Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrydag | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article but the first thing that jumped into my head is why are they comparing the size of a continent to sizes of countries?

View on HN

Because most people have no idea that Africa is as large as it is due to the way we represent our planet's maps and globes.

Seriously have this conversation several times a year. People really think Greenland is almost as large as Africa. I than state that we can fit these countries into the area of Africa and people are shocked.

BTW US is the third largest geographical country in the world.

Wait, our globes do not show the correct size of Africa? :O

Our globes do, but our Mercator projection maps don't.

Which the only globe people see on the computer is either the start of a strategy game or Google Earth.

I remember learning in school (here in the US) that the Sahara Desert is by itself as large as the continental US. That fact was so striking to me when I learned it, I wonder why other people don't know it.

In other news, look how many continents can fit in the ocean. See how many moons can fit in the earth. Lots of smaller things can fit in larger things!

While I appreciate the tongue in cheek nature of your comment, keep in mind the vast majority of people don't realize how bonkers the Mercator projection makes the world out to be.

The map doesn't make the oceans look smaller than the continents.

5673 million football fields fit into Africa while just 398 million fit into Greenland. For comparison: The US can take 1800 million football fields.

What fits into Mother Russia. https://youtu.be/N3lz2GFfkEg

People seem to compare the US with Europe all the time.

Edit: My favourite being an, apparently serious, assertion by an HN user than Europe would fit in Texas... :-)

i like the africa comparisons here:

http://www.texasmonthly.com/daily-post/how-big-texas-compare...

the last line might help people understand why people compare these things:

"If you’re the right kind of nerd, you can probably do this forever and not get bored"

I do these kind of comparisons all the time myself (particularly distances) - I just tend to react that assertions that Europe is "small" which I think are based on the distribution of "interesting" bits within Europe and the US. In Europe a lot of the "interesting" bits cluster together in the middle with a lot of empty bits towards the edges - the US has the opposite layout with major attractions often being on the coasts and the middle getting relatively little attention.

[NB Note the sweeping generalisations - I know fine well that there is a lot of cool stuff in the "middle" of the USA as well as lots of fascinating stuff round the periphery of Europe - I'm from Scotland!]

Completely unrelated;

My brother's father-in-law, while lecturing me how we younglings don't know nothing and have terrible education, insisted that Iran is in Africa and full of arabs.

Its closer to Alaska (half a million square miles)

Because the countries, being smaller, can be arranged to fit into Africa.

what they're doing is making up a new hypothetical continent consisting of the US, China, Europe, India, Japan and comparing that to Africa.

I think it works to show how big Africa is.

But yes, if you compare countries, you can take comparisons further, and it would be more practical.

Why not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com