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I feel very lucky to have grown up with a huge (~ 75 cm diameter) globe as a centerpiece in the living room; I never ended up with Mercator-derived misconceptions in the first place.

Really cool work, love it!

I first discovered this about three months ago in a reddit comment under 'r/geography', and I still, from time to time, use it and enjoy it. Back then, I posted it here in HN, but zero traction!

Anyway, for those interested in previous discussions, here we are:

(2020), 556 points, 266 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787

(2017), 193 points, 66 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973

(2019), 155 points, 49 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538

(2015), 105 points, 36 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024

I have a very different sense for the size of countries since starting to play Geoguessr as the number of points that you get depends on distance. You start to appreciate things like how big Brazil and Indonesia are and other things like how far the Atacama desert stretches. You can guess in the Atacama and still lose a lot of points!

I really enjoy this! I wish it would also support cities, it would help me get a better sense of the size of a city to compare it to one I'm familiar with already. But I guess city limits are less well defined that country limits. Anyway, great project!

Pretty neat. One tip it took me a while to realize is that after you tap on a country, the compass rose (now the same color as the country) can be used to rotate it.

But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?

Mercator projection striking again.

The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.

I've been using, and sharing, this site for several years. I think it's excellent. The two things I'd like to see are the provinces, at least in larger countries, and large bodies of water. I'd like to be able to drag Ontario, Lake Superior, the Caspian Sea, New South Wales, and so on, around the way you can with countries and US states.

If you drag something large over so it covers the south pole the shading can invert so that only the region covering the south pole is unshaded.

That's how I proved that the actual size of Australia is approximately 90% of the area of the globe. Who knew the mercator projection could be so confusing! :)

Did anyone else expect this to be about the C++ sizeof operator?

I have been told so often about how the Mercator projection misrepresents the size of countries that seeing it like this is underwhelming to me.

It turns out that even when put in the middle of Africa, Russia is still massive. And even without the projection, Greenland is not small either, which, in a sense, makes Denmark the largest European country by far.

What a nice well made tool. I was shocked how massive Algeria is! Maybe larger than half of Europe. And Tunisia which is a tiny country in my head, seems to be not tiny at all.

I hate that I can't go back without long pressing the back button and selecting from the history.

I never thought that Panama and Ecuador would be so big when compared to European countries

Gall Peters Projection scene (From "The West Wing" S2E16) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY

Really nice, it would be wonderful if in addition to drag-and-drop it would be possible to rotate the shapes!

So much tech that can be accomplished by just using Waterman butterfly, Peters, Dymaxion or any of a host of other projections.

Opening this starts with 3 countries showing (US, China, and India), overlayed on top of Africa. However, the country shapes are wrong. They're the shapes of their respective countries, but they've been relocated without any mercator distortion. Which means if I try and drag it back onto the country it belongs to, it doesn't fit anymore, as that distorts it (well, India has very little distortion so that one works, but China and the US don't).

Every time I end up on this website I'm reminded how small my country, Belgium, truly is.

It's interesting to me how the large countries are roughly similarly sized. Canada, Australia, US, Brazil, China, Russia, India are all within a factor of 2, and it shows when you drag it across eachother. India and Russia as outliers slightly.

I recommend trying Antarctica! It's tiny compared to the Pacific. I didn't expect it to fit into the Indian ocean.

Pulling the US up to nearer where Russia is, or Russia down to near where US is, is amazing to see how the familiar shapes distort to something nearly unrecognizable.

For the quantitative size of, go to https://mapfight.xyz/

Related: amazing video about map projections: https://youtu.be/bpp0xCknQAQ?si=AL-Qt36AeUH_oSeI

I wish Europe (EU) could be selected as a common entity. The continents as well.

I had to pare down a optmistic peru itenurary once I realized the country was like 1/3 the size of Ontario.

It's interesting how Russia appears to only be about twice as large as the United States or China, but on a typical map it looks at least 3-4 times larger.

Huh, Russia is almost the size of South America.

17,098,246 km2 vs 17,840,000 km2 (95.8%)

chile is really fun to move around

Very cool! TIL Greenland is smaller than Argentina.

I've always loved this. The coolest thing is to overlay Kiribati over the continental US.

this is so incredible. I'd love if it supported continents.

slightly off topic but it should be a crime for a website hijacking the back button

it's australia engulfing europe for me.

Brazil is huge.

Oh my - history spam. I had to long-press the back button to find this HN page again.

omg brazil is huge

Try Ukraine

use all the time

Very nice

Maybe we could give Trump the northern part of Greenland, as visible on this map? As you can all see, the northern part of Greenland is HUGE, which is why I think it is the best part to give him. The small insignificant SOUTHERN part however, he doesn't have to deal with, we can leave it to the greenlanders (appropriate, given that they are already called greenlanders.) Heck, we might even call the northern part HUGELAND! /s :-)

We need a new world map that accurately portrays countries by size. The downstream effects would go crazy.

No wonder china is investing so heavily into Africa, including having Chinese settle there.