I feel very lucky to have grown up with a huge (~ 75 cm diameter) globe as a centerpiece in the living room; I never ended up with Mercator-derived misconceptions in the first place.
Really cool work, love it!
I first discovered this about three months ago in a reddit comment under 'r/geography', and I still, from time to time, use it and enjoy it. Back then, I posted it here in HN, but zero traction!
Anyway, for those interested in previous discussions, here we are:
(2020), 556 points, 266 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787
(2017), 193 points, 66 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973
(2019), 155 points, 49 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538
(2015), 105 points, 36 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024
I really enjoy this! I wish it would also support cities, it would help me get a better sense of the size of a city to compare it to one I'm familiar with already. But I guess city limits are less well defined that country limits. Anyway, great project!
Surely any city is small enough that projection distortion is negligible? So you can just open cities on two maps side by side and zoom in/out till the scales are equal.
Use this site for that https://acme.com/same_scale/. It lets you compare any two map views at the same scale.
That site only seems lock the zoom value of the two maps together, not correct for distortions. E.g. zoom in on Svalbard on one side and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other. Svalbard appears larger despite being many times smaller. This means if you zoom into Longyearbyen it will appear several times larger than it should compared to say Kinshasa.
Longyearbyen is a pathological example but it's quite easy to end up thinking a city in the UK is ~1.75 linearly and ~3x by area compared to one on the equator using this site.
I wish it would support sub-national entities (states, provinces, territories) outside of the US too. US-state-only support is kinda frustrating.
same here, I was looking for a tool that does exactly that a few weeks ago. Ended up just comparing 2 google maps with same zoom level, but it's not practical at all. Open to any suggestion you may have!
+1 for cities
Pretty neat. One tip it took me a while to realize is that after you tap on a country, the compass rose (now the same color as the country) can be used to rotate it.
But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?
It's a widely observed phenomenon that as a country start to go south it moves to the right.
This explains much of the current global political situation.
I think it's the other way around. As a country moves to the right it starts to go south.
"West takes you In, In takes you East, East takes you Out, Out takes you West, North and South bring you back again."
I think part of that is an illusion, since for something bowing upwards, the usualy anchor point of top left seems rotated clockwise.
But there is still a real rotation - look at wyoming or colorado for a perfect rectangle. My guess is the div element isn't quite centered - perhaps too much padding on the right edge, causing the center point to be off to the right. So when it bows you get the rotation bias
I have a very different sense for the size of countries since starting to play Geoguessr as the number of points that you get depends on distance. You start to appreciate things like how big Brazil and Indonesia are and other things like how far the Atacama desert stretches. You can guess in the Atacama and still lose a lot of points!
Mercator projection striking again.
The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.
Brazil is the largest surprise for me. It's an absolute massive country.
Not only in area, but also in population: about 200 million, 2/3 of the USA population. The population of our 5 largest cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte) is bigger than the 5 largest cities of the USA (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix):
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_munic%C3%ADpios_do_Br...
Wikipedia says contiguous USA is smaller, 95% of Brazil size.
Wow - in my head, Australia was somehow ~20-25% the size of US (I'm from Europe) - really surprising, and shows how misleading the projection can be in this regard.
I wish schools would stop using it so much. Mercator is useful, yes. But having good size comparisons is much more important for most everyday tasks.
It's useful for navigation in the open ocean without satnav or even a chronometer, which is what it was designed for in the 1500s. Not for much else.
Is the use of Mercator in schools common, globally? Based on what I've read on the internet it's common in the US, but I have no idea about other countries. In Finland I think I only ever saw Robinson or Winkel-tripel type compromise projections. Mercator was maybe used as an example of how projections distort things.
I thought Mercator became popular due to online maps like Google using it. It's convenient for tiles because it's square.
I don't think I've ever seen a Mercator map of the world printed out, though. Is that seriously a thing? It looks completely ridiculous. Every poster I've seen has been a more rectangular projection like Robinson.
Google Maps doesn't use Mercator — it uses a 3D globe. If you zoom out you can see the whole globe and there doesn't seem to be any jump where the projection changes, or any distortion of country sizes.
Edit: I just noticed that Google Maps on Firefox and Chrome is indeed 3D, but on Safari it is 2D Mercator.
Italian here. We learned about the existence of different projections in school, but only used Mercator when actually discussing geography.
It preserves angles, which is what makes it useful in navigation. Mercator is bad at relative sizes for places far apart, but when you look at a small patch shapes are less distorted. For that reason, online maps use a version of Mercator.
Huh. Swede here. Went to school in the 80:ies and 90:ies. Only ever saw Mercator. Perhaps things have changed since.
German is Mercator only. Learned about different projection on the internet years after school
I only visited Realschüler and switched to gymnasium in 11. Tbh I don't remember much of my geography lessons, was not my primary interest in school
I wonder if Mercator maps that aren't aligned with the equator would already do the trick. (pinging Randall Munroe)
A flat map on a wall does not take any three-dimensional space. You can't say the same for a globe, though!
Which everyday tasks?
I was really surprised that China isn't much bigger than the US. I always assumed it was about twice as large.
The real surprise is ~95% lives on 1/3 of that land. Other 1/3 is plateau, 1/3 is desert. An extra dumb derrived stat I like is about ~25% of the worlds smokers are concentrated on ~0.6% of earth's land mass (that 1/3 of PRC).
Australia and Canada are both slightly bigger but if you consider population density they are immense territories. Then there is Russia, which is in a league of its own. You don't see many "Check fuel. Next gas, xxx miles" signs in the US.
> "Check fuel. Next gas, xxx miles"
You don't see that in Australia either: we don't use miles, and we don't call it 'gas'. Typically it would be "No fuel next X km"
One of the rules I came up with while driving the coast of Aus a good while ago was just "always fill up". Oh and also "carry a jerry can of spare fuel"
The first bit came after one day when I skipped a servo and then it was over half my remaining fuel further along the road, I hadn't seen another and I realised "well I can't go back. Shit."
The second bit got expanded to two jerry cans after I had to use one because even though I made it to the servo in rural FNQ, it was 5.15pm and they were already closed. Thankfully that day the extra 20l got me to Port Douglas.
We do still have a few remnants of the imperial system - "90 mile straight" on the Nullabor comes to mind. The longest straight road in Aus, or maybe the world I don't know. When you're already suffering brainrot on your multi-day Nullabor drive, the announcement that you're not even going to have to turn the steering wheel for over an hour is... well it didn't fill me with joy!
There's an awful lot of "X Mile Beach"-es in Aus.
I've been using, and sharing, this site for several years. I think it's excellent. The two things I'd like to see are the provinces, at least in larger countries, and large bodies of water. I'd like to be able to drag Ontario, Lake Superior, the Caspian Sea, New South Wales, and so on, around the way you can with countries and US states.
What a nice well made tool. I was shocked how massive Algeria is! Maybe larger than half of Europe. And Tunisia which is a tiny country in my head, seems to be not tiny at all.
Algeria is about 23.4% the size of Europe.
I would guess you included Russia and OP mentally excluded it.
This is why it's crazy to think there's room for Algerians in Europe.
Why would Algeria's land size have anything to do with that?
Algeria is more than 80% desert and has a population of ~46 million. Non-desert area accounts for ~480k km^2 out of their ~2400k km^2 land . Europe has far more livable space than Algeria does. Spain is pretty comparable with a population of ~48 million in 505k km^2.
I get that there are political reasons, but "Algeria is big so Algerians shouldn't need to leave" is a pretty surface-level observation.
If the French didn't want Algerians to be French they shouldn't have invaded there in the first place.
So it's like revenge? The French have to accept revenge?
I don't think the poster meant it as a revenge thing. France at some point made it illegal to deny the Frenchness of Algeria, you could go to prison for this back then. The two countries have had a very long history of close relations with its all ups and downs, and many French lived in Algeria and Algerian lived in France. I have no connection to either of those countries I'm just interested in history.
If you drag something large over so it covers the south pole the shading can invert so that only the region covering the south pole is unshaded.
That's how I proved that the actual size of Australia is approximately 90% of the area of the globe. Who knew the mercator projection could be so confusing! :)
I have been told so often about how the Mercator projection misrepresents the size of countries that seeing it like this is underwhelming to me.
It turns out that even when put in the middle of Africa, Russia is still massive. And even without the projection, Greenland is not small either, which, in a sense, makes Denmark the largest European country by far.
Move Greenland over the DRC, or Brazil over just about anywhere.
Why not just look at the area?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Yeah, the Mercator projection misrepresents a lot of the Global South. So of course Russia is still massive.
Why the South? What about the North? Symmetric globe?
And why is the shrinking considered a misrepresentation, but the enlargement of high latitudes apparently not?
> Why the South? What about the North? Symmetric globe?
The globe isn't symmetric when it comes to these terms. They don't refer to the actual two hemispheres, split at the equator. The "south" contains the equator and the "north" ends way before the equator.
> And why is the shrinking considered a misrepresentation, but the enlargement of high latitudes apparently not?
Because being overrepresented (looking bigger) is typically an advantage. Both are misrepresentations but the direction matters. Some of this is only a real problem if geographical area and population are correlated. Which, at least in broad strokes, is true here.
You asked what you thought were open ended questions but turned out to have concrete answers. Maybe you are also one of these people who should reflect?
I'd say it mostly misrepresents Europe.
A combination of Europe being generally close to the pole, so the projection makes it look big, and the large number of small countries and fine geographical features, giving it a high concentration of details.
Did anyone else expect this to be about the C++ sizeof operator?
I thought it would be about the C sizeof operator.
I'm more surprised that anyone didn't
Haha, same here
Gall Peters Projection scene (From "The West Wing" S2E16) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
I was thinking of posting this too.
I've been using _TrueSizeOf_ for years...
I hate that I can't go back without long pressing the back button and selecting from the history.
Very cool site, but...
It looks like each drag-n-drop changes the history. I had to click the back button about 10 times to get back to HN.
So much tech that can be accomplished by just using Waterman butterfly, Peters, Dymaxion or any of a host of other projections.
Every time I end up on this website I'm reminded how small my country, Belgium, truly is.
It's about half of my state in Brazil (which is one of the smallest in the country). However, I've been to Belgium many times and it feels bigger. I think the key is the population density: 388/km^2 in Belgium vs 70/km^2 here. Like, yes, it's big, but empty space is truly boring.
Here in Australia there's a farm thats almost 80% the size of Belgium...
It's interesting to me how the large countries are roughly similarly sized. Canada, Australia, US, Brazil, China, Russia, India are all within a factor of 2, and it shows when you drag it across eachother. India and Russia as outliers slightly.
This is a tautology. You defined the category "large countries" such that they are as you say, close in size to each other.
Russia is literally 5 times bigger than India
I wish Europe (EU) could be selected as a common entity. The continents as well.
Would increase the data maintenance requirements from ~0 to >0 since the EU grows and shrinks every so often
Since 1973 there have been 9 changes to EU borders (in 1973, 1981, 1985, 1986, 1995, 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2020)
Since 1973, at least 69 sovereign states have been created or altered! That's not even counting states that have had multiple changes to their territory in that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da... -> sort by date of latest territorial change
I guess I should’ve learnt by now that no project - done right - is truly easy
I wish people learnt that (a) European Union is not Europe, and (b) Europe is a continent.
Europe is a relatively small and arbritrarily-defined part of Eurasia.
Geologically or geographically, there are 7 continents:
Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America, South America, and the mostly-sunken Zealandia.
Opening this starts with 3 countries showing (US, China, and India), overlayed on top of Africa. However, the country shapes are wrong. They're the shapes of their respective countries, but they've been relocated without any mercator distortion. Which means if I try and drag it back onto the country it belongs to, it doesn't fit anymore, as that distorts it (well, India has very little distortion so that one works, but China and the US don't).
I think the issue you're encountering is purely due to those two countries starting with a rotation, and not any incorrect handling of distortion. You can adjust the rotation of a country by clicking it and then dragging the compass rose, which will allow you to perfectly overlay them back on their starting positions.
Oh! That was very much non-obvious, as there was no textual description of that like there was for dragging countries around and deleting them. I see if I actually watch the video it shows the compass rose at the very end, but I normally skip video content.
I've always loved this. The coolest thing is to overlay Kiribati over the continental US.
Related: amazing video about map projections: https://youtu.be/bpp0xCknQAQ?si=AL-Qt36AeUH_oSeI
Pulling the US up to nearer where Russia is, or Russia down to near where US is, is amazing to see how the familiar shapes distort to something nearly unrecognizable.
It's interesting how Russia appears to only be about twice as large as the United States or China, but on a typical map it looks at least 3-4 times larger.
For the quantitative size of, go to https://mapfight.xyz/
I recommend trying Antarctica! It's tiny compared to the Pacific. I didn't expect it to fit into the Indian ocean.
Really nice, it would be wonderful if in addition to drag-and-drop it would be possible to rotate the shapes!
You can rotate by clicking on the compass.
I had to pare down a optmistic peru itenurary once I realized the country was like 1/3 the size of Ontario.
Peru is 500k square miles, while Ontario 415k square miles.
Sorry I messed up the sentence, I meant it looked 1/3 size of Ontario but was roughly ontario sized so I had to pare back.
A decade ago I managed Cochabamba -> La Paz -> Cusco -> Lake Titicaca -> train to Machu Picchu -> Lima in two weeks, which felt like hitting the major spots (including some of Bolivia) at a reasonable pace. Did involve some very small planes though, and the very unusual "climb to land" of La Paz.
I would have thought I could reasonably tour Ontario, but holy shit, it's 3 times the size of Peru?
No I messed up msg, it's larger than Ontario but looked 1/3 the size on Google maps, so I had to trash stupid optimistic itenuary.
I never thought that Panama and Ecuador would be so big when compared to European countries
chile is really fun to move around
Huh, Russia is almost the size of South America.
17,098,246 km2 vs 17,840,000 km2 (95.8%)
Very cool! TIL Greenland is smaller than Argentina.
Brazil is huge.
slightly off topic but it should be a crime for a website hijacking the back button
It should be a crime for web browser letting the back button be hijacked in the first place!
It shuld be a crime for web browsers to download and execute code as a matter of loading a page.
Nothing is "hijacked"; it just sets the hash to allow permalinks. It should probably actually load the state when pressing back (or replace the current entry instead of adding a new one). But that's just a bug and not malice, as some seem to assume.
It actually is augmenting the history so "hijack" is correct.
Weird that back isn't restoring the state. Just stays the same for me.
this is so incredible. I'd love if it supported continents.
Oh my - history spam. I had to long-press the back button to find this HN page again.
omg brazil is huge
it's australia engulfing europe for me.
Try Ukraine
Very nice
use all the time
Maybe we could give Trump the northern part of Greenland, as visible on this map? As you can all see, the northern part of Greenland is HUGE, which is why I think it is the best part to give him. The small insignificant SOUTHERN part however, he doesn't have to deal with, we can leave it to the greenlanders (appropriate, given that they are already called greenlanders.) Heck, we might even call the northern part HUGELAND! /s :-)
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We need a new world map that accurately portrays countries by size. The downstream effects would go crazy.
There's already several, Gall Peters being the most (in)famous. Other than accurately showing size, such maps are pretty useless. Mercator is actually useful for navigation because it maintains angles, all "size accurate" projections have to sacrifice that.
I mostly agree but it’s comical you have put “size accurate” in quotes but have said Mercator “maintains angles” without any qualification.
It preserved rhumb lines.
>a new world map that accurately portrays countries by size.
Search for "equal-area" in the list of map projections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
You can see that any translation from 3D sphere to 2D plane will always create a tradeoff of geometry somewhere. E.g. Distorted shapes and lines, torn oceans, etc.
You think that doesn't exist? You think the cartographers and mathematicians in Mercater's age were just sitting on their hands?
> The downstream effects would go crazy.
Wars are won with tanks^W drones, not by measuring the area in a map. Laypeople may be confused, but when a government decides to invade another country or add some economical penalty, they know the real data like real-world-surface, GDP, number of weapons, ...
Like a globe?
Like a globe, but flat, and make sure angles stay accurate so you can still use a compass effectively.
Wait, all that AND have it be size-accurate? ...how about we make it flat in 3 dimensions, but uneven along a 4th one?
> The downstream effects would go crazy.
I used to say "No human being who has ever lived has made a consequential decision because 'Greenland big brah' and people just need to get over it."
But given the current administration, I...
Why? There's other projections that do that already. And now we do most stuff on screens we can just use 3D models.
No wonder china is investing so heavily into Africa, including having Chinese settle there.
Non sequitur much? Geographic size differences alone don't drive investment and migration patterns.
I recommend everyone with even the slightest interest in the world or the need to understand things like time zones, seasons, flight paths etc. to get a globe, even just a small one. You just can't understand a non-Euclidean space by looking at projections and 3D globes on screens don't seem to cut it either.
> You just can't understand a non-Euclidean space by looking at projections
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, from a mathematical perspective you absolutely can. In fact, manifolds[0] are defined in terms of local coordinate charts. :-)
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold
Peeling oranges (the way bored kids do) also teaches you this.
Please don't do this to the planet! Oranges only.
Insert joke about an orange peeling the planet.
I rarely/never saw mercator projection as a kid. I think I probably saw mostly Robinson projection[1] as it seems that is what national geographic was using at the time. Mercator looks so completely wrong to me; I don't know why so many people use it. It seems to have gotten more common. Anyway, I agree that a globe is best.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection