Something doesn't seem right about this algorithm you used to draw the rectangles. If you used a similar algorithm to define circles, I feel like you would get a artificially high amount of circularness for countries that are not that circular.
The rectangularness of countries
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Re: The rectangularness of countries
#12Neat! To me, Egypt doesn't look very rectangular at all. The very deep concave section, and the sharp convex portion at the bottom right completely break rectangularity for me. I'm also curious as to why Nauru seems to have such sharp, straight borders - it looks more like the Vatican than a Pacific island.
I'm guessing low resolution in whatever dataset was used.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#13Neat! To me, Egypt doesn't look very rectangular at all. The very deep concave section, and the sharp convex portion at the bottom right completely break rectangularity for me. I'm also curious as to why Nauru seems to have such sharp, straight borders - it looks more like the Vatican than a Pacific island.
The measure is how much overlap there is with a rectangle of the same area, which means that a narrow but deep deviation is weighted the same as a shallow but long deviation along the border. I'd think that an intuitive notion of "rectangulareness" (rectanglosity? rectangularity?) would better match some sort of RMS measurement, where the penalty for a mismatch is proportional to the square of its distance from the ideal rectangle. It would be really interesting to see what changes with that sort of measurement.
Regarding Nauru, I think that's just poor resolution in the source data. It's only a couple of miles across, and the plot looks like it attempted to approximate the coastline with points roughly 1 mile (maybe 2km?) apart.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#14Colorado wins
Another example is Saskatchewan, Canada. Like Colorado, its borders, on all four sides, are defined by latitudes and longitudes.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#15I wonder how many of those are due to pairs or rivers or mountain ranges that tend to lie parallel to each other, or to rivers that tend to be at right angles to a coastline?
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#16Wow, what's going on with the Netherlands
The Netherlands have two islands in the Caribbean that is technically no different than any other "county" of the Netherlands.
It looks like a similar thing happened with the USA, except worse because whatever Pacific territories it included got attached to the east side, making it take the long way around.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#17Neat! To me, Egypt doesn't look very rectangular at all. The very deep concave section, and the sharp convex portion at the bottom right completely break rectangularity for me. I'm also curious as to why Nauru seems to have such sharp, straight borders - it looks more like the Vatican than a Pacific island.
Good catch, seems they're using low-resolution outlines for small countries like San Marino, Nauru, Vatican...
Actual outlines:
Nauru: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Nauru_ma...
San Marino: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/San_Mari...
Vatican: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Vatican_...
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#18I was kind of disappointed that this post isn't about artificial borders that look like straight latitudinal or longitudinal lines.
Those kinds of borders are quite common and I've always thought they say a lot about a country and its past.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#19You mean xkcd hasn't covered this already?
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#20I was kind of disappointed that this post isn't about artificial borders that look like straight latitudinal or longitudinal lines. Those kinds of borders are quite common and I've always thought they say a lot about a country and its past.
What do they say?