Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also good to realize that countries do not lie on a plane, and the edges of the rectangles should be great circle arcs.
Yes, I suspect there may be Euclidean geometry underlying all of this.
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The rectangularness of countries
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#132169/208?
Reagan would never have let this happen. #makeamericarectangularagain
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#133I'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.
One must not forget Madeira islands either
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#134Eq. Guinea at #18 looks wrong...the rectangle seems too large. It is pretty rectangular, about as much as Egypt to my eye...
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#135I wonder how similar the result would have been with this metric:
Score = area of the symmetric difference between country and the rectangle maximizing the score.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#136Re: The rectangularness of countries
#137The UK map, unlike France or Spain, doesn't include the oversea territories.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#138Funny to see that France is only 134th while French refer to their country as "The Exagon" (metropolitan France) - 3 ground borders and 3 sea borders. The expression was coined in the 1860s by school reformists and got popular after the Franco-German War in 1870 when Alsace was lost. To my knowledge French are the only ones to define their country with a geometrical form
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#139Re: The rectangularness of countries
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. I feel like there should be a CGP Grey video about this. He has one about London vs the City of London and the weird US/Canada border. Someone also tried to tell me Norwood, Ohio is the largest city within a city (an enclave city), but I can't find a source on that anywhere.
Newark is completely surrounded by Fremont (California) and has over 40,000 residents and is over 13 square miles in area, so if it's not the largest, it's at least near the top. If we discount natural borders like the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica borders only Los Angeles and has twice as many residents.
Los Angeles has very strange borders. West Hollywood and Beverly Hills are independent enclaves, and it has an odd tendril stretching down to Long Beach. I remember being delighted when Google Maps started outlining city borders - I had always wondered exactly what LA's looked like.
Another fun one is San Diego, which does indeed touch Mexico, but to get from downtown to the border and stay within city limits you'll have to get on a boat and stay within a narrow band of water stretching down the bay to San Ysidro.
See:
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy//plannin...