Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rectangularness of countries

pappubahry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 150 posts

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#121

Post by mikeash »

clock_tower wrote: post #104
mikeash wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, your use of "'punish' countries" made me imagine a world where improving this score gets taken seriously by the peoples of the world, leading to countries gradually becoming more rectangular over time, and many terrible wars along the way.

This reminds me of Paradox's strategy games, where players routinely complain about "bordergore" and fight wars to make the map look neater...

That's great, never heard of that before. When I search for that term, the first hit is a Reddit thread where the first commenter expresses his desire to "drop-kick" people who do it. Strong emotions! Maybe we can create this world after all.

I wonder how many actual wars in the past have been started because someone didn't like how the border looked on a map. It has to be non-zero.

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#124

Post by [deleted] »

foliveira wrote: post #65
Analemma_ wrote: post #25

I'm surprised Portugal didn't score higher. One day in the car I randomly asked myself the same question of "which country is the most rectangular", and Portugal was the first one I thought of. Is it because the Azores were included? Would like to see the rank if they had only the mainland.

Including Azores definitely affected the final result. It's weird that other countries didn't have their islands include though

[deleted]

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#125

Post by notsureifwant »

fiatjaf wrote: post #32

Correlate with economic development!

There's a fair amount of research in economic history on almost exactly this topic. Two recent papers http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328.pdf and https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4s_WKe-US99LV9XVTNVNzFxYW8... have looked at how measures of the artificial-ness of borders (how straight they are, how often they cut through the territory of ethnic groups, ratio of a country's area to the area of its convex hull) are correlated with various measures of welfare (e.g. GDP/capita, lack of conflict). The papers are often controversial because they often claim something approaching causality (see recent Twitter war https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/753252113510268928).

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#126

Post by shekhar101 »

I read somewhere that manmade boundaries can be clearly identified. They are mostly straight lines on maps. It makes more sense after reading this article. This is the reason why so many African countries have such sharp boundaries. Colony masters divided them amongst themselves, ignoring natural resource division, people and ethnicity of new countries. This has led to so many conflicts among these countries as well. I might be wrong, but I think this happened to middle-east as well.

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#127

Post by LeifCarrotson »

zumu wrote: post #123

I wonder if the overall rectangularness of the African countries is evidence of a bias for retangualarness by the map making colonial powers.

Egypt and Equatorial Guinea are clearly on latitude/longitude lines, but the rest look pretty random. I am actually surprised that it's as nonlinear as it is - go take a look at a map of Africa, not much is actually rectangular! There are a lot of straight lines (which would be another interesting metric to study-the countries most closely bounded by an irregular polygon) in several interior borders on the Sahara, as well as Namibia and its neighbors. But none except Equatorial Guinea are really rectangular.

The state borders, on the other hand, are often quadrilaterals. Perfect scores to Wyoming and Colorado, and near-perfect for many others.

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#128

Post by rspeer »

mynewtb wrote: post #78
tobr wrote: post #63

These are not rectangles though. The projection has severly stretched many of the countries. Combined with the tilted angles, that should mean the corners of these "rectangles" aren't really 90°.

Site is currently down, please tell me they used locally fitted projections, not Mercator?

They used an equirectangular projection, because rectangles. But that means that some of these rotated rectangles are more like parallelograms when you look at them in another way.

Mercator actually would have been a good choice because it preserves local angles. Not sure why you'd be so opposed to it in this case. For this purpose, relative sizes don't matter at all.

And I don't think a local projection would clarify anything. Countries can get pretty big and non-local. If you strive for complete geometric accuracy on the scale of, say, Canada, the idea of a "rectangle" breaks down because there are no parallel lines on Earth, and four right angles don't bring you back to the orientation where you started.

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#129

Post by jlg23 »

mikeash wrote: post #121
clock_tower wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Paradox's strategy games, where players routinely complain about "bordergore" and fight wars to make the map look neater...

That's great, never heard of that before. When I search for that term, the first hit is a Reddit thread where the first commenter expresses his desire to "drop-kick" people who do it. Strong emotions! Maybe we can create this world after all. I wonder how many actual wars in the past have been started because someone didn't like how the border looked on a map. It has to be non-zero.

> I wonder how many actual wars in the past have been started because someone didn't like how the border looked on a map.

Plenty, though it's less about rectangular shapes per se but borders being drawn by former colonial forces with a ruler, splitting ethnic groups and forcing them to live under a new, foreign government. Under colonial rule every unrest was simply stopped by brute force, after "liberation" and division of countries according to some arbitrary border created by drawing a line along a ruler on the map there was no "moderating" force anymore and ethnicities that had ignored/evaded each other for centuries were forcibly mixed and the former colonial force usually decided who was the new government, based on their interest. A great example is Western Sahara:

Spain left and decided "this part goes to Mauritania, this part goes to Morocco". The Sahawri managed to beat the Mauritanian forces and to claim some land, then Morocco "invaded" (in quotes because Moroccans fought the Spanish in the 50s from as far south as Aoussard). Also, officially the border between Morocco and Algeria is closed because of Algerian support for the Sahawri. But in the north of Morocco, in the Rif area, people feel more connected to the Rif than to Morocco and cultural exchange with the Algerian Rif people is much more vibrant than cultural exchange with the south of Morocco.

Re: The rectangularness of countries

#130

Post by adrianratnapala »

dragonwriter wrote: post #46
andrepd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. For example, these borders exist more often in deserts, for instance (see Sahara and Arizona for instance).

Arizona's not a country, so not quite germane (unless you are talking about its southern border, which is clearly an example of the effect suggested.) In the case of the borders among countries in the Sahara, my understanding is that lots of those were disputed borders settled by people pretty remote from the areas with the straight borders, so I'm not sure they provide a counterexample. "It's a desert" may increase…

Looking at this map (http://www.freeworldmaps.net/africa/africa-physical-map.jpg) I see that nearly all the stright-line borders in Africa are in deserts.

Dividing geography with existing populations and long histories into discrete countries is always going to produce tricky ethnic issues. It's just that in Europe those issues were worked out violently over a period of centuries up to and including the second world war. The process is so big, that people don't notice it.

Post reply on HN