Tagged: Africa
The true size of Africa? Really big.
Most of us know, intellectually, that standard Mercator projection maps grossly distort the relative sizes of countries. In particular, the world maps we most often use exaggerate the size of first world, northern-hemisphere countries like Canada, the USA, and the nations of Europe, while under-representing the size of third-world countries clustered around the equator.
But do we grasp this distortion in any visceral sense? Quite the contrary: Each time we look at a distorting world map, we are subliminally reinforced in the prejudice that we’re big, and they’re small.
GUI-designer Kai Krause strikes a blow against what he calls immappancy with this eye-opening demonstration of Africa’s capacity to swallow up the much smaller land masses of countries we normally think of as quite large.
China, the USA, India, Japan, and most of Europe would handily fit within Africa’s shores. Click here for a much larger version, together with some commentary and additional stats from Krause.
[Via Stephen Fry and various others.]
Annals of climate change: June, 2010
The deniers have some explaining to do:
The Weather Underground reports that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center rates last month as the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, while NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls it the third warmest (behind June 1998 and June 2009). Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January – June, as the warmest such period on record. Moneyquote:
A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010. At least two other Middle East nations came within a degree of their hottest temperatures ever in June.
To judge from the map, Greenland and the the midwestern US got zapped pretty good, too.
Hat tip: Gus Reed.
