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The True Size of Countries

193 points| Mitchhhs | 9 years ago |thetruesize.com | reply

66 comments

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[+] moioci|9 years ago|reply
Just for fun, I laid the UK over the eastern US with London roughly on top of Atlanta. Edinburgh falls very near Indianapolis. Now from Google maps, the straight line distance from Atlanta to Indianapolis is about 429 miles, while London to Edinburgh is 331. This leads me to believe that this tool is not accurately doing what it purports to be.
[+] madcaptenor|9 years ago|reply
When I put London on top of Atlanta (which admittedly is hard to do exactly because the cities in the country getting moved around aren't indicated), Edinburgh lands in southern Indiana, somewhere between Louisville, KY and Evansville, IN.
[+] gsanghera|9 years ago|reply
I could be wrong, but I don't think that's how it works. You're comparing the true size of UK with the flatmap projection of US. To do what you want, you need to compare the true maps of both countries - with the cities.
[+] rootlocus|9 years ago|reply
Doesn't work anymore. Apparently they exceeded their google maps request quota:

"You have exceeded your daily request quota for this API. To request more than 25,000 map loads per day, you must use an API key and enable billing: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

[+] pdxandi|9 years ago|reply
That's a pretty great problem to have. Not the limit, but getting 25k daily views.
[+] manojlds|9 years ago|reply
It is surprising that a lot of educated folks don't know about this. I always run into folks who think Greenland is the biggest island.

Edit: on Australia being continent - now I come across as a fool. But I hope people understood what I meant. Also, I have had to argue against folks who said Greenland should also be a continent since it is bigger than Australia.

[+] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
> It is surprising that a lot of educated folks don't know about this. I always run into folks who think Greenland is the biggest island.

If it's the only projection you've ever seen - and globes aren't all that common - it's a reasonable misconception.

Kind of makes you wonder what other projections we're carrying around in our heads.

[+] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
Don't worry manojlds, I'm sure the Pluto people will back you up and demote Australia.

I often wonder if it will matter in a couple of years. If we actually get to the point where walls are displays, then I would expect most schools will have a globe projected on the wall instead of a map. How long until we start with 3D animations instead of 2D drawings?

[+] howawaygoog|9 years ago|reply
some definitions are arbitrary, for some people America is one continent, for some there are two, it's human-based, whatever is established in a culture, not math.
[+] sqeaky|9 years ago|reply
This is just a matter of semantics and word choice? Why isn't Eurasia (or Afro-Eurasia before the Suez canal) the largest island? Why not Greenland?
[+] worldsayshi|9 years ago|reply
I'm a bit surprised the other way around. Greenland is bigger than I thought when I move it over Europe. And Iceland too.
[+] stuckagain|9 years ago|reply
Greenland is the biggest island, by a large factor.
[+] vkou|9 years ago|reply
Greenland is the biggest island. Australia is a continent.
[+] graedus|9 years ago|reply
This is cool! I'm not seeing instructions on how to rotate the selected country.

Edit: Ah, I see it now in the instructional video. My browser's video controls were obscuring it. You click and drag the compass in the bottom left.

[+] basseq|9 years ago|reply
Click on the country and the compass rose will change color to match. You can drag the compass rose around to rotate the country.
[+] pokemongoaway|9 years ago|reply
This makes me wonder if there's some sort of official world database for how national borders are drawn... -- how often they're redrawn -- how often they're updated -- if there are different/conflicting databases of border data

Surely drawing each line wasn't as straight forward as it appears on maps - in history and in practice.

[+] vog|9 years ago|reply
Small nitpick: The country area is inverted if you move it near the poles. (Maybe because the orientation clockwise/counterclockwise changes implicitly.)
[+] worldsayshi|9 years ago|reply
Some countries seems to be impossible to move for me. Morocco and Ghana for example. Also, The Ivory Coast is only searchable by its French name, Côte d'Ivoire, while having its English name on the map.

Edit: Oh, the move issue is not by country. When I reloaded I could move a country I previously couldn't.

[+] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
I see it as Côte d'Ivoire on the map.

I also find their insistence on nobody translating or even transliterating their country's name annoying.

[+] haberman|9 years ago|reply
Are the shape changes accurate, as you drag north/south? I would expect horizontal borders (like the north border of the USA, which is along the 49th parallel) to stay horizontal as you drag. But in the tool the border becomes more concave as you drag it further south. Why is this?
[+] f137|9 years ago|reply
Cool!

One suggestion and one complaint.

I'd like to be able to select countries by clicking, rather than text input.

After a couple minutes playing, the site filled firefox history with tens of entries, and I could not return to HN even after hitting back several dosen times.

[+] jasonjei|9 years ago|reply
I notice Puerto Rico and possibly some other territories are missing in the United States selection. Is that deliberate since PR is quite different from the US?
[+] jstanley|9 years ago|reply
The projection is inconsistent: dragging a country over where it really belongs results in an outline that does not line up.
[+] SamBam|9 years ago|reply
That's only the rotation. You can fix the rotation by clicking on the compass rose.

But I admit, the first thing I did as well was to drag the sample outlines over their own counties, and thought it was messy how they didn't line up.

[+] ambrop7|9 years ago|reply
From what I can tell, some of the pre-placed countries are rotated probably on purpose, you can unrotate them with the compass. I haven't seen the issue with any country added via the search.