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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

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arethuza·

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... :-)

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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!]

Its closer to Alaska (half a million square miles)

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.

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