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Comment by petermcneeley

5 hours ago

Ya people have no idea how big Africa truly is

Here is the UK in Africa: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTAyODQ3Nzg.NTkyNDI2Nw*...

Note of course this includes Scotland! The traditional English are basically a dot.

11 comments

petermcneeley

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skew-aberration  5 hours ago

I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation. I've never thought Africa was small and was taught about the Berlin Conference, etc in school.

All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.

If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.

  • riffraff  4 hours ago

    North America is very affected, Mercator makes it look as big or bigger than Africa when it's actually quite smaller.

    • skew-aberration  4 hours ago

      Continents are in truesizeof btw. Asia is much bigger than Africa, North America is only a little smaller. When you account for the Sahara Desert of course, there is more usable land in North America.

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flohofwoe  1 hour ago

I would expect that most people have seen a globe at least once in their life though? ;)

thaumasiotes  1 hour ago

> Note of course this includes Scotland!

Don't worry; Americans assume as a matter of course that England includes Scotland. Your internal political divisions are of interest only to you.

The widget also appears to include Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, Americans probably wouldn't expect.