The True Size of Africa (infographic)

informationisbeautiful.net

10 pointsmike_h2 comments

I'm puzzled why this one keeps popping up. I'm 34, and I had it hammered into me in geography classes that Africa was the second-largest continent, second only to Asia. And yet, people seem amazed by this.

I'm vaguely reminded of the story about a guy in NYC whose French coworkers asked him about the best directions to the Grand Canyon - they wanted to drive over to it that Saturday.

ETA: Mind, the linked projection correction is nice. I thought France, Germany, and Spain looked ridiculously large in that first one.

Common errors contain information by their being common, and in this case I think it's pretty cool information. Africa is rendered grossly smaller than life in our minds due to a confluence of two bugs: 1) the usual 2D mapping techniques distort scale (e.g., see google maps), and 2) our internal representation of geo-size seems to implement a spatial compression on places we have less information about.

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