[HN Gopher] The True Size of Africa (2015)
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The True Size of Africa (2015)
Author : metahost
Score : 121 points
Date : 2021-05-15 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kai.sub.blue)
(TXT) w3m dump (kai.sub.blue)
| kossTKR wrote:
| https://thetruesize.com/ is a way better interactive version.
| mxfh wrote:
| 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
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| jobigoud wrote:
| 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.
| dialogbox wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| desktopninja wrote:
| Refreshing to see how many times this pops up on HN:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=true+size+of
| praptak wrote:
| Africa has so much sand that it could cover the whole Sahara
| desert and then some.
| init wrote:
| 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.
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.)
| xpe wrote:
| It seems to me the commenter is referring to the number of
| languages and countries in a land mass.
| dnautics wrote:
| 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.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| kcb wrote:
| 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.
| init wrote:
| 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...
| DevKoala wrote:
| In which sense is the USA homogenous?
| jahnu wrote:
| 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....
| init wrote:
| I'm referring to the European countries included in the
| visualization.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| bombcar wrote:
| It's only 6m sq km more than _North America_ - but a major
| significant part of that is Canada.
| idatum wrote:
| 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.
| xpe wrote:
| Yes, I think more than one Australian professor have a similar
| map on display. :)
| aksss wrote:
| So too with a polar view of the planet:
| https://www.grida.no/resources/7845
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Shh. We arent supposed to talk about those maps. The earth is
| officially round.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| I share the same read. It's very much an apples to oranges
| comparison.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| 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."
| _Microft wrote:
| "Kai Krause" is the one of "Kai's Power Tools" ("KPT") and
| "Bryce" fame by the way.
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
| nfoz wrote:
| Wow! Thanks for the heads up. Those were some of my favourite
| softwares. Inspired design.
| mikestew wrote:
| 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.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| I think a lot of Americans think that Africa _is_ a country.
| umanwizard wrote:
| What makes you think so? I'm American and have never
| encountered that belief.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| https://time.com/12990/africa-is-not-a-country/
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/c
| o...
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _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.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| 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! :)
| ordu wrote:
| _> 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. ;)
| samatman wrote:
| 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].
| ddxxdd wrote:
| 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.
| meristohm wrote:
| I haven't yet found a reference site, but I remember then-
| President G. W. Bush referring to Africa as a big country.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| darkwater wrote:
| > 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...
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > A veritable shitstorm of responses latched onto the tiniest
| of tiny details.
|
| For a second there I thought you were talking about hn.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| 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.
| edem wrote:
| If you find this fascinating try the intractive version!
| https://thetruesize.com/
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| > Greenland is always so huge on maps
|
| Not quite always.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_map
| prestigious wrote:
| 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.
| gundmc wrote:
| 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
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqKkYYALMU
| raldi wrote:
| It says "United States with Alaska & Hawaii" but I don't see them
| anywhere.
| jobigoud wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| I guess it fits in all the cracks.
| aksss wrote:
| Right, HI is probably not material, but considering AK is 1/4
| the size of the contiguous US, that's pretty substantial.
| dominicjj wrote:
| 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.
| coyotespike wrote:
| whoa, now there's a statistic for you!
| bombcar wrote:
| Asia is 17.21 million mi2 - and the moon is 14.6 million mi2.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Ah, the Mercator Puzzle https://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-
| redux/
| jlos wrote:
| Why isn't Canada or Russia, the two largest countries by land
| mass, included?
| witherk wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| > _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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| >17%
| bioinformatics wrote:
| It's big.
| bioinformatics wrote:
| It's big, quite big.
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