The true size of a country or state(thetruesize.com) |
The true size of a country or state(thetruesize.com) |
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection
For an extreme example, try to lookup Chile and put it over Portugal, a similarly shaped country. Watch how Chile is vastly different whether you put its southern or its northern tip over Portugal.
On one hand Chile looks like it might be less than 10 times the size of Portugal, on the other hand it looks like it might be more than 20 times Portugal.
The projection used for the underlying map here is the Mercator, which stretches everything near the poles. It makes Greenland look almost as big as Africa, which it is not. It's the most common projection, but it's awful for accurately visualising the whole world at once.
But the Mercator is actually a really good projection for stuff like Google Maps, because it keeps shape and direction (not scale) accurate all over the world. Say you zoom into Iceland and then Ecuador... OK you'll need a different zoom level to get to the same real-world scale (e.g. to get to 10 miles per inch you need to zoom in closer to Ecuador than Iceland) but who cares. What matters is that, in either location, north is pretty much straight up, east is right, south is down and west is left. And also, a 10 mile road going east–west will look about the same length as a 10 mile road going north–south.
Other projections don't have these qualities, but are better for keeping overall scale the same all over the map, making relative sizes of countries look more like what you get on a 3-D globe. But most people just use Mercator for everything.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mariasherm/every-world-map-youve-eve...
I chose buzz feed because they use illustrations. Some believe it is a conspiracy though.
We will add the ability for users to rotate countries soon.
Obligatory XKCD.[1]
EDIT: and there's a 'non-contiguous' option for the US that includes Alaska and Hawaii.
It's fixed now.
The rotation code is actually done, you'll notice China is rotated when you first log on (as is the US just a little).
Creating sane UI for you to rotate countries yourselves (that works on top of google maps) is going to take us a while. But it's on the todo list after better State/Province data
Consider using something like the Gall–Peters projection[2]. It is interesting to compare continents at their true size.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
The downvotes are likely because parent is giving the impression that they couldn't be bothered to spend 3 seconds finding out what's going on before commenting about it.
"Gall-Peters: I hate you."
