom-out...

Now you have to click a button to turn it on: https://old.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/eoav6s/did_they...

Look at the screenshot - notice how compressed Italy is? That’s a projection issue. The projection issues are still there.

First of all Google Maps is cruder than Google Earth, so let's just use https://earth.google.com/web

I think the point here is that it is interactive and can be made as accurate as you want by moving around, zooming in and looking at the center. Not at stuff at the edges which might be distorted a bit, because yes, it's still a projection. Go to Map Style and enable gridlines and then try to argue it's not accurate.

Yes, but our brains readily interpret it as a rendering of a 3D globe, and do not make the assumption that the shape or size of Italy is literally like that. Further, you can trivially drag it to spin the globe.

There's a little button that looks like a globe in the lower right corner. When it was introduced, it used to be the default, but apparently isn't anymore. If you toggle it once, Google will remember your preference, so for a lot of people, when they zoom out they get a globe without manually switching over every session.

Of course, rendering a globe in WebGL or whatever and drawing it on a 2D screen is still a projection, and it still introduces distortions in shapes and areas, but the 3D-ness of it gives your brain the cues it needs to "correct" the distortions.

It'll be a non-problem once VR is more accessible. I can imagine Google Maps in 3D (and pr Google Earth) will be a killer app that helps pushes VR forward.

google earth vr already exists and has for a while

Google Earth VR has existed since 2016 I think, it's normally the first thing I show people that want to try VR. You can be like Godzilla sized in famous cities, go see your childhood village, visit the world, it's a really great experience.

An oblate spheroid shaped globe for that extra degree of accuracy.

It's neat, but it breaks the back button, something fierce.

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.

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...

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.

When an app seriously disrupts a core browser feature like navigation to the point that it’s nearly unusable, I call it broken.

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.

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.

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.

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/germ...

About 3/4 of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of their southern border with the US.

No, it’s 90% of the population.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Canadians-live-with...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/5...

We cling to them for warmth

I’m going to justify eating a donut by telling myself I’m keeping you warm.

But the cream floats to the top.

Sure, only a Canadian would know how incredible it is to have such a vast expanse of incredible and diverse terrain that makes for interesting cultural differences between the pockets where people concentrate. I don't know if bragging about the entire country's people per sq/km makes as much sense, save for on a city level.

I love many parts of the U.S for this as well, but the places that are unencumbered by hoards of people are much more scarce imo. In Canada it's easy, just go up.

Up is pretty unencumbered by hoards of people in most places! But in Canada, you can just go north ;)

Given the climate change going on (everything is getting warmer) having the ability to just keep going north is going to come in handy.

I've heard we're growing corn much further north than we ever did in decades past.

And if you put India over the South Pole, it covers the whole world.

System's buggy is all I'm sayin'. It's pretty, but I don't trust it for much of anything.

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.

I like playing Map Fight: https://mapfight.appspot.com/ with friends. After playing it for a while you get a pretty good feeling for most countries' relative size.

What are the rules of the game? That is how do you "play" it?

Texas to Minnesota fits India so well. Ganges just south of great lakes, India's south eastern border roughly following Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

True fact: texas is larger than the USA

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

you are using euclidian geometry rather than texas geometry

Indeed. Another slightly less well known true fact is that the standard hotel Texas waffle is larger than Rhode Island.

To be fair, Rhode Island is all syrup no pancake.

I think the size of North America in general is underappreciated.

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...

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.

Well said. It’s the same problem you run into when measuring the length of a coastline. It has no “true” length.

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

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. And you can have more beach.

Matt Parker from Standup Maths made a great video on exactly this subject a few weeks ago.

"Does land area assume a country is perfectly flat?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtKhbbcc1Rc

I remember something similar being said about Korea because it is so mountainous.

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.

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

Oh yeah, it's certainly not small! It just looks that way if, like me, you're used to seeing the mercator projection. :)

Holy crap Iceland is teeny tiny. More than 2.5 times smaller than Gabon.

https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTQ2ODE4OTY.MzI1NDkxOA*...

Put Chile over Europe and it goes from the northenmost tip of Norway all the way down to Libya and Egypt.

Put it over Australia and it’s only 30% longer. Australia is huge!

btw, this site completely obliterates your browser history.

Then put Australia over Africa and be blown away by the true scale of that continent.

The contiguous United States are slightly smaller than the Sahara.

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

That gives you an idea of the diversity of climates within Chile.

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.

Haha that'd be annoying as hell.

We do have 2 timezones, though (because of Rapa Nui)

Since 2017 it's actually three timezones, because Punta Arenas got its own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Chile

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

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

Cartographers for Social Equality was the very first thing I thought of when I saw this post!

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 :)

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.

Try enabling the globe mode with the top button in the bottom right corner's buttons.

It's an option, "Globe", in the menu.

I added in some missing pieces [1]. There are probably others.

[1]: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTI3MTAzMDM.NDg4OTk2MQ*...

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.

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).

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.

The same idea can be conveyed in one image with no interactivity: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/74/5e/12745ea9bb8bdf389214...

It's fun to drag Antarctica around to see the true size of it. Slightly bigger than China but not by too much.

...and growing smaller every day.

:-(

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.

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)

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)

From what I understand, rebound is fairly rapid at first when the crust itself uncompresses. Then it slows down and gets exponentially slower as the exceedingly viscous mantle flows back into the region. I believe that's what's occurring under Finland today, but I'm not sure how fast it ever was at its peak.

One people probably don't know about:

Indonesia is about as wide as or wider than North America at any point

No point using flat projections on the web, push for more interactive globes!

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/Robinson_projection

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.

You can place Alaska over Europe and it will touch Turkey, Spain and Sweden.

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.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538

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.

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...

There's a single cattle grazing station in Australia that's nine times the size of it.

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.

Not so high and mighty now, are you Greenland!

Still covers the distance from Winnipeg to Monterrey. So if the US is high, Greenland is high.

The Map Men covered a number of different map projections last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtBV3GgQLg8&list=PLfxy4_sBQd...

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/

[1] youtube.com/theroadchoseme

So the old saying that Japan could fit inside California is wrong?!

https://www.laweekly.com/these-countries-could-fit-inside-ca...

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.

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

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.

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/bf26a70c57a3eb00ecd3...

So obviously if you move a country to the poles, it gets scaled larger and larger and larger.

I stand corrected.

OMG everything you do on the site creates an entry in the browser history...

Would be worth limiting the latitude scale to physically-real values LOL https://i.imgur.com/EmYKxVL.png

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.

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.

never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

"Stupidity" might be bit harsh here, but the principle applies.

In Germany all schools use the Winkel-Tripel projection which avoids these issues entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Winkel-t...

This spams your browser history something fierce. Can that be optional?

Agreed, it's a neat little app but having URL parameters work like this is very anti-user.

Disagree. The app's url scheme is stateless, which is great. Linear views of browser history is the problem.

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.

Do we really want to push the Git way of thinking onto joe-average web user.

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.

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),

Very cool, but flooding the browser history can be avoided - I don’t imagine deep-linking would be very common.

According to this Antarctica seems to be the biggest of them all? Or at least much bigger than say USA

Australia is really interesting. It’s about the same size as the USA or the entirety of Europe.

And even rescaled russia is brutal

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.

Why didn’t Australians settle in the closest points to Britain? Why sail all the way to the other side?

It was a continent-sized jail ; you keep your baddest of asses as far from you as possible

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.

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.

I don't know if the discovery and use of the Roaring Forties predates or postdates Australian settlement, but in the Age of Sail, you need to sail south of Cape of Good Hope, which puts you in a strong westward wind belt known as the Roaring Forties, which will spit you out on the southern coast of Australia, with the southeast being the easiest to reach (because it's the most southern one). So in terms of sailing time, it's easier to get to southern than northern Australia.

You may need to read more about Australian history, people were sent their from England if they committed a crime like stealing a silk handkerchief.

One example given below

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Thackery

Historically sea and ocean navigation was coastal or as close to coasts as possible, plus influenced by winds and ocean currents. I imagine that going "straight" towards Perth was harder and less intuitive at the time that hopping near Asia and then through Indonesia and then over the Australian East Coast.

Nice app. I wouldn't mind seeing continents and celestial bodies as options.

Wow South America is so much bigger than expected. Brazil is as big as the USA.

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.

I'm surprised by how small Russia is and how large Africa seems to be.

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.

Whatever projection you choose, Russia will always be incredible huge.

But like Canada, most of that territory has too harsh climate to live in. Without such places it would be comparable with US.

Add the ability to turn countries please. Otherwise its brilliant.

Anybody found contact info? I think I found a bug...

Iceland is both smaller and bigger than I thought.

I wish there was a way to move Antarctica around.

There is! Just type "antarctica" into the search box

You're right! English is my second language, so I was typing "Antartica". I apologize for that.

English is my only language. Its spelling is still terrible. 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."

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.

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.

There are anamorphic maps:

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

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.

Hangs when zooming into vatican

"True Size"

Try Greenland there.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/

[AtOmXpLuS](https://atomxplus.com)

Um, comparing two or more countries only works properly if they're all dragged to be centered on the equator.

Or to any other latitude.

Okay, I should have been more clear - to get their mostly undistorted size and shape, not equally distorted.

Don't people have globes at school these days?

Oh, and get off my lawn.

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 ?

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/

Gall-Peters is not a pleasant map. If you want equal area, try Eckert IV.

Or get a globe.

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.

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...

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.

Yes. It looks ugly.

But that projection would also lead to countries changing shape when dragging them around, would it not?

Right. So maybe the best comparison could be done by not dragging one country, but selecting 2 (or another small number) and having them "fly" over each other or next to each in an "ideal" projection for this country. For most but the huge countries distortions should not be that big. The problem is the world map. Distortions will always be big somewhwere if you want to see 180 countries on the same map. But at the same time nobody wants to compare 180 countries.

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