Africa Dwarfs China, Europe and the U.S
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
A nice way to get a feel for the distortions.
Edit (spoiler): it's actually in Asia :)
I’ve recently been trying to make some better Cahill spinoffs of my own. Here’s a conformal version: http://i.imgur.com/RhZL1FN.jpg
I found the Cahill projection a few years ago and was disappointed that I couldn't seem to find one in print.
The one I found that seem to resemble it is the Waterman projection which is also available in printed versions.
Spend a month or two reading the appropriate books about cartography, complex analysis, and approximation theory, and then write some Matlab code. :-)
Seriously have this conversation several times a year. People really think Greenland is almost as large as Africa. I than state that we can fit these countries into the area of Africa and people are shocked.
BTW US is the third largest geographical country in the world.
Edit: My favourite being an, apparently serious, assertion by an HN user than Europe would fit in Texas... :-)
http://www.texasmonthly.com/daily-post/how-big-texas-compare...
the last line might help people understand why people compare these things:
"If you’re the right kind of nerd, you can probably do this forever and not get bored"
[NB Note the sweeping generalisations - I know fine well that there is a lot of cool stuff in the "middle" of the USA as well as lots of fascinating stuff round the periphery of Europe - I'm from Scotland!]
My brother's father-in-law, while lecturing me how we younglings don't know nothing and have terrible education, insisted that Iran is in Africa and full of arabs.
I think it works to show how big Africa is.
But yes, if you compare countries, you can take comparisons further, and it would be more practical.
I really dislike the article saying that "On a flat map of the world, Greenland appears as big as Africa". That is utter bullshit. Yes, it says "most prevalent flat maps" in the subtitle but even that seems not based on anything but agenda. Mercator is often used today with online maps because people (especially journalists) just love Google Maps (which uses Web Mercator by default) and seem incapable of learning about alternatives or just map projections.
Yes, the projection can be a problem and yes, this is a fun way illustrating it but please go the extra mile and do it scientifically as your name suggests. What projection was used for this example? Is the 3D actually geodetically correct or did another oblivious artist scale and move things so they look nice?
I poked around for a minute, and it turns out Alaska and Hawaii combine to have the same surface area as Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium combined.
One thing I noticed from looking over the above wikipedia comparison is that a lot of the land mass is probably uninhabitable, and it made me wonder how much is uninhabitable when comparing land-masses. The closest thing I could find was a chart of currently uninhabited regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_uninhabited_regions
If it's just about area, the Pacific Ocean alone would dwarf all land masses all-together.
In general this approach of raising awareness to regions leaves a lot to question, especially if it's mixed with a humanitarian tone:
Understanding Africa's immense size helps us appreciate how difficult it may be to solve the continent's poverty and drought problems
To answer that: No, just no. As said, it might help raise initial awareness, but that's about it. Poverty is not a function of land area, just to name Bangladesh or Canada.
Alternatively one might point out, that Nigeria's current population alone is already on par with that of half of the USA's at a 10th of its area (~1⅓ of Texas).
Some population density maps:
Africa: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n1/fig_tab/nclimat...
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/nagdc/nagdc-...
Global: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/age-of-man/map-int...
Didn't anyone ever see a globe when they were a kid?
Lambert equal area projection: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Lambert-...
obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/
http://thediplomat.com/2015/01/china-embracing-africa-but-no...
http://qz.com/217597/how-a-million-chinese-migrants-are-buil...
(that third article is probably the most interesting)
If you want to see Chinese Ming architecture, visit Korea.
If you want to see Chinese Qing architecture, visit Beijing.
If you want to see contemporary Chinese architecture, visit Africa ;-)
He comes across as a very ambitious guy and he seemingly has a plan (to use his children to get more "local" offspring)
Are you saying that because you have some sort of evidence of their highly egalitarian nature, or because "They aren't Americans/Western Europeans, therefore they can't possibly be racist."?
If it's the former, I've heard an awful lot of complaints from non-Han in China about racism, and I'd be curious how you reconcile that with your statement.
The temporary halt to the power struggle over mainland China was just a self preservation tactic on the part of both parties.
edit - are you looking at the right line for the equator?
[1] http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/110730/mercator-scale...
From your link the contiguous US would appear to be represented at ~ 1.7 times larger scale than the continent of Africa, on average. If I am comparing area and something is generally over 1.5 times bigger than it should be, that is a massive distortion, other more massive distortions notwithstanding.
edited to add -
I don't think the article or anyone in particular is trying to claim that the Mercator projection was created or used to make the US look larger, I mean, the map predates the USA by over 200 years.
People are trying to discourage it because it is a distortion that is only really of use to people navigating the sea in boats using paper charts.
Look at this chart in particular: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ilC.png 1.7 larger is nowhere to be found. The very north of continental US compared to equator is below 1.5. If you consider that Africa extends north and south of equator and US south of 45th, the magnification is much smaller. Moreover consider that we're comparing areas instead of lengths, so visually the extent of magnification is even less apparent. You keep repeating the word "massive distortion", but it simply doesn't apply to the latitudes of continental US. This is very easy to check if you have a globe and a Mercator map. And yet the myth persists...
>People are trying to discourage it because it is a distortion that is only really of use to people navigating the sea in boats using paper charts.
That is patently false. Mercator has many very useful properties, such as local conformality which is why Google Maps and other maps providers use it. It is, in fact, the only cylindrical map projection with local conformality. Which is very useful for generating map tiles.
We often see these maps with Russia or Canada or Australia, but the reality is very little of land is usable. Large countries that effectively use their land, have roads to every part, have significant settlements in every region, etc are rare. The USA comes to mind. China would qualify if they didn't annex Tibet and didn't leave the whole western side of their country largely undeveloped.
Size, while interesting to look at on a map, is a kinda useless metric. For example, Japan is smaller than California, but its one of the world's cultural and economic powerhouses. Or South Korea, which would fit between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"Some economists have talked about the 'scourge of raw materials', large quantities of rare raw materials putting Africa under heavy pressures and tensions, leading to wars and slow development. Despite these abundance of natural resources, claims suggest that many Western nations like the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom as well as emerging economic powerhouses like China often exploit Africa's natural resources today, causing most of the value and money from the natural resources to go to the West and East Asia rather than Africa, further causing the poverty in Africa."
If you say that only 7% is being used for farming, then yes, that might be accurate - the population density is way lower than, say, Europe. But I'm pretty sure a whole lot more than that is potentially usable.