from Hacker News

The true size of a country or state

by callum85 on 9/7/15, 4:32 PM with 36 comments

• by noobermin on 9/7/15, 5:27 PM

  Interesting things happen when you drag a country onto the poles.

  More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection

• by SCAQTony on 9/7/15, 5:27 PM

  Drag Greenland onto Australia or Mexico and watch how much it shrinks. Australia just swallows greenland.

• by fmax30 on 9/7/15, 5:40 PM

  Can someone tell me why countries get larger as they are moved closer to the poles ?

• by amelius on 9/7/15, 10:11 PM

  Hmm, I tried to drag the US back to where it is on the map, and it doesn't fit...

• by Animats on 9/7/15, 9:46 PM

  Just use an equal-area map projection.

  Obligatory XKCD.[1]

  [1] https://xkcd.com/977/

• by bdcravens on 9/7/15, 8:08 PM

  Why does the US say "contiguous 50 states"? Shouldn't this be 48? (or 49 if you consider DC a state)

• by GerardoGarzon11 on 9/7/15, 6:24 PM

  Wow, Russia changes a lot.

• by adontz on 9/7/15, 8:11 PM

  Georgia, the republic of, not US, GA, cannot be viewed. Sad.

• by bkmn on 9/7/15, 6:40 PM

  This is great. I've been looking for a tool like this!

• by timeiscoffee on 9/7/15, 8:11 PM

  Why does South Korea have North Korea flag?...

• by Aldo_MX on 9/8/15, 12:42 AM

  How do you rotate a country?

• by cmwelsh on 9/7/15, 4:59 PM

  The author of this tool should use history.replaceState instead of history.pushState. Otherwise the way the page saves state using the HTML5 History API makes it impossible to use the back button.

• by vacri on 9/7/15, 6:46 PM

  Same thing in puzzle form:

  https://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledr...

  http://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-redux/

• by vladharbuz on 9/7/15, 6:46 PM

  Except, this is the Mercator projection, which distorts the size of objects as latitude increases from the Equator[1], rendering the whole website pretty much useless.

  Consider using something like the Gall–Peters projection[2]. It is interesting to compare continents at their true size.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection