Love to see a world map tessalated this way!
The rectangularness of countries
21–30 of 150 posts
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#22Something 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.
Or probably just any kind of polygon from triangle to whatever you choose to find. The common property is probably rather convex shape than rectangularness or anything arbitrary like that. Maybe because convex borders are easier to protect or less threatening to neighbors or something like that?
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#23I 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?
Natural or artificial borders, rough date of creation of the border (straighter -> more recent).
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#24I 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?
Someone drew them on a map with a ruler, often from a great distance, I assume.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#25I'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.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#26It's a good metric, but I do feel there's something slightly different being said in human terms when we say a country is "rectangular." Turkey seems to have sharper, closer to 90 degree angles than other countries that may overlap a rectangle more.
I suspect what's really going on, psychologically, is that Turkey looks much more like a rectangle than it does any other basic shape: I would never described Macedonia as rectangular, despite its considerable overlap, because it's "oval." Kenya's a pentagon before it's anything else, and so on.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#27Neat! 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 i…
There's a couple of different scoring rules that would be interesting, I think.
Another one might be: What's the ratio between the area of the country and the smallest rectangle which bounds the country. This would "punish" countries with protuberances more than ones with "in-cuts", which "feels right" to me.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#28Wow, 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.
which are these? as far as I understood (I lived in Sint Maarten for a couple of years once) the Netherlands Antilles are colonies only, unlike the French islands (Martinique and Guadeloupe mainly, but St Barts and St Martin too) which are overseas departments of France, and also considered part of EU.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#29I 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?
Mostly that there was a conflict (possibly merely political rather than military) that was settled by people who didn't live near the disputed border.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#30Neat! 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 i…
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.