Do you enjoy comparisons? I do, and especially ones I hadn't considered before. At exporedplanet.com visual maps of various countries and their characteristics are shown - quite often in overlays.
How interesting and curious some of the comparisons turn out to be.
This one is the size of Australia compared to the U.S. The United States is around 9,833,517 sq km, while the land down under is 7,741,220 sq km. In mathematical terms, America is about 1.3 times as large as Australia, or 27 percent.
The Majority of the US has a smaller population than LA County.It has 10 million people.
Here's China vs the United States. It has over one billion people, but a little less land mass than the U.S. By using a bit of imagination, you can see that if you reconfigure the shape of China, it is almost the same size as the US. But, at the end of the day, China is just a bit smaller, at 9,596,961 sq km, while the United States comes in at 9,833,517 sq km.
And what's this? Cuba fits into Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay's surface area is 1,230,000 sq km, while Cuba has an area of 110,860 sq km. With that size difference, no wonder Cuba looks like nothing more than a sandbar on this map.
Many more are HERE. There's everything from noise pollution, metric vs imperial measurement, left-side vs right-side driving. The final map is what the world map "should actually look like flat.
March is the start of the spring flowers. Look at these flaming tulips.
I have a bias that North is up and even that there is an up for world. This has to do with the magnetic north pole and all the pictures of the world with the north pole at the top - real pictures and pictures we create - maps. Somehow, intellectually, I realize this might not be the case - that this is our Western World view that continues to be bubblesome.
Did you know that the Blue Marble photograph - the famous photograph of the Earth taken from on board Apollo 17 had the south pole at the top - and got turned around to match our familiar view?
The Greek astronomer Ptolemy (90-168AD) set this in motion - that north is up. In between much happened. It got cemented by the European navigators using the North Star and the magnetic compass.
Before that, the top of the map was to the East. It has never been to the West. The West is traditionally a representation of death, where the sun sets.
Poor Australia, always represented at the bottom. There are maps with Australia at the top - McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World is the great example. There is a person named the Wizard of New Zealand who has made an imperial British upsidedown map.
In the Ancient world, Arabia, put south at the top. The explanation is that if you wake up and face the sun, south is on the right. With the sea to the south of them, there was nothing "on top" of the country, so they predominated the map visually. (This is what maps are for - to show 'our position'). By definition, they are political, politicized.
Buckminster Fuller created the Dymaxion Map - no compass direction consistently facing the same way - it is an unfolded icosahedron. Didn't he reveal the global village - look how connected we are in this version!
Then there is the Peters Projection: "one of the most stimulating and controversial images of the world". It is HERE. It addresses the challenge: which is bigger, Greenland or China? It is described as an 'equal area' map.
"When this map was first introduced by historian and cartographer Dr. Arno Peters at a Press Conference in Germany in 1974 it generated a firestorm of debate. The first English-version of the map was published in 1983, and it continues to have passionate fans as well as staunch detractors. " This map is used for world aid by charity organizations such as Oxfam.
The International Society for Global Inversionbelieves that flipping iconic world maps everywhere would be a symbolic ceremony to help mankind break its old thought patterns, and act in a more ecological way. We conclude with the Guide to Unusual Maps on the Web HERE.
Flowers and Floyd Elzinga's metal sculpture are our images today.
