So here are some charts to help you figure it out. Which Countries are Mapping the Ocean Floor? Animating the Mercator projection to the true size of each country in relation to all the others. Edit: Kai Krause has contacted us to let us know that the previous headline image we used was a … Someone please correct me if I am wrong. Take a look at these true size maps that compare the actual, real size of different parts of the world. The data was tabulated by Vincenzo Cosenza at Vincos.it by examining annual traffic data from Alexa and SimilarWeb. So if you remove Alaska, the United States does indeed look smaller, even if the overall number is larger. Africa. Since its 2017 release, the Nintendo Switch has become a household game console for gamers and non-gamers alike. [True Size of Africa via Good | Thanks, Cay], Pingback: My main cartography complaint is that for something that ostensibly fights “immappancy” caused by map projections, there is no information given on the map projection used here. My first guess is that the list is sorted by “%” and not “AREA”. Please try again later. In fact, the continent is 14 times larger than the island. So here is the true size of Africa, distortion-free. All of Europe he says but only includes the southern countries and the middle ones, excluding northern Europe (Scandinavia, Iceland, Faroe Islands), Republic of Ireland, the Baltic states and the Russian European bit, the Ukraine, Belarus etc etc. Presumably yes, but it would be good to note. Few consoles penetrate the mainstream deeply enough to have parents referring to a console by its proper name, instead of their children’s “Gameboy” or “Wii”. Share on Twitter. Read about the true size of Africa … Interestingly, the problem with maps is not that Africa is sized incorrectly. Africa is No. Click here for a larger, zoomable version, courtesy of The Economist. Realizing the true size of Africa also helps us appreciate how daunting it may be to solve Africa’s poverty and food challenges. Mapped: The True Size of Africa. The classic example, also used in The West Wing scene, is Greenland: on a Mercator world map, it appears roughly the same size as Africa. I would venture to say that it’s because Alaska is included with the total area value but not with the map overlay. So here is the true size of Africa, distortion-free. 2 on both lists: population and size. The True Size Of Africa Map. The Wii U’s weak sales brought about one of Nintendo’s worst periods ever in recent history, with two unprofitable years for the company in 2012 and 2014. Facebook did manage to capture the #1 spot briefly in 2011, but since then, they’ve been displaced by Facebook-owned Instagram. Kai Krause’s map, “The True Size of Africa.” Africa looks about the same size as Greenland in a Mercator projection, even though it is actually 14 times bigger; Krause’s map illustrates the fact that Africa is three times larger than the USA and larger than the USA, China, India, Japan, and all of Europe – combined! The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries – particularly in the case of the African continent. Four years ago, I set out to learn about Tanzania for a blog I ran about the School of St Jude in Arusha. A detail from Kai Krause’s True Size of Africa map. Take a look at these true size maps that compare the actual, real size of different parts of the world. Spain, for example, is roughly 1/20th the area of the US per the info provided, but the map of Spain appears to be aoubt 1/8 the size of the US map. In the images of the US and China, it almost seems to be the African country boundaries, but the E. European image seems to have European boundaries…. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. The Nintendo Switch came just in time in 2017 as the Wii U’s sales dried up, and the new hybrid home and portable console was an instant success. As Sony and Microsoft pushed HD rendering and higher graphical fidelity in their next generation of consoles, Nintendo focused on how games were played rather than raw power. The Game Boy and the SNES (1990) were the first iteration of this strategy, and they reached more than 160 million units sold combined while establishing legendary game franchises with revered sequels like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Still like the effort and idea. In 2018, the company released Nintendo Labo, a custom cardboard building set which integrates with the Switch and its Joy-Cons for a variety of games and experiences. For example, I don’t see Alaska or Hawaii represented as part of the US. Nice gesture to show how big Europe is but ouch, that is glaring oversight. Precious Metals Production, Volatile Returns: Commodity Investing Through Miners and Explorers, The World’s Gold and Silver Coin Production vs. Money Creation, Visualizing U.S. Money Supply vs. Half of the population live on the island of Java which is the fairly large island shown in the middle of the map (across Texas and New Mexico). Although I live on the continent, I am one of the millions who don’t understand just how big it really is. Geographic Area (millions of square kilometers) Top 15 countries The theme park will also be combining the digital and physical world, with virtual coin collecting and other prizes tracked on mobile phones, gamifying the experience for visitors. Africa, which straddles the Equator, barely changes in size — meanwhile, the countries furthest from the Equator become inflated from their true sizes on this type of map. 914 views-1. 2 on both lists: population and size. Wikipedia says Spain is about twice the area of Oregon, 504,030 km² to 255,026 km². Edit: Kai Krause has contacted us to let us know that the previous headline image we used was a variation on Krause's work by … The 2020 release of Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit pushed this further, with players able to build a Mario Kart circuit in their home to race physical karts controlled by the Switch. Africa is No. But how large really is Africa? Become a member. Can anyone tell what the internal boundaries in the different non-African countries are supposed to represent? But its massive global footprint didn’t grow overnight. The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries – particularly in the case of the African continent. A more realistic perspective of country sizes, Great Data Visualisation: True Size of Africa « Musings on Interesting Things, A Petty Blog » Africa: Bigger than You Think, One Billion People and One Stereotype | Thought Clusters, http://www.sunda.org/assets/indoamermap.gif, True Size of Africa - JOTA/JOTI Follow up | Jabbering All Day Long, Combating Immapancy, One Map at a Time « Hands Wide Open, El Verdadero Tamaño de Africa « La Valija, » El Verdadero Tamaño de Africa Té Forastero, True size of Africa – Infoviz project « CS450. At about 30.3 million km 2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area. But how large really is Africa? Where Are the Oldest Companies in Existence? Image by Kai Krause, courtesy of The Economist. Click here for a larger, zoomable version, courtesy of The Economist. Facebook had attempted to gain ground in the country but was banned in 2009. The True Size of Africa By Robert Quigley Oct 11th, 2010, 3:45 pm Very good, very well-researched illustration by Kai Krause illustrating just how mammoth Africa is. The Mercator projection has some real advantages, especially for navigation. However, Africa is indeed larger than a couple of continents put together. This attempt to illuminate inaccurate perceptions of country size perpetuates the problem but using what appear to be different scales for the countries filling in the African outline. Nice map but not entirely accurate. Where’s Alaska?! Pingback: While Facebook is the most popular social network in many countries, this traction didn’t happen overnight. China is cut into two parts making it look bigger within the Africa map to my eyes. Pingback: Even though i also have to mention that Scandinavia is a quite large part of Europe that has been cut out.. The success of the Nintendo Switch has brought on more experimentation and fresh ideas from the company, and the COVID-19 pandemic made it an essential product of 2020. Drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. This means that the sizes of European and North American countries are distorted, giving us an inaccurate mental “measuring stick” for judging the relative sizes of other countries. By Inside | Out . by Tony 1 jaar ago 1 jaar ago. That is weird…. The console only reached 13.56 million lifetime sales, and was quickly overshadowed by the Playstation 4 (113.5 million units sold) and Xbox One (~51 million units sold) releases in 2013. You ever wonder why civil wars never end in Africa? The True Size of Africa, highlighted by The Economist, shows just how big Africa actually is, and shows how easily all of the countries above can squeeze into the same physical area. Even fewer come together as a complete package that ties together the ideologies and technical ideas of their preceding consoles like the Nintendo Switch has. Editor’s note: The above table is slightly different from the countries shown in the visualization, which focuses more on fitting recognizable country shapes into the geographical shape of Africa. Africa is without a doubt a large continent. As the Nintendo Switch’s excellent game library continues to expand, new and old fans alike will be excited to see what consoles, games, and other products come next from the legendary game company. Thank you for an interesting comparison. The social giant’s growth, however, didn’t come without resistance. It’s in the details of 100,000 moments. With the Wii U’s poor performance leaving Nintendo in a tough spot, the next console release was crucial to the success of the company. Alaska. Yes, that’s right. By Stephen Luntz 04 Jan 2015, 23:57. The True Size of Africa « Signal/Noise. This has implications not only for Africa, but for the whole Southern Hemisphere: South America, India, the Middle East, and even Australia are “bigger” than they may initially appear on a map. The image is just there for illustration purposes so the scale is off and countries are missing. Have you ever looked at a map of the world and wondered how big some countries are and how tiny some other countries are? The BRICKS need to step up their act and push for a more balanced world in voice and it starts with correcting wrong perceptions such as those perpetuated by political maps. It sounds like you’ve looked solely (or at least primarily) at a Mercator projection map. Image by Kai Krause, courtesy of The Economist. http://www.kswmyy.com/alaskamap.htm, Pingback: True size of Africa . The issue here is that of political vs geographical mapping. If China has less land mass (given in the image) than the United States why does the author place it as number 3? Today, it was the true size of Africa.. Combating Immapancy, One Map at a Time « Hands Wide Open, Ok, so we all now know where to move into if a big asteroid hits :), Pingback: Visually, this graphic does not portray this. In area, it spans 11.6 million square miles (30 million square kilometers). Oops. Is Greenland really as big as all of Africa? However, Africa is indeed larger than a couple of continents put together. That means that 40% of Earth’s population (7.8 billion in December 2020) uses Facebook-owned social media. What Is The True Size Of Africa? http://www.sunda.org/assets/indoamermap.gif : this map shows the enormous size of Indonesia. China’s most popular social networking website has been Tencent’s Qzone since the mid-2000s. Maps of Africa. Africa, which straddles the Equator, barely changes in size — meanwhile, the countries furthest from the Equator become inflated from their true sizes on this type of map. Similarly in Iran, Facebook was also blocked first in 2009 and then intermittently since. The Game Boy’s variants like the Game Boy Pocket (1996) and Game Boy Color (1998) lengthened the handheld’s lifespan enough to accompany another home console, with the Nintendo 64 coming out in 1996 and selling 32.93 million units of its own. Funny thing is: a lot of people are stating the map is not perfect (to say the least). And Madagascar is more than twice the size of the UK, but they seem to have the same size on the map. Online maps that we use for directions use the Mercator projection, and this tends to dictate how we perceive the size of countries and continents. This one’s for you, cartographers. 3 | Side Culture. The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents. In area, it spans 11.6 million square miles … The story was similar in Africa, as increasing internet traffic data pointed to Facebook dominating the social network landscape across the continent (minus a temporary LinkedIn surge in 2017 for Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Cameroon). I suspect that that’s the source of the error. Very curious that the same two countries are swapped in both lists in the graphic, but that’s probably because the lists originated from the same source list, so errors would propagate identically. While showing the true size of things is a noble goal, these sort of errors really take away from this work. The next generation made up of the Game Boy Advance (2001) and Nintendo GameCube (2001) saw slightly lower sales numbers, but was competing against Microsoft’s gaming debut with the original Xbox (2001) and Sony’s incredibly popular Playstation 2 (2000). If you add in Alaska as Leif suggested, that should make up for the discrepancy. Video comparing the Mercator projection of 1596 with the Gall-Peters projection of 1974. See this map for full details.. By Anne Taylor 13 September 2013.   Its population is estimated at 1.3 billion. Nice graphic! In a bid to fight “immappancy” and chronic misjudgement of Africa’s true scale, software and computer – graphics guru Kai Krause created a public domain image that illustrates the truth. Take a look at any map, and it’s clear that the African continent is a big place. Kai Krause The True Size of Africa A few years back there was an exhibition in a London gallery by the Royal Geographic Society , and the curator asked the edge.org group to contribute “unusual maps”. This graphic explores 20 years of Nintendo console sales and the success of the Nintendo Switch. Of course I meant to say “how big Africa is”. What’s the true size of Africa? One Billion People and One Stereotype | Thought Clusters, Pingback: The True Size map points out that Mercator projections suggest that Greenland is about half the size of Africa, for example. Did You Know? By the way most political maps do qualify this fact and in most cases include a scale of the levels of northern exaggeration (normally located in next to the legend or scale). While developers previously flocked to create games for the Wii’s motion controls, the Wii U’s tablet controller didn’t attract the same kind of innovative software development. Traditional maps have downplayed the size of the continent in comparison to other parts of the world for hundreds of years. In 2020, the company saw 1.3 billion MAUs on Facebook’s Messenger app, 2 billion MAUs on the world’s most popular messaging app WhatsApp, and just under 1.2 billion MAUs on photo sharing network Instagram. Realizing the true size of Africa also helps us appreciate how daunting it may be to solve Africa’s poverty and food challenges. Read about the true size of Africa here. Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. Many of the Wii Remote’s abilities are still present in the Switch’s Joy-Cons, with built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes for motion controls, along with the ability to rotate them sideways for a more classic controller configuration. A great tool for educators. “Of course, you know Africa is a continent, right, so why would it be news that many ‘major’ countries in the world are smaller in area? Something went wrong. What do you think? It stretches for over 3,000 miles between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and separates Asia from Australia. Yeah, what is going on there? The population of Africa numbers 1 billion, while the North American continent is home to 528 million souls. If you look at the world map on Google, for example, Africa doesn’t look that much bigger compared to China or the United States. Nintendo was clearly the king of the handheld console market. We know who never marries. If you look at the world map on Google, for example, Africa doesn’t look that much bigger compared to China or the United States. Visualizing the Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface. Most of Indonesian territory is water but its 13,000 islands constitute a considerable amount of land and its 200 million population makes it the 4th largest in the world. Animating the Mercator projection to the true size of each country in relation to all the others. Before 2008, the social network landscape was populated by social network pioneers such as Myspace and Hi5. I analyzed the crowd-sourced corpus to see what brought the most smiles. Once place that is often skewed is Africa; it generally appears much smaller on maps than it is in real life. The continent of Africa is larger than the United States, China and Brazil combined. The thick black border is equivalent to a jar that holds jellybeans. The Mercator projection has some real advantages, especially for navigation. 110 points. Another “immappable” country: Indonesia. I’m guessing the list was manually sorted by a person and not a computer, and they screwed up. By Facebook’s own estimates in its Q3 2020 reporting, its core products are used by more than 3.2 billion people every month. At the same time, Facebook is struggling to reach younger audiences in developed countries, which have increasingly turned to Snap and TikTok instead for social media. There, social network dominance has switched regularly between the networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, both owned by Mail.ru, a Russian internet giant. Join the 220,000+ subscribers who receive our daily email, 50 Years of Gaming History, by Revenue Stream (1970-2020), The 25 Largest Private Equity Firms in One Chart, The World’s Most Influential Values, In One Graphic. Pingback: In the USA it is bling-bling, in Africa its bling-BANG! The True Size Of Africa Map. Kai Krause scales countries by their area in square kilometers and then fits them into a Africa’s borders for some perspective. Online maps that we use for directions use the Mercator projection, and this tends to dictate how we perceive the size of countries and continents. Another largely invisible continent. At 30.2 million square kilometers, its land mass covers 20.4 percent of the earth’s total land area. But the Facebook wave came in earnest. Google’s Orkut was the most popular network in Brazil and India, and Friendster found a foothold in Southeast Asia. African country borders are underneath all other countries, which really isn’t helping anything. 9 Share on Facebook. Make great charts. It is there in number. We know when people usually get married. Africa is without a doubt a large continent. Kai Krause. On that map Europe is still too big compared to the US. In reality though, it’s a lot bigger. You may be surprised at what you find! Mapped: Which Countries Have the Worst Air Pollution? The true size of Africa. The image also needs some explanation which has been separated through the way it’s been disseminated on the web. Because in China, there are still some disputable area with India, specifically the Aksai Chin, Trans-Karakoram Tract, and Arunachal Pradesh. I think those borders shouldn’t have been included since the graphic is supposed to be showing how many non-African countries can fit inside the continent of Africa when jammed together. Based on what has been published by cartographers, the continent is shown to be smaller in favour of other places on earth. The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined. Although a quick scan shows the other ties are properly sorted. Spain is actually scaled incorrectly. If you look at the world map on Google, for example, Africa doesn’t look that much bigger compared to China or the United States. While the GameCube sold 21.7 million total units and the original Xbox sold ~24 million total units, the Playstation 2 dominated this generation and is still the best-selling video game console of all time with 155 million units sold. While Nintendo’s development team can prepare for their next console with a bit more financial breathing room thanks to the Switch’s superb sales, the company has been working hard to broaden its audience. Does not that define “immappancy”? By the end of 2018’s fiscal year, the Switch had already outsold the Wii U with 17 million units sold. From just a few thousand users in 2004 to 2.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs) in 2020, Facebook is by far the world’s largest social network. And in other places, it still hasn’t quite taken off. » El Verdadero Tamaño de Africa Té Forastero. October 18, 2010 Topic Maps. China’s area is between 9,596,961–9,640,011 — a different large enough to switch place with United States. In … The true true size of Africa - The Economist, November 2010 A famous African proverb says, “until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter”. True size of Africa . This graphic visualizes the Nintendo Switch sales success story alongside more than 20 years of Nintendo console sales. Both the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii were runaway successes, dominating their generation with more than 255 million combined consoles sold. The other countries that Facebook has had trouble capturing, despite not being blocked, are Russia and many former Soviet republics. What’s the true size of Africa? Geographic Area (millions of square kilometers) Top 15 countries The Nintendo DS’s touch screen permeated many Nintendo consoles and is still present in the Switch, and looking back at the Wii U’s tablet controller, it now seems like an early prototype for the Switch’s free-form portability.