Hacker News Reader

Comment by radpanda | Hacker News Reader

Since the creation of that map Canada and Denmark have gained a border (Hans Island). That barely registers on any traditional map but would dramatically rearrange this.

EDIT: Or maybe it wouldn’t? I don’t see Russia’s border with Lithuania and Poland reflected (due to Kaliningrad) so maybe only the “main” part of a country is considered?

View on HN

Looking at the author’s Reddit post apparently things like exclaves were intentionally omitted for simplicity’s sake.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gxwn5r/oc_the_topo...

Still doesn’t explain some things, like, why is Singapore (an island) shown on the map as having a border with Malaysia? Other countries connected by bridge or causeway (Denmark and Sweden, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) aren’t shown as sharing a border.

You just opened my mind. I was absolutely convinced that Singapore did share a land border somewhere.

> apparently things like exclaves were intentionally omitted for simplicity’s sake.

That may not be just for simplicity’s sake. If you include “things like enclaves”, the graph may not be planar.

For example, Belgium, France, Germany and the Kingdom of the Netherlands all border each other (France and the Netherlands on Saint Martin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Martin_(island)), so if you take ”the Kingdom of the Netherlands” as a node, you can’t draw the graph on a plane.

An alternative is to see the countries of the Netherlands and St. Maarten as separate; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands). That would remove this counterexample, but others may exist.

Love that list of the internet's favourite exclaves. (Ignoring French Guyana counts as a crime, though.)

There's some simplification. I was initially puzzled about why it was United Kingdom and not Great Britain, as part of UK is on the island of Ireland. Also absent are countries that aren't fully independent, the largest being Greenland. Singapore is plain wrong. It doesn't share a land border with Malaysia.

The map also disregards the Dutch/French border on Sint Maarten/Saint Martin, or the UK/Spain one at Gibraltar. In fact, I can't find the Dutch Caribbean anywhere. So I guess a lot of those small islands and borders were just ignored.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com