
The true size of a country or state - callum85
http://thetruesize.com/
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noobermin
Interesting things happen when you drag a country onto the poles.

More information:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection)

~~~
seszett
Thats why Mercator is not a good projection even for comparing countries this
way. Because for reasonably-sized countries, north and south are still
distorted.

For an extreme example, try to lookup Chile and put it over Portugal, a
similarly shaped country. Watch how Chile is vastly different whether you put
its southern or its northern tip over Portugal.

On one hand Chile looks like it might be less than 10 times the size of
Portugal, on the other hand it looks like it might be more than 20 times
Portugal.

~~~
curtis
Maybe this explains why New Zealand looks like it has about as much land area
as California even though California is actually about 60% larger than New
Zealand.

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SCAQTony
Drag Greenland onto Australia or Mexico and watch how much it shrinks.
Australia just swallows greenland.

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fmax30
Can someone tell me why countries get larger as they are moved closer to the
poles ?

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callum85
There's no way to take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out into a
rectangle without distorting it in some way. It's called 'projecting' from 3D
to 2D.

The projection used for the underlying map here is the Mercator, which
stretches everything near the poles. It makes Greenland look almost as big as
Africa, which it is not. It's the most common projection, but it's awful for
accurately visualising the whole world at once.

But the Mercator is actually a really good projection for stuff like Google
Maps, because it keeps shape and direction (not scale) accurate all over the
world. Say you zoom into Iceland and then Ecuador... OK you'll need a
different zoom level to get to the same real-world scale (e.g. to get to 10
miles per inch you need to zoom in closer to Ecuador than Iceland) but who
cares. What matters is that, in either location, north is pretty much straight
up, east is right, south is down and west is left. And also, a 10 mile road
going east–west will look about the same length as a 10 mile road going
north–south.

Other projections don't have these qualities, but are better for keeping
overall scale the same all over the map, making relative sizes of countries
look more like what you get on a 3-D globe. But most people just use Mercator
for everything.

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amelius
Hmm, I tried to drag the US back to where it is on the map, and it doesn't
fit...

~~~
rorygreig
I think it has been rotated to fit inside Africa better. If you spawn it by
typing in USA it fits back after you drag it.

~~~
jamestalmage
This is 100% correct.

We will add the ability for users to rotate countries soon.

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Animats
Just use an equal-area map projection.

Obligatory XKCD.[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/977/](https://xkcd.com/977/)

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bdcravens
Why does the US say "contiguous 50 states"? Shouldn't this be 48? (or 49 if
you consider DC a state)

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gdw2
I'm guessing it should be 48. When the US is placed over the US, its appears
to be about the same size (therefore, not including Alaska).

EDIT: and there's a 'non-contiguous' option for the US that includes Alaska
and Hawaii.

~~~
jamestalmage
My bad.

It's fixed now.

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GerardoGarzon11
Wow, Russia changes a lot.

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adontz
Georgia, the republic of, not US, GA, cannot be viewed. Sad.

~~~
jamestalmage
Added to our bug database. We will get it fixed eventually. Keep checking
back!

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bkmn
This is great. I've been looking for a tool like this!

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timeiscoffee
Why does South Korea have North Korea flag?...

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WildUtah
The Republic of Korea and the People's Democratic Dictatorship of Korea have
their flags reversed.

~~~
jamestalmage
Fixed!

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Aldo_MX
How do you rotate a country?

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jamestalmage
You can't ... (yet)!

The rotation code is actually done, you'll notice China is rotated when you
first log on (as is the US just a little).

Creating sane UI for you to rotate countries yourselves (that works on top of
google maps) is going to take us a while. But it's on the todo list after
better State/Province data

~~~
Aldo_MX
No need for UI, just use the scroll wheel while dragging, or shift + scroll
while the mouse is hovering a country.

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cmwelsh
The author of this tool should use history.replaceState instead of
history.pushState. Otherwise the way the page saves state using the HTML5
History API makes it impossible to use the back button.

~~~
irremediable
Yeah, noticed this. Kind of annoying. Overall, a very cool idea, and well
executed, though!

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vacri
Same thing in puzzle form:

[https://gmaps-
samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledr...](https://gmaps-
samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledrag.html)

[http://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-
redux/](http://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-redux/)

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vladharbuz
Except, this is the Mercator projection, which distorts the size of objects as
latitude increases from the Equator[1], rendering the whole website pretty
much useless.

Consider using something like the Gall–Peters projection[2]. It is interesting
to compare continents at their true size.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection)

~~~
jccalhoun
That's what I thought at first but if you search for a country then drag it
around, it will change its size as you get closer to or further away from the
equator so it takes the distortion into account. So maybe pointing out the
distortion in the Mercator projection is part of the point?

~~~
dtparr
Yeah, I took that as the whole point. You can overlay one country on another
to see how they relate despite being at wildly varying latitudes on this
projection. E.g pull Greenland down to India.

