Traditional Anglo Saxon maps show the racial & socio-economic bias of cartographers for many, many years. Africa and South America are much much larger than most people realize. Russia is about half the size of Africa, 17million sq. k, compared to around 30million sq. k. Most world maps don't represent area correctly. This map gives an image of all the worlds countries with area preserved. It looks distorted, but it's correct. This has fascinated me ever since I first saw it. Africa is HUGE. Spoiler http://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/petersprojection-over.gif
Weird, I've never seen that before. It looks like the map was drawn on a balloon that let some air out.
This map makes Northern lands appear much smaller than they actually are. Look how Canada/Alaska/Greenland/Russia/etc. are flattened like this is a globe and not a map.
I still find it weird how Australia is a continent of its own. I never really payed much attention in 10th grade geography, but who got to name and select which countries belong to which continent?
Any 2D representation of the globe will distort somewhere. Sactown is right, i saw a map that showed Africa is USA + China + Europe in terms of area.
This will have far-reaching ramifications on Risk, Axis and Allies, and other traditional board games!!! Owning Africa or S. America only give you three and two bonus armies, respectively...balderdash!!!
For some reason they chose to distort it only in the northern area of the map. Europe is small, USA isn't the biggest country on our continent, and China isn't the biggest country in their continent. I'm not sure what anybody is learning.
Its not distorted. The map i posted is drawn to scale based o **** square miles of each area.. your view is distorted because you've been brainwashed by traditional maps your whole life.
It's distorted along the equator as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
Damn dude, Sudan is like 1/3 the size of the United States. And Algeria is probably 1/4 the size of it. Also, Brazil/India/Saudi Arabia are gigantic. And Argentina/Kazakhstan/Iran/Turkey are so much bigger than a normal map
Thank you for posting this! I was definitely in that group of white people who thought Africa and Asia were these small little places. Damn those map makers from years gone by! All this time they tricked me! Who knew that Africa and Asia were large!
That's how the U.S. and A. calls the continent. In lots of other places, it's called "Oceania" and it includes New Zealand and a few smaller countries. FAIL. It's missing the South Pole. Penguins are people, too, Señor ReyChita.
^The picture I get in my head when I read SacTown posts. No flat map representation can be drawn accurately. It is a projection of a sphere onto a plane, so there will be distortions. A projection can preserve shape, area, or distance but not all three. You showed one map that preserves shape and one map that preserves area. If you want a true representation, look at a globe. There is no conspiracy.
