From The West Wing: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU</a>
Everyone knows the ONE TRUE MAP PROJECTION is the Fuller Map:<p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_projection_rotated.svg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map</a>
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.
Doesn't work anymore. Apparently they exceeded their google maps request quota:<p>"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: <a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key"" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...</a>
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.<p>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.
A few years ago I wrote (as a joke) some javascript to make a municipality of Brazil (Alegrete - RS) wander about the globe.<p><a href="http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.html" rel="nofollow">http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/jangada-de-pasto.h...</a><p>It's the largest of 497 municipalities in the state (it has an area of 7,804 km²).
Did anyone notice in the About dialog that the infographic "The True Size of Africa" was done by Kai Krause?<p>Kai Krause as in Kai's Power Tools.
This is cool! I'm not seeing instructions on how to rotate the selected country.<p>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.
The UK fits within the Gulf of Mexico.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/aTnhSpp.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/aTnhSpp.png</a>
Makes me want to get back to working on my conformal octahedral butterfly map project: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg</a>
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<p>Surely drawing each line wasn't as straight forward as it appears on maps - in history and in practice.
Small nitpick: The country area is inverted if you move it near the poles. (Maybe because the orientation clockwise/counterclockwise changes implicitly.)
I feel it is my duty to link to a <i>very</i> relevant xkcd:<p><i>What Your Favorite Map Projection Says About You</i><p><a href="https://xkcd.com/977/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/977/</a>
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.<p>Edit: Oh, the move issue is not by country. When I reloaded I could move a country I previously couldn't.
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?
Cool!<p>One suggestion and one complaint.<p>I'd like to be able to select countries by clicking, rather than text input.<p>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.
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?