Refreshing to see how many times this pops up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=true+size+of
Clickable link:
The True Size of Africa (2015)
161–170 of 226 posts
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#162I remember flying to Munich once from Cape Town and a German colleague guessed the flight was three to four hours. I said no, it was over eleven hours and he was shocked. I laughed and told him to check out a globe sometime - not a map - so he could trace for himself how massive Africa really is. The surface area of the moon is only 20% larger.
Ha, in 3-4 hours you may be in Cairo at best
I got curious and looked at a non-Mercator map and it seems Cairo is 7-8hrs away. Damn, Africa is huge.
Interestingly India got separated from African continent. West cost of India snugly fits on the right edge of The Horn of Africa. India collided with the larger Asian land mass resulting in the formation of the Himalayan mountain range. It’s fun to think about that the western coastal mountains of India are much older than the northern mountains!
Geography is lot of fun!!
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good article. They rightly attribute the reuben sandwich to the Blackstone hotel. Anyway, I'm enthralled by the idea of a lobster roll. I had clam chowder one time when we were in New England and it blew me away. I ate the pint and tried to go back and buy another, but my husband stopped me. I've had it a number of times since back here in the middle of the country and it doesn't even compare. Even in fancy restauran…
The lobster roll is really delicious. I’m sure you’re aware you had New England clam chowder, And that there’s also Manhattan clam chowder. But few folks know there’s also a Hatteras clam chowder. It’s made with a broth and the taste of clams really comes through a lot better than with the cream or tomato based variants. https://blog.carolinadesigns.com/outer-banks-food/hatteras-i... (And now that I’ve worked my way…
Definitely New England clam chowder. I'm not sure I'd like Manhatten style. You're just teasing me now with this Hatteras style. I don't think there's a good way to get decently fresh clams to the middle of the country.
I don't have a taste for grits. I finally came around to gravy on my rice, but I'm still iffy on grits.
I'm holding out hope that there's a decent lobster roll around here somewhere. You can get live lobsters here. There's no real reason you couldn't do a good lobster roll.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good article. They rightly attribute the reuben sandwich to the Blackstone hotel. Anyway, I'm enthralled by the idea of a lobster roll. I had clam chowder one time when we were in New England and it blew me away. I ate the pint and tried to go back and buy another, but my husband stopped me. I've had it a number of times since back here in the middle of the country and it doesn't even compare. Even in fancy restauran…
The lobster roll is really delicious. I’m sure you’re aware you had New England clam chowder, And that there’s also Manhattan clam chowder. But few folks know there’s also a Hatteras clam chowder. It’s made with a broth and the taste of clams really comes through a lot better than with the cream or tomato based variants. https://blog.carolinadesigns.com/outer-banks-food/hatteras-i... (And now that I’ve worked my way…
I did have fresh-caught blue crab when I was living in New Jersey. Once I figured out how to eat it, it was amazing. Fluke and striper straight from the water to the oven. I don't miss the coast, but damn do I miss the food.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the other commenter responded, I'm referring to the linguistic, socioeconomic and judicial homogeneity. Even though the US is culturally diverse, it still has a single currency, a single dominant language and a single jurisdiction (with minor state specific legal requirements). I only need one US visa to travel to all 52 states. A software company taking payments in the US has access to all 52 states. A peach cobb…
> The US can be seen as a single market, the same applies to China and India. Europe has the schengen area, the EU and the EEA. Africa needs similar initiatives. Yes, but you don't need much international cooperation to get a single market or visa free travel: individual countries can unilaterally declare free trade and open their borders. (And economic theory is in favour of that, too.)
You get an imbalance with free incoming trade but taxed/impaired outgoing trade. Perhaps a massively importing country can live with it if importers get better deals as a consequence. But otherwise bilateral arguments would be the long term viable approach.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#166Refreshing to see how many times this pops up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=true+size+of
Why is that refreshing? You'd expect HN people to not find this map interesting and therefore not post it/upvote it as its just common knowledge. Continent and country sizes are just a few numbers that everyone has already seen.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#167This reminds me of my favorite scene from The West Wing where they talk about how misleading the Mercator projection is with regard to the size of Africa. https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI
This is exactly why I despise it when I people say "things go south" then they mean "get worse" or "north of" when they mean "better".
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not a fan of AuthaGraph at all. It has horrible distortion look at Brazil or Alaska - and it’s proprietary (creator never released the actual map details, so you can’t make your own...) The worst thing, in my eyes, is that the distortion is unpredictable. Looking at a map where Canada is too big, you can mentally imagine Canada as smaller. But you can’t mentally undo the multi-direction transformation of Alaska i…
If one really cares about accuracy, why not getting a globe.
Yes, you're very clever.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#169That's not really accurate. Madagascar, for example, is about twice the size of Great Britain. That's without Ireland, but still...
He mentions this in the article.
He does but I can't understand his rationale. He claims it's "just a symbolic image - it may as well have been just blobs to tell the story" and "Had I stretched things to truly properly show that though, then the whole shape of Africa would have looked very awkwardly elongated." But why? One could scale the outlines so that they have the correct relative area whilst they preserve shape.
I think it's just a poorly-designed map.
Re: The True Size of Africa (2015)
#170>> The Good Design Grand Award, arguably Japan’s most prestigious award for design, went out to architect Hajime Narukawa’s completely groundbreaking design for a map of the world. His map, the AuthaGraph World Map, isn’t your average map of the globe: It’s a near-perfect representation of the continents and oceans as they exist on our spherical planet, all laid out on a two-dimensional surface. https://totravelistol…
It’s a near-perfect representation of the continents and oceans as they exist on our spherical planet, all laid out on a two-dimensional surface.
This is a bullshit statement. You cannot project the surface of the earth onto a flat plane without distortion. AuthaGraph favors the preservation of size at the cost of extreme distortion of shape.