True size of Africa | Hacker News Reader

True size of Africa

tariq.co

44 pointstariqr31 comments

Not only is this lifted without proper attribution from someone else's work; the only added content is the words "Peter's projection" at the start, which in the space of two words manages to make all of the following mistakes:

1. The person's name is Peters; the "s" is not possessive.

2. The projection was devised independently by two people; Gall got there before Peters. It's therefore usually called Gall-Peters nowadays.

3. The map shown does not use the Gall-Peters projection, either for Africa or for any of the other regions fitted into it. (It's all Mercator, but with Africa scaled up to make its area correct.) The appearance of Africa in the Gall-Peters projection is unusual enough that no one who actually knew anything much about maps would make this mistake.

4. The Economist article to which the page links has its own version of the "true size of Africa" graphic (which is not the one looted for the "Brain Junk" page) that uses a different projection also devised by Gall. But this is also not the "Peters projection" but a quite different one.

I suppose those mistakes are what Tariq Rauf is asserting the copyright on.

(It may be worth noting that Kai Krause seems to have explicitly put his graphic in the public domain, so there's nothing illegal in what Tariq Rauf has done here. That doesn't stop it being extremely unimpressive.)

Why is Kai Krause not credited?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartograph...

It's funny that the footer of the tariq.co page states:

Even though apparently the one piece of content on the domain is owned by someone else.

Good times!

haha sorry, did not expect this to go anywhere, added source.

So you copied his content and claimed ownership and submitted in hopes of attracting HN views? Nothing sketchy there.

"Did not expect this to go anywhere" -- right, you just accidentally submitted it to HN

Since we're comparing sizes... Let's do it with continents!

1 Africa

= 3.35 Australias

= 2.86 Europes

= 2.20 Antarcticas

= 1.67 South Americas

= 1.23 North Americas

= 0.69 Asia's

Now, in term's of population:

1 Africa

= 35.10 Australias

= 1.38 Europes

= 227669.04 Antarcticas

= 2.60 South Americas

= 1.89 North Americas

= 0.25 Asia's

I wonder if there's a usable ballpark measure for "habitable land"? E.g. you could say that large parts of Siberia are effectively uninhabitable, along with some parts of the Sahara desert and a good portion of Australia, and most/all of Antarctica. Of course habitability isn't really a binary function with a solid definition, but it'd be interesting to get some kind of rough estimate, especially when looking at land area and population in parallel.

That is a good question.

I think of the huge countries, Brazil is probably the one with less useless land?

Brazil harshest environment is the quasi-desert plains in the northeast non-coastal region, it rarely rains there because the coast has lots of hills high enough to block rain (thus the coast is very rainy too), but it is not a complete desert (yet... overuse of land in agriculture is slowly transforming it in a desert).

Brazil has no crazy areas of desert, tundra, or other non-fertile areas, the only parts "hard" to live as human are the rainforest (because it is too dense, nothing you cannot fix by making your own clearing) and the marshy area (because to live there you need to figure how to make a floating house or a house that don't flood).

US has the Arizona desert, and some snowy mountains, Canada half of it is just ice, Russia too, half of it is ice, China has a huge desert plus the himalaias, and the largest countries in Africa usually are large because they extend the border to the middle of Sahara because of natural resources, it is not really useful land.

And Australia has that very dry outback where you cannot have proper farming.

Navigable rivers is the big problem. Extensive navigable rivers is what made and continues to make Europe and North America such premium pieces of land. Siberia, Brazil, and Africa have all had the problem that moving stuff in and out is super energy intensive.

This is an interesting point. Can you suggest some reading to find out more about this? eg. what got you thinking along these lines?

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

How land is utilized has a huge impact. You'd think Brazil's rainforests would be on incredibly fertile land, but the soil actually stinks for agriculture. Brazilian farmers use Swidden (a.k.a. Slash-and-Burn) agriculture. They clear the land and generally only get a few useful growing seasons before the soil is infertile. Then they move on.

Land has more uses than agriculture of course. Forestry is huge. The amazon, were it sustainably logged instead of hastily burned, could supply a tremendous amount of lumber. Canada and Russia do have a lot of perma-frost in the far North, but an even larger portion of their uninhabited land is boreal forest. This land is far from useless even if much of it is not suitable for agriculture.

There is the measure of "arable land" which isn't too close, but explains a lot.

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

Land in permafrost, desert, mountain or swamp isn't arable and can support by itself a lot less population. This doesn't matter as much at a today when food can be shipped anywhere.

Fair point.

In the US, the bulk of population is along the Easter Seaboard, and much of the rest east of the Mississippi.

Europe is pretty uniformly populated.

Even China is mostly populated along the southeast coastline, with the interior largely empty space.

India's population density is rather more uniform, with a surprisingly large (to my mind) portion of the population against the Himalaya.

For the US, two ways of providing an equal-population distribution:

Re-allocated states by population. Note that this IMO inverts perception, as we view "bigger" with "more", when in fact the largest states have the lowest population densities. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/map-u-s-redrawn-as-50-...

US population represented by height: http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/12/map-of-week-...

And a cartogram by state: http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/bright-ideas.php

Here's global population density by color intensity: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7052

A global cartogram (equal-area by population). Color coded by surface temperature anomoly: http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Te...

Ah, what I've been looking for (should have started at Wikipedia): a US cartogram by county, color shaded by 2004 presidential election results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cartlinearlarge.png

A number of interesting world maps, including more cartograms: http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/

http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Th...

There's a pretty cool Vidsauce video on this. The most popular version of the map that causes this misperception also causes Greenland to look much, much larger than it really is.

The Mercator Puzzle demonstrates this quite dramatically:

http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledra...

You probably mean Vsauce. Here's the link if someone is looking for that: What does Earth look like? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lR7s1Y6Zig

Also, I'd suggest any how or why enthusiasts on HN to subscribe to Vsauce (if you aren't already). It's just amazing.

Where is Alaska fitted into the picture? Alaska is part of U.S. and adds substantial weight to its size.

Reminds me of What Fits Into Russia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zm6HzN5YVI

Wow, I thought China was much larger than America(as in much much larger); Africa though I already knew was a fucking giant.

Accurate maps of the globe are enlightening.

> Accurate maps of the globe are enlightening.

Despite its shortcomings I'd argue that Mercator projection maps (in general) are accurate.

Mercator is conformal. Angles are accurate, that's all. It provides accurate navigation, which is great if you are planning a boat trip with middle-ages technology, but not fit for any other purpose.

That was kinda my point; unqualified "accuracy" is not an useful metric for evaluating map projections, as most of them are accurate in one way or another (and inaccurate in other ways).

Arguably the "best" (general purpose) projections are the least "accurate" ones because they use a compromises between different projections to make a visually appealing map.

China, the US and Canada are all nearly the same size (9.5 million, 9.1 million and 9 million km^2, respectively).

Russia on the other hand is significantly bigger (16.3 million km^2) - bigger than even Antarctica (14 million km^2).

Are you sure of those numbers? Sources I've seen has the area of Canada larger than that of the US, and US close to that of China.

Russia is significantly bigger, as you note.

Wikipedia says 9.6, 9.8, and 10.0 million km^2 respectively. Do these numbers include something (e.g. water) that the numbers you quoted don't? (They also peg Russia at 17.0 million km^2)

The numbers are land-only, but there are multiple conflicting ways of calculating it often due to land disputes. For instance, Taiwan/Tibet/etc. wrt China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_area...

The author forgot a part of Italy

Yes. I get it. Africa is big. Whoopty-freaking-doo. Stop polluting HN with this irrelevant fluff, please.

I know that the average American has some issues with maps -- I think we've all seen those videos where some chubby schlub is asked to point out the United States on an unlabeled map and winds up sticking his finger in his eye. Or his nose. Or butt. Or France.

But Hacker News readers: I really hope the general size of the African continent is not news. Knowing the general size and arrangement of the continents is basic geography...

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