The True Size of Africa (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The True Size of Africa (2015)

kai.sub.blue

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>> The Good Design Grand Award, arguably Japan’s most prestigious award for design, went out to architect Hajime Narukawa’s completely groundbreaking design for a map of the world. His map, the AuthaGraph World Map, isn’t your average map of the globe: It’s a near-perfect representation of the continents and oceans as they exist on our spherical planet, all laid out on a two-dimensional surface.

https://totravelistolive.co/authagraph-world-map/

I’m not a fan of AuthaGraph at all. It has horrible distortion look at Brazil or Alaska - and it’s proprietary (creator never released the actual map details, so you can’t make your own...) The worst thing, in my eyes, is that the distortion is unpredictable. Looking at a map where Canada is too big, you can mentally imagine Canada as smaller. But you can’t mentally undo the multi-direction transformation of Alaska into not-Alaska. The distortion is so bad that real world things like a road trip through South America would end up looking completely different from this map to another. You better hope you never get on a boat or a plane using this map - try tracing a straight line if you want a laugh. (The unfortunate distortion-hacking done by its creator effectively dumped the distortion in the oceans, so good luck if you ever go there.)

Design features like “you can do nifty origami with it” shouldn’t factor into if a map is used or not.

In my opinion, if you want something modern and cool, and you really care about pure accuracy, go with Waterman Butterfly. If you want something four sided and traditional, and relative sizes are slightly less important (but still important), go with Peirce Quincuncial - which, I might add, has far better looking Tissot’s indicatrices.

Your criticisms are way too strong. Every 2D projection map of a 3D globe is going to make some compromises. So you can make the similar kinds of arguments for Mercator projection maps, which preserve shapes, but not relative sizes.

>You better hope you never get on a boat or a plane using this map - try tracing a straight line if you want a laugh.

Then don't use it for that!

>Design features like “you can do nifty origami with it” shouldn’t factor into if a map is used or not.

Maps are made for functional or aesthetic reasons or both. Why shouldn't that be a consideration? The pertinent question is: what do you want to use your map for?

>In my opinion, if you want something modern and cool

Again, what are you trying to optimize for?

If one really cares about accuracy, why not getting a globe.

We all do : Google Earth. Is there still a point to 2D maps?

> Is there still a point to 2D maps?

Hiking away from cell towers and wifi

Historical maps

Maps that aren't owned by Google

> Hiking away from cell towers and wifi

Just download the map in advance.

> Historical maps

Agreed on this.

> Maps that aren't owned by Google

I agree with this in principle, but there are alternatives to Google Maps and some of them are even gaining popularity because developers in general are terrified of ever relying on Google for anything besides ads.

I actually just came home from a hiking trip hours ago. I was supposed to meet up with a friend along the way. I had a proper map. He only had a phone. Some rainfall and a little bit of bad luck and he could no longer use his phone. Luckily, everything worked out in the end, after some unneeded trouble. But I wouldn't rely on a phone like that.

> Just download the map in advance

Okay, hiking away from cell towers and wifi and power supplies

My phone gets about 4 days of use currently before recharging, and I could pretty easily find ways to recharge it even using solar power if I wanted to.

If you don't want to use your phone as a map that's fine, but it's incredibly convenient for (I'd wager) 99% of use cases.

What about redundancy. You drop your phone and you are lost in the wilderness. You drop the map, you pick it up again.

At least here hiking maps are much better than Google maps. (trails are marked and there are smaller paths visible)

"try tracing a straight line if you want a laugh" And on the Mercator projection, it too is also going to turn a straight line into a curved line. Draw a long enough line, and in a specific direction, it'll make an 'S' curve.

Personally, my favorite map to look at is the Goode homolosine projection. Also difficult for the usecase of navigation across oceans, but among continental comparisons, general shape and size, it's useful. Not all maps need to necessarily be used for navigation aeronautics, or seafaring.

It’s a near-perfect representation of the continents and oceans as they exist on our spherical planet, all laid out on a two-dimensional surface.

This is a bullshit statement. You cannot project the surface of the earth onto a flat plane without distortion. AuthaGraph favors the preservation of size at the cost of extreme distortion of shape.

Here is an interactive tool, that lets you center other projections on different countries, to see the effect of the distortions move about:

https://engaging-data.com/country-centered-map-projections/

From playing around with that, it would seem the design process for the map was to "center" japan, then fiddle around with the polar regions to make them more recognisable.

This projection seems to really skew shapes. For example, Alaska looks skewed diagonally, Brazil looks really stretched east-to-west, and the west half of Australia looks too big compared to the east half.

Mercator is what you get when you preserve local angles (ie shapes). So it's only natural that moving away from Mercator would distort shapes.

I guess you could try to concentrate your angle distortion into the ocean away from the land masses that people care about?

I prefer the (related) Dymaxion approach myself, but I'll admit it's not quite as accessible.

I really like the Dymaxion projection as well, especially the fact that one can easily see that all major land masses are separated by only small distances of water.

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

Dymaxion map is neat, but I don't think human brains are very good at handling interrupted maps and Dymaxion is particularly challenging. It is just pretty difficult to mentally intuit how the edges connect, and especially judge distances that cross the edges. Trying to eyeball something like Sydney-Lima great circle path on Dymaxion is unintuitive.

Of similar interrupted style, I think butterfly projections are even better. They might distort land masses slightly more, but are immensely more readable. And they have very pretty symmetric outline.

Even better, a close relative of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...

Very neat. And he didn't forget New Zealand[1] =)

I wonder how much the Mercator projection influenced the recent flat earth movement, specifically the Antarctic ice wall.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/

I far prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...

Minimal distortion, preserves east west alignment as much as possible.

That’s a fascinatingly done projection. It really demonstrates how it’s possible for Maine to be the closest US state to Africa.

Really cool. The shapes of the contents and countries seem like what I am used to. Except for Brazil.

Brazil really looks like it bulges out from South America compared to what I have seen on globes and other projections.

Does anyone know why that happens?

Any comparison of map projections should include Tissot's indicatrix [0] as a visualization of how distortion varies across the map. I find that it's easier to understand than looking at stretched and bent lines of latitude and longitude.

For AuthaGraph: https://kunimune.home.blog/2017/11/23/the-secrets-of-the-aut...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissot%27s_indicatrix

The map also follows the tradition of putting one's own country at the center

Africa has 54 countries, thousands of languages and 1.2 billion people.

As an African, whenever I see this map I'm more astonished by how densely populated Europe and India are, how big and populated China is and how homogeneous the US is compared to its size.

Population density of Europe is 34/km2

Africa is 45/km2

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...).

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-popula....

That really depends on where you draw the borders on Europe.

The population density of the EU is 105 people per km2. Include some or all of Russia and things look rather different. Similarly, Finland is 8% of the EU’s land area but only has 16.3 people per km2.

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

That has to be including all of Russia as part of "Eastern Europe" (indeed, if you drill down into the data, that's what's happening).

When we're talking about geography, you can't include anything east of the Urals in the European subcontinent.

The Urals as a border is purely political and historical in nature. It has no particular geographic significance.

Huh?

In Geology class they teach that the Urals formed about a quarter of a billion years ago when Europe and the Khazak land masses collided. I know this because we had to do a group paper on why such an old mountain range would be so unusually high. (Long story and not important.) Point is that though my degree wasn't in geology, and I'm only going from memory, I'm 99.999% certain that the Urals are the Urals for a critically meaningful geographic reason. At least, geologically speaking.

Of course, if this is all just political, then you can take any borders you wish to be Europe. I was only pointing out that if we're talking about landmasses in the geological sense, then the commenter was correct, Europe clearly does not extend past the Urals. Scientifically speaking.

In terms of geology it’s all just the Eurasia pate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Plate

Europe has always just been an political/economic entity as overland passage to Asia is difficult. Which makes the border completely arbitrary with various historic maps placing it in different areas.

That said plate technics is surprisingly recent, reaching a fairly modern form and acceptance in ~1960’s.

I'm referring to the European countries included in the visualization.

I'm always surprised to hear people say "The world is overpopulated" - I'm thinking there's plenty of room to grow in regions that live sustainably.

What would those regions be ? The Sahara isn't overpopulated if you look at the density of population, but it can't really sustain anybody. I'm sure there are some rain forests left to cut so we can grow more food for 1 or 2 billions extra people, but what's the end goal ? The world is overpopulated.

What are you measuring to determine over or underpopulation? Food production? We grow more food that is required to feed current population, much of world's farming is not efficient, done without modern equipment, etx., and then there is the subject of meat - if we stopped growing feed for animals, and instead seitch to vegetarian diet, we could feed a lot more people.

Then there is the argument that glasshouses are 10x as productive as open fields, so if we were to use them predominantly, we could return land to forests.

The modern agriculture just means automating depleting natural aquifers and using up topsoil and abusing chemicals at massive scale. Its the agricultural equivalent of optimizing for next quarter, but losing out on next decade.

Ancient equivalent is slash-and-burn agriculture, and famines from crop diseases and droughts. I dont think modern vs oldschool juxtaposition is helpfull

Agreed, but the scale makes all the difference. What few million farmers were doing manually is now being done by same number of of people (approximating, but could be wrong) using massive industrial scale machinery.

Quick google-fu is failing me with actual numbers, but I would not be surprised if we are using 3/4/5 orders of magnitude of water every year compared to 3000 years ago.

How would greenhouses use up top-soil?

Some places when seen from planes looks literally as vitrified, for example in Netherlands.

One of the largest current national problems in the Netherlands is the overproduction of nitrogen compounds, mostly caused by intensive farming. There's more to sustainability than CO2 and topsoil depletion.

Those would be the regions that live sustainably - e.g. low insecticide use, but currently have relatively low crop yields that can be improved by adopting some non-harmful modern techniques, like mechanization. You can also compare the average amount of garbage thrown out by a family - developed nations generate a lot of of waste and a lot of greenhouses. If we're capping population growth, the most wasteful regions should be the first.

No, there isn't room to grow unless you're talking about decimating other species and habitats. I live in one of those densely populated areas, and see the environmental, social, and political challenges of overpopulation every day.

with the population density of NYC the entire World population would fit in Texas.

the environmental benefits would be enormous

Good luck living in Siberia.

As the tundra thaws that place is predicted to be a massive agricultural production area.

Biodiversity is being decimated at an ever increasing rate, oceans are being stripped of life, many minerals will be mined out and become depleted and economically inaccessible within a generation or two, fresh water is running out, antibiotic resistance is increasing, long term chemicals are accumulating in the environment.

That's all before you even talk about greenhouse gasses.

When you say the US is homogenous for it’s size, are you referring to the physical geography or the demographic make up of the population, or something else entirely?

(I think I would disagree, but good faith requires I actually try to understand what you meant before I take issue with it.)

As the other commenter responded, I'm referring to the linguistic, socioeconomic and judicial homogeneity. Even though the US is culturally diverse, it still has a single currency, a single dominant language and a single jurisdiction (with minor state specific legal requirements). I only need one US visa to travel to all 52 states. A software company taking payments in the US has access to all 52 states. A peach cobbler is called the same throughout the US even though the recipe might change a little bit from place to place.

This is not the case in Africa or Europe, where countries use different languages, scripts, legal codes, currencies, driving directions, etc...

EDIT: I'm referring the land masses included in the visualization and what they entail in practical terms.

The US can be seen as a single market, the same applies to China and India. Europe has the schengen area, the EU and the EEA. Africa needs similar initiatives.

Do you have any idea how many different kinds of sandwiches we have in this country? You're just not looking at the right things for diversity! :-)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/14/dining/field-...

Good article. They rightly attribute the reuben sandwich to the Blackstone hotel.

Anyway, I'm enthralled by the idea of a lobster roll. I had clam chowder one time when we were in New England and it blew me away. I ate the pint and tried to go back and buy another, but my husband stopped me. I've had it a number of times since back here in the middle of the country and it doesn't even compare. Even in fancy restaurants, it's just not the same. I really want to try a lobster roll, but I have the feeling I'm not going to find one around here that does the sandwich justice.

The lobster roll is really delicious.

I’m sure you’re aware you had New England clam chowder, And that there’s also Manhattan clam chowder. But few folks know there’s also a Hatteras clam chowder. It’s made with a broth and the taste of clams really comes through a lot better than with the cream or tomato based variants.

https://blog.carolinadesigns.com/outer-banks-food/hatteras-i...

(And now that I’ve worked my way to the Carolinas… if you’ve never had shrimp and grits, look it up. Yum.)

p.s. as good as lobster is, stone crab is even better.

Definitely New England clam chowder. I'm not sure I'd like Manhatten style. You're just teasing me now with this Hatteras style. I don't think there's a good way to get decently fresh clams to the middle of the country.

I don't have a taste for grits. I finally came around to gravy on my rice, but I'm still iffy on grits.

I'm holding out hope that there's a decent lobster roll around here somewhere. You can get live lobsters here. There's no real reason you couldn't do a good lobster roll.

Lobster Rolls have two styles as well, butter only or with mayonnaise.

Really you just need the right roll, and you can make the butter version yourself.

It’s the roll that is hard to find.

I live in Manhattan and will defend it in all things EXCEPT clam chowder. Manhattan clam chowder is hot garbage.

I did have fresh-caught blue crab when I was living in New Jersey. Once I figured out how to eat it, it was amazing. Fluke and striper straight from the water to the oven. I don't miss the coast, but damn do I miss the food.

I love this! As an American, I think I've had most of the sandwiches on this list at one point or another in my life :)

Everything you said is correct and makes a lot of sense with the exception of the number of states. There are 50 states in the US.

Better luck next time DC and Puerto Rico.

That was pretty clearly a deliberate choice to show solidarity with two parts of the country who lack the same rights and government support for historical reasons.

Not taking away anything from what you said, my experience has been a bit different.

I actually found US more federal in nature for doing business compared to India and to some extent Europe.

The tax laws are lot more state specific than India, California has very different rules for privacy(ccpa) or environmental regulations than other states. Europe largely following GDPR is good enough (with some exceptions for Germany), most environmental regulations seem broadly consistent across Europe.[1]

US did seem lot more regulatory diverse than India which is more culturally/linguistically diverse,it feels like US states have more significant autonomy than countries in Europe have over EU regulations!

[1] It may be that I have not done as much work with Europe as US so I have not yet come across nuances

Try running a barbershop in France, Germany and the UK. They are far from business homogeneous.

In eg Germany you need three years of government approved training to work in one. And another two years of government approved training to run one.

(And I don't think those training certificates can be used for anything in other countries?)

Barber licensing is done at the State level in the US, and also varies pretty widely between states.

https://www.barber-license.com/

Not saying regulations are lighter in the Europe compared to the US , like the other poster below mentioned I have usually found some mechanism for cross border applications.

On a fundamental level access to free market and European project has a goal of synchronizing the regulations across member countries.

US states are proudly unique, Texas doesnt even keep frequency sync to the national grid!

Even UK(Texas of Europe?) , generally need to follow similar rules if they want access to common market brexit or not.

The training is often transferable.

Here is a link to a database of regulated professions in the EU: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/professional-qual...

A hairdresser in Czechia, with equivalent qualifications from other countries listed: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/regprof/index.cf...

> The US can be seen as a single market, the same applies to China and India. Europe has the schengen area, the EU and the EEA. Africa needs similar initiatives.

Yes, but you don't need much international cooperation to get a single market or visa free travel: individual countries can unilaterally declare free trade and open their borders. (And economic theory is in favour of that, too.)

You get an imbalance with free incoming trade but taxed/impaired outgoing trade. Perhaps a massively importing country can live with it if importers get better deals as a consequence. But otherwise bilateral arguments would be the long term viable approach.

What imbalance? The benefits of free imports accrue whether you’re a big country or a small one. Hong Kong did very well out of unilateral free trade.

The demerits also accrue, you lose a bargaining chip for your export fees, and it makes it more attractive to rely on imported goods than build a local alternative that could lead to an export business.

Huh? You can't just keep importing, because your trading partners want to be paid.

In the long run, imports and exports have to be balanced.

(Some countries export capital goods, like the US: when Chinese investors buy American startups or real estate that doesn't show up on your usual export statistics, but essentially it's still an American export.)

So if you are importing, you can't help but develop exporting industries.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by bargaining chip? What's there to bargain? You just declare unilateral free trade, and let other people decide on their own policy.

Also, FWIW, I've read that Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together.

I think america is diverse, and shockingly homogenous given its diversity. For example, chinatown in NYC does not seem particularly different from chinatown in SF.

Yes, the midwest calmer and the south is friendlier, the east is more uptight and the west is more chillaxed, and the cuisine is different in different parts of the country, but these are pretty much details at the edges. Everyone speaks english, the low-end labor speaks spanish, african-americans are discriminated against, etc.

To me (an outsider from Europe) the US doesn't feel homogenous at all. Compare New York to Taxas or California to South Carolina and they feel as much as different as for example Germany and Spain. With the only difference being that all US states share the English language and Europe has different languages, but even that difference is slowly reducing. For example the French, famous for not speaking English 20 years ago now actually do it very well if they're under 40 or 50 or so. And similar for Germany.

None of what you write makes any sense.

Spain and Germany have hugely different history, completely different food, different weather, they speak two non-compatible languages sets (Romantic vs Germanic), they have different laws, different stores, different banks, anything.

Texas and California speak the same language, have similar makeup of people, are similarly wealthy, they have the exact same stores, your bank account is the same, everything.

Now I am not argueing there aren't differences between CA and TX. But those are similar to differences between Hamburg and Bavaria or between Catalonia and Madrid. German<>Spain is a whole different ballgame.

Don't want to interrupt this nice discussion but the head topic was about Africa for once, and here we are talking about Europe and US again. Funny we can't switch even for a moment. I bet Africa sees a lot of this.

Probably the vast majority of HN readers/posters hail from the US and Europe, most probably haven't even been in any African country, so that hardly remarkable or unexpected.

And even in Spain itself you have three romances plus some alien language: Galician (closer to Portuguese), Catalan (French-Occitan family), Spanish (and Andalusia has it's own subdialect), plus Basque.

A Basque playing the txalaparta would look like a guy who came from a UFO for an Andalusian guy playing Flamenco with a guitar.

Ditto with a Galician with an Atlantic culture (and Celtic customs) plus a obvious bind to Portugal because 500 years ago they were the same language against a Valencian living in the sunny Mediterranean towns.

> Catalonia and Madrid

I believe those are what are literally called "fighting words"

I think you may be comparing "apples to oranges" within the US. When you say New York that includes a lot more than New York City. I'm from New York City but have never really felt out of place in Austin, San Francisco, LA, Denver, etc. But far upstate New York would be a different story.

Eh, the difference between those all will have more to do with population density than their location. Rural New York feels more like rural South Carolina than it does NYC.

>eel as much as different as for example Germany and Spain

Then you don't know Spain.

Western chillaxation is put-on.

It seems to me the commenter is referring to the number of languages and countries in a land mass.

What does it mean to be an African? Is there unifying culture of all of Africa? Like when I say I am an American, I don't mean the continent, I am talking about living in the US, but when someone calls themselves an African, what can I glean from that other than they live on a large, heterogenous continent?

As a fellow African I struggle to answer the question!

I find it interesting that your (valid to you and a commonly used use case) of "being American" excludes Canada, Mexico, etc. ... (actually all of South America).

There isn't a common culture.

I'm also acutely aware that my definition is extremely unlikely to be shared in North Africa, Central Africa, even in another province of my own country).

All that said "being African" parses with a lot more emotional and ideological content than just geography.

There's a hint of pride at the grandeur and diversity of the landscape and peoples, a dollop of hope for a brighter future given our huge potential (despite our poverty we have so much more stuff than many other countries), there's a dash of injustice of colonial history and exploitation.

When I work with someone from Nigeria or Kenia or I interact with someone who is effectively a refugee from DRC or Zimbabwe - I can honestly say we seem to have something in common with our feeling about Africa.

It's an identity. It attracts people who have it and repels people who don't have it. With efficient communication channels around it you can eventually build homogeneity. (I'm African)

I think you'll find lot's of people from North and South America would take issue with your definition of "American".

Totally but they would also know I was just speaking of the US. I don’t have any frame of reference for someone who says they are African.

Check out these latest photos taken all across various USA cities by NYTimes photographers: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/us/scenes-from-americas-r...

It's quite varied for a homogeneous country.

A related map comparison that blew my mind and left me feeling I understood things a little better, is East coast of USA vs Japan:

https://photoguide.jp/log/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/JapanUS...

This is especially funny when I look at my home country Germany.

It's one of EU countries with the densest population, but it doesn't feel that way. Especially the east is very empty in the countryside.

This is very much a question of reference points, I'm sure even the Belgians will insist there are sparsely populated areas in their country :)

Scrolling around on a map of Germany, I could find a forest about 10 km across in the eastern bit that only looked to have a few roads marked on the map. Go into northern Sweden and you'll be drawing completely empty circles 50 km across...

America understood very early on the power of story telling to build homogeneity. Medias are not just entertainement. They are the back bone of a nation.

The US isn’t very homogenous, it is merely depicted that way in media.

In which sense is the USA homogenous?

Language, currency, jurisdiction (to large extends), media…

An American from Idaho will be able to communicate, trade and watch the same tv as someone in Vermont, whereas a person from Malawi will not be able to do any of these things with a person in Guinea

As someone from Scandinavia I was surprised to to find out that there is even homogeneity in brand names. In Scandinavia if you from Denmark to Norway, you will likely stop shopping at Netto and instead shop at REMA 1000, if you travel to Iceland, you might find your self shopping at Nettó again, but it is a whole different chain (more likely you will shop at Bónus). In the USA you will probably shop at Safeway in New York, just as you would in California.

In comparison all of Scandinavia has a similar population size as the New York metropolitan area.

Actually, the one example you've picked there (grocery stores/supermarkets) is quite a bad one. There are very few national supermarkets in the US. Ironically, Whole Foods Market (now owned by Amazon) is as close as any to this title. Safeway may once have been widespread, but in terms of stores bearing that brand (as opposed to be owned by the company), there are not many Safeways anymore.

Instead, there are regional supermarket chains, some of which branch out a little into areas where they are not the dominant store.

Examples:

Albertsons: mostly in the western states

HEB: Texas only

Publix: southern states (all the way down to Key West)

Piggly Wiggly: hard to describe, but mostly a stripe running up through the midwest

Fairway: NYC, NJ and almost nowhere else

Now, had you written that about, say drug stores, it would be more true. Everywhere you go it will either be a CVS, Rite Aid or Walgreens. There are independents, but these 3 dominate the entire country, with some regional focus, but always a national reach.

Trader Joes has a pretty wide presence across the country (in 43 out of 50 states). And while they're not supermarkets per se, Walmart and Target have also got into groceries in recent years. There's also Costco in a similar boat.

Trader joes is the best example of homogenous because they sell mostly their own brand cross-country, so local stock doesn't dictate what is available on the shelf. The prices remain static across most of their stores as well (for most items) which is a HUGE reason why New York and Cali folks love shopping there.

And there are regional brands in many areas - just below Subway and McDonalds you’ll find things like Culver’s or Jack in the Box or In-n-Out - regional. Gas stations and restaurants are often regional, especially as cuisine varies.

Of course you can find McDonalds everywhere but you’ll find those in Europe, also.

I think the main thing that makes it feel superficially homogeneous is the shared language - which is now even more shared since the advent of Hollywood and national entertainment.

While Albertsons itself might be mostly in western states, the parent company owns plenty of other chains in other states, e.g. Safeway or Jewel-Osco. These chains all run the same promotions, carry the same generic brands, etc.

Thanks. I didn't realize that the parent company of Safeway had gobbled up Albertsons as well. Good to know.

It was actually the other way around. :)

Is Walmart not a national supermarket?

You're comparing a continent with a country. A person in Canada has very little in common with those in Mexico and/or Panama, etc. The same could be said about most continents.

I was answering the question how the USA are considered homogenous, not how the Americas are.

GP is saying that if you're comparing to the US, it would make more sense to compare to e.g. Ethiopia (a single country with several ethnical groups and languages) than compare Malawi to Guinea (two different countries, thousands of miles away from each other)

Vermont and Idaho are also thousands of miles away from each other, a distance not achievable within Ethiopia's borders. I think people are missing the point, so to make it clear, in the US, you can move from Los Angeles to New York (not even extreme ends of the country) and experience the same culture, language, TV shows, cell phone, etc. at both ends. That would be the same as moving from Madrid to Moscow, or Lagos to Khartoum.

Sure but if you consider that you could say the same about e.g. Moscow/Vladivostok or Sao Paulo/Manaus or Sydney/Perth, it doesn't seem like homogeneity is that unique or impressive of a characteristic for an expansive country. IMHO it's more notable to point out that there's a language barrier between Toronto/Quebec despite them being only a few hours away from each other, a form of heteregenereousness that is also present in many countries in Africa, whereas in the US, there's a relatively high level of homogeneity even taking into account highly international places like Chinatowns because of the melting pot effect.

One of the strangest feelings I've had is flying from Amsterdam to Johannesburg. It's a super long trip and so mentally I was expecting jet lag. But there was no time change. The season flipped but the time of day was right in sync with everyone back home in Budapest.

That's exactly why it's one of my favorite destinations. Take off in European winter in the evening, land in summer in the morning, no jet lag, beautiful landscapes, it's awesome.

That's also exactly same when I fly from Seoul to Sydney. 1 or 2 hours differences depending on daylight saving but it's actually nothing.

I traveled from San Francisco to Johannesburg. It was two flights, one to Berlin and then on to Johannesburg.

The first flight gave us the usual jet lag going to Europe. The problem was our flight from Berlin to Johannesburg left in Berlin’s evening. It’s an 11 hour flight so the idea is that you sleep on the plane and arrive in the morning after 8 hours of sleep.

But that only works if your body is already in GMT+1!

So while everyone else slept the whole way, we were wide awake! I took pictures of the navigation display the moment we crossed the equator.

But man was I messed up when I arrived. 11 hours on a plane and no time change is just so strange.

The two times I've been to SA it was for conferences and normally they had been held in Asia. It was a completely different experience going into them without some pretty heavy jet lag. Everything was better. And I could see how it impacted the people who had come from farther east or west. It was super interesting to see it play out. I don't know where we would have met this year - the pandemic took care of that.

Past related threads. Others?

The size of Africa, in perspective (photo) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492708 - March 2014 (1 comment)

True size of Africa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249832 - Feb 2014 (31 comments)

The True Size of Africa - Misleading Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226458 - Aug 2013 (101 comments)

The True Size of Africa (2010) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5790504 - May 2013 (44 comments)

The True Size of Africa (infographic) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865958 - Nov 2010 (2 comments)

The True Size of Africa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789769 - Oct 2010 (1 comment)

The True Size of Africa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780004 - Oct 2010 (38 comments)

Strange Maps: Did you realize Africa is this big? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366692 - Nov 2008 (51 comments)

"Kai Krause" is the one of "Kai's Power Tools" ("KPT") and "Bryce" fame by the way.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

Wow! Thanks for the heads up. Those were some of my favourite softwares. Inspired design.

Projections can be tricky. Early memory I have in college: I walked into my professor's office and she had a curious looking map on her wall. It had Australia at the center and the US was distorted and upside down.

As someone from North America (US) this was a nice lesson in perspective.

So too with a polar view of the planet: https://www.grida.no/resources/7845

Shh. We arent supposed to talk about those maps. The earth is officially round.

Yes, I think more than one Australian professor have a similar map on display. :)

A good page of examples with xcellent historical background: https://www.flourish.org/upsidedownmap/

This reminds me of my favorite scene from The West Wing where they talk about how misleading the Mercator projection is with regard to the size of Africa.

https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI

This is exactly why I despise it when I people say "things go south" then they mean "get worse" or "north of" when they mean "better".

The alternative projection used in that episode is apparently pretty bad too. (It's a great scene, though!)

Big block of cheese day!

The edited title is incorrect, in that it is a comparison with countries. How big is Africa compared to Asia? Okay, there’s one comparison with Europe (scroll down). Otherwise it’s a matter of how many countries one could cram in there. Of course, Africa already has a bunch of countries, so I guess I just didn’t get it. Comparing to, say, North America or something would be a better visualization for me.

> A veritable shitstorm of responses latched onto the tiniest of tiny details. People complained “you missed Ibiza”, “how could you make Belgium the same color as the Netherlands” “and on and on and on...

No, the parent makes a good point that stacking countries insides different continents doesn't give one much of a comparison. The visualization winds-up more "factoid" than fact.

Africa is approximately three times the size of Europe, 2/3 the size of Asia, 5/4 the size of North America and so forth. Obviously it's a large place but so is every continent.

Edit: This isn't to take away from the point that historically, the size, importance, history and so forth of Africa have been neglected. But it seems like this should be dealt with more holistically than the infographic size comparison approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Area_and_population

The importance of Africa was historically neglected? I don't think that fits well with the "Race for Africa" and the long history of Mediterranean conflicts involving North Africa.

Africa wouldn't still be recovering from the effects of colonialism if it weren't as historically important as it was.

> A veritable shitstorm of responses latched onto the tiniest of tiny details.

For a second there I thought you were talking about hn.

The fact that countries and continents are two different things is not a "tiny detail".

If you're comparing continents, Asia is larger than Africa, and North America is nearly as large.

If you're comparing countries, the largest African country is Algeria, which ranks 10th.

I think a lot of Americans think that Africa is a country.

Coming from a background most would consider rough and tumble in the US, this is true.

However, you're missing a bit part of it. Americans don't understand governance models very well. Provinces are to counties and states are to small countries. What does federal map to? Mental model says next one up - continent.

I'd argue its not precise to consider Americans dumb, just inexperienced outside our bubble.

>I'd argue its not precise to consider Americans dumb, just inexperienced outside our bubble.

Indeed!

Funny, because others replying to my comment seemed to be similarly inexperienced outside their well-educated Silicon Valley / Ivy League bubble… :^)

I can't speak for them. I don't know that many to have any sort of reasonable basis.

What makes you think so? I’m American and have never encountered that belief.

There's the fact that not many Americans can name more than 3 countries in Africa.

And the ratio of people mentioning "Africa" rather than a particular nation in Africa is much high than the ratio of other continents being mentioned rather than their constituent countries.

Also, "African American" is a common term; "European Americans" not so much.

All of these imply that Americans know less about Africa than other continents, which is true (and makes sense, since Africa is the poorest continent and therefore has the least impact on contemporary news, is relatively unpopular as a place to visit, etc).

None of it implies that we “think Africa is a country”.

> “African American”

Asian-American is a widely used term, too.

I'm honestly shocked to hear that. I've encountered it many times.

I haven’t yet found a reference site, but I remember then-President G. W. Bush referring to Africa as a big country.

Edit to add: sometimes one important person’s error gets conflated with the assumed views of many.

https://time.com/12990/africa-is-not-a-country/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/co...

> there are rumors that a former Vice Presidential candidate thinks Africa is a country

Rumors, not facts.

One candidate, not "a lot of Americans."

Irony is making sweeping generalizations while ostensibly pushing back on generalizations.

A candidate and a president (who’s a Yale and Harvard alumnus):

“ One of the most famous blunders made by former U.S. President George W. Bush was, “Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease.” President Bush, like many others, misconstrued the fact that Africa is not a country, but a continent.”

https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2018/11/23/africa-not-a-co...

But surely, it must be a coincidence! :)

> But surely, it must be a coincidence!

Coincidence of what and what? Bush is well known for his blunders, so it is not such a coincidence that this one is of his authorship. Or did you mean that it was American president who blundered this? How many other presidents had a chance to blunder in such a way that you'd notice it? It is an important question, because blunders of American presidents are carried to every corner of the world, while blunders of a president of Botswana probably isn't.

> A candidate and a president

I pray, America is a democratic country, anyone could become a president. ;)

Joe Biden recently said "white supremacists and Nazi f*gs" while giving a speech.

Should we conclude that he was referring to homosexual Nazis with a slur? Or did he mis-speak.

GWB was a rich source of flubs and boners. Deciding that this one means Americans think Africa is a country is a big ol' [citation needed].

That sounds more like a language quirk. For example, gas does not refer to a state of matter, it refers to a liquid fuel used in cars.

Calculus doesn't refer to categories of calculations, it refers to infinitesimal calculus.

America doesn't refer to the combination of both South and North America, it refers to a specific country in North America called the "United States of America".

In your case they simply may have decided to just drop the "South" from "South Africa".

I don't understand the logic behind these abbreviations so I will never understand why someone would refer to a single African country by "Africa" as a whole, but apparently that is what some Americans do or at least it sounds believable when you consider the 3 examples I have mentioned above.

Why is the subtitle “a visual comparison with other continents” here? It’s not in the source, and the source does not compare Africa visually to other continents (except that one of the smaller visualizations conpares it to Europe), but to individual countries.

I share the same read. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison.

Why isn't Canada or Russia, the two largest countries by land mass, included?

Probably because it's trying to convince you that Africa is really huge, so including other really big countries would be counterproductive. I guess you could argue that Canada and Russia both have a lot of tundra that no one wants to live on so that land doesn't count or something.

I've not drawn up the maps, but it appears that North America is just a bit larger than the USA, Canada, and Mexico combined. That's large!

You can make your own comparisons on https://thetruesize.com/

(Spoiler: Africa is still big.)

Dragging Indonesia around was very illuminating for me. Somehow I know the least about Indonesia of all places.

They also excluded Alaska from the United States, which would increase the size by >20%. I also understand why they didn't; the purpose isn't a rigorous measure of country size or anything like that.

>17%

Alaska is 17% of the US but ~21% larger than CONUS, which is how it was expressed.

Canada is tricky because of all the islands in the north. It isnt a solid blob. Russia is tricky becuase it is so long. I dont think it and the US would nest nicely inside the africa outline. And we cannot ever have a map without thr USA center stage. Also with russia, exactly which boarder should we use? It's probably better to just not enter into that debate.

> Also with russia, exactly which boarder should we use?

I assure you no one was thinking about that. They would just take whatever they got from punching "Russia" into the GIS database.

OT: Here’s a little bit of Russia and Canada for you ;)

https://youtu.be/BXqKkYYALMU

Canada isn't as big as you think it is.

Reminds me of this scene:

Why are we changing maps? (from The West Wing) - https://youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI

I love that scene. It’s one I find myself thinking back on whenever there’s a cartography discussion (such as this thread).

Many years ago, a family member (USian, suburban, whitebread) was dating the son of a Nigerian diplomat posted in Addis Ababa. She asked him how long a drive it was, and that's how I knew the relationship was doomed.

I just looked it up. Addis Ababa to Lagos is 2400 miles as the crow flies. This presumably auto-generated route planner states nearly 5000 miles driving. On day one on your drive to Lagos, it recommends 9 hours of driving and stopping in Gondar, still 3.5 hours to the Sudanese border. https://www.trippy.com/drive/Addis-Ababa-to-Lagos-Nigeria

Ah, the Mercator Puzzle https://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-redux/

This reminds me of reading about Africa's size in the introduction to Michael Crichton's Congo back when I was a kid:

"Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America."

It says "United States with Alaska & Hawaii" but I don't see them anywhere.

Right, HI is probably not material, but considering AK is 1/4 the size of the contiguous US, that’s pretty substantial.

It's not on the map but it's included in the figure they used to add all these countries together to compare with the size of Africa.

I guess it fits in all the cracks.

> "The table at right shows the US including Alaska and Hawaii, btw. And while not listing Eastern Europe (dark blue in the map) it adds many others unused in the map: Mexico, Peru, New Guinea, New Zealand, Nepal and Bangladesh!"

There are three basic choices you have with a rectangular map:

- Mercator, which preserves shape and direction, but not size

- Gall equal-area etc, which preserves size and direction, but not shape

- AuthaGraph, which preserves size and shape, but not direction

No rectangular map will ever be satisfactory, but maybe putting all three together would make a good display?

And then there's my stupid projection (a rip-off of August epicycloidal): https://postimg.cc/N5nZ18CF

Aside: this was meant to be a reply to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27168589

Not at top level.

Gall sucks, it looks vey ugly. If you want equal area use Eckert 4 (fill the rectangle if desired).

If you find this fascinating try the intractive version! https://thetruesize.com/

Wow, this is a great visualization tool because it corrects for the distortions of flat maps. Greenland is always so huge on maps, but really its only a bit bigger than Mexico.

For people trying the website out, you can type in the country then drag it around the world and it will change size based on latitude (because of flat map distortion), but you can also left click on the country, then turn it by clicking and holding on the compass in the lower left. You can also change the colors by double clicking the county.

> Greenland is always so huge on maps

Not quite always.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_map

https://thetruesize.com/ is a way better interactive version.

But this is by Kai’s Power GOO Kai Krause. Doesn't get more random than this, if the most prevalent output of his getting passed around these days is this comperative map.

For those who don't know his software, this was quite remarkable UI and graphics software more than 20 years ago.

https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html

That's not really accurate. Madagascar, for example, is about twice the size of Great Britain. That's without Ireland, but still...

He mentions this in the article.

He does but I can't understand his rationale. He claims it's "just a symbolic image - it may as well have been just blobs to tell the story" and "Had I stretched things to truly properly show that though, then the whole shape of Africa would have looked very awkwardly elongated." But why? One could scale the outlines so that they have the correct relative area whilst they preserve shape.

I think it's just a poorly-designed map.

Off course Africa is huge. I think it takes around 9 hours by plane to get from Cape Town to Tunis. But Africa is extremely diverse, there are so many different counties and cultures.

What impressed me most recently, was the size of Brazil. I flew from Montevideo to Madrid and around one third of the 12 hour flight you just fly over Brazil

Isn't this recent 2021 map fantastically simple and accurate?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/18/22289120/globe-2d-map-dou...

One of my early childhood toys was a little globe and I'll make sure my kid has one too.

Globes are great for inquisitiveness, but they are often outdated, with globes providers in certain regions simply never updating them. Many globes in the US still have Czechoslovakia as a country, let alone not having South Sudan on it, for example. And let's not get started about all the globes being Made in China and what that means for getting a perception of that region of the world.

Owning a globe and giving it to a child is just a start.

I have a soft-spot for USSR globes - though ones before that are now arguably more accurate than the ones from the 80s.

Africa has so much sand that it could cover the whole Sahara desert and then some.

I don't know why, but I thought of this song when I saw "Africa."

Cesaria Evora - Africa Nossa

https://youtu.be/QH1UG6V7iiY

And not this?

https://youtu.be/FTQbiNvZqaY

Interesting... :)

How about an accurate rotatable 3 dimensional map using the puzzle piece idea? I’m not skilled at 3d animation but I bet a talented artist could do it fairly easily.

At that point why not just use a globe?

Flash News Today! A continent is bigger than most countries!

It’s interesting as I always thought Africa is over populated but then if the whole of France was the Sahara it would be over populated as well.

This map ( https://thetruesize.com )is very interesting, also.

Refreshing to see how many times this pops up on HN:

  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=true+size+of

Why is that refreshing? You'd expect HN people to not find this map interesting and therefore not post it/upvote it as its just common knowledge. Continent and country sizes are just a few numbers that everyone has already seen.

Clickable link:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=true+size+of

It’s only 6m sq km more than North America - but a major significant part of that is Canada.

becase why not

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

^ Africa video by TOTO

Wow the audio is badly out of sync.

And less GDP than california somehow...

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

I remember flying to Munich once from Cape Town and a German colleague guessed the flight was three to four hours. I said no, it was over eleven hours and he was shocked. I laughed and told him to check out a globe sometime - not a map - so he could trace for himself how massive Africa really is. The surface area of the moon is only 20% larger.

whoa, now there's a statistic for you!

And, according to a very literal reading of 1917 Catholic law, under the jurisdiction of the diocese of orlando.

https://aleteia.org/2018/08/03/yes-the-moon-has-its-own-cath...

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

Asia is 17.21 million mi² - and the moon is 14.6 million mi².

Ha, in 3-4 hours you may be in Cairo at best

I got curious and looked at a non-Mercator map and it seems Cairo is 7-8hrs away. Damn, Africa is huge.

Interestingly India got separated from African continent. West cost of India snugly fits on the right edge of The Horn of Africa. India collided with the larger Asian land mass resulting in the formation of the Himalayan mountain range. It’s fun to think about that the western coastal mountains of India are much older than the northern mountains!

Geography is lot of fun!!

If you leave Cairo in a Taxi after 3-4 hours you'll still be in Cairo.

Stuck on 6th of October bridge

After four hours, you're still flying over the Congo and haven't even crossed the equator yet.

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

It's big.

It's big, quite big.

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