Some people have too much time on their hands.
I agree; they really shouldn't spend their time leaving disparaging comments of other peoples' hobbies.
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The rectangularness of countries
41–50 of 150 posts
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#42Colorado wins
Another example is Saskatchewan, Canada. Like Colorado, its borders, on all four sides, are defined by latitudes and longitudes.
Saskatchewan actually has an unusual border on its east with Manitoba, in which a series of north-running meridians are interrupted by west-running jogs. This newspaper piece [1] reflects on the story behind this boundary.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-the-zigzag-betwee...
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#43I'm not sure this algorithm is the best fit for our natural intuition of a rectangular country.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#44this metric is kind of poor. What about something like the area ratio of the biggest inscribed rectangle to the smallest circumscribed rectangle that has edges parallel to the selected inscribed rectangle.
That measures nothing but outliers: consider that changing anything between the two rectangles would leave that metric unchanged.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Aleutian islands wrapping around? Marshal islands?
Ah yes, I believe it is the Aleutians. It's hard to really see it well, but it looks like the blob on the right side is at the same latitude as the end of the chain on the left side. I assume the "edge of the world" for this purpose was the 180th meridian, which would leave some of them on the "wrong side."
Looking again, I see that Russia and Fiji also suffer from this problem, and those are the other two countries divided by that line.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 the likelihood that decisions get made by people living far out of the region (since it reduces the number of people living close by), though.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#47Re: The rectangularness of countries
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, I suspect there may be Euclidean geometry underlying all of this.
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#49It's interesting to judge conflicts based on this ranking as well.
Check out #55 (Palestine) and #175 (Israel)
Re: The rectangularness of countries
#50Huh, the US is 169 out of 208. I would've guessed it at a good bit higher but I forgot Hawaii and (especially) Alaska are kinda hanging out there screwing up the ideal rectangle.
The metric used doesn't really knock us for Hawaii though, because it's so small.