Accurate maps of the globe are enlightening.
Despite its shortcomings I'd argue that Mercator projection maps (in general) are accurate.
Russia on the other hand is significantly bigger (16.3 million km^2) - bigger than even Antarctica (14 million km^2).
Russia is significantly bigger, as you note.
1 Africa
= 3.35 Australias
= 2.86 Europes
= 2.20 Antarcticas
= 1.67 South Americas
= 1.23 North Americas
= 0.69 Asia's
Now, in term's of population:
1 Africa
= 35.10 Australias
= 1.38 Europes
= 227669.04 Antarcticas
= 2.60 South Americas
= 1.89 North Americas
= 0.25 Asia's
I think of the huge countries, Brazil is probably the one with less useless land?
Brazil harshest environment is the quasi-desert plains in the northeast non-coastal region, it rarely rains there because the coast has lots of hills high enough to block rain (thus the coast is very rainy too), but it is not a complete desert (yet... overuse of land in agriculture is slowly transforming it in a desert).
Brazil has no crazy areas of desert, tundra, or other non-fertile areas, the only parts "hard" to live as human are the rainforest (because it is too dense, nothing you cannot fix by making your own clearing) and the marshy area (because to live there you need to figure how to make a floating house or a house that don't flood).
US has the Arizona desert, and some snowy mountains, Canada half of it is just ice, Russia too, half of it is ice, China has a huge desert plus the himalaias, and the largest countries in Africa usually are large because they extend the border to the middle of Sahara because of natural resources, it is not really useful land.
And Australia has that very dry outback where you cannot have proper farming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
Land in permafrost, desert, mountain or swamp isn't arable and can support by itself a lot less population. This doesn't matter as much at a today when food can be shipped anywhere.
In the US, the bulk of population is along the Easter Seaboard, and much of the rest east of the Mississippi.
Europe is pretty uniformly populated.
Even China is mostly populated along the southeast coastline, with the interior largely empty space.
India's population density is rather more uniform, with a surprisingly large (to my mind) portion of the population against the Himalaya.
For the US, two ways of providing an equal-population distribution:
Re-allocated states by population. Note that this IMO inverts perception, as we view "bigger" with "more", when in fact the largest states have the lowest population densities. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/map-u-s-redrawn-as-50-...
US population represented by height: http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/12/map-of-week-...
And a cartogram by state: http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/bright-ideas.php
Here's global population density by color intensity: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7052
A global cartogram (equal-area by population). Color coded by surface temperature anomoly: http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Te...
Ah, what I've been looking for (should have started at Wikipedia): a US cartogram by county, color shaded by 2004 presidential election results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cartlinearlarge.png
A number of interesting world maps, including more cartograms: http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/
http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Th...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartograph...
"All content copyright Brain Junk © 2014 • All rights reserved."
Even though apparently the one piece of content on the domain is owned by someone else.
Good times!
http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledra...
Also, I'd suggest any how or why enthusiasts on HN to subscribe to Vsauce (if you aren't already). It's just amazing.
1. The person's name is Peters; the "s" is not possessive.
2. The projection was devised independently by two people; Gall got there before Peters. It's therefore usually called Gall-Peters nowadays.
3. The map shown does not use the Gall-Peters projection, either for Africa or for any of the other regions fitted into it. (It's all Mercator, but with Africa scaled up to make its area correct.) The appearance of Africa in the Gall-Peters projection is unusual enough that no one who actually knew anything much about maps would make this mistake.
4. The Economist article to which the page links has its own version of the "true size of Africa" graphic (which is not the one looted for the "Brain Junk" page) that uses a different projection also devised by Gall. But this is also not the "Peters projection" but a quite different one.
I suppose those mistakes are what Tariq Rauf is asserting the copyright on.
(It may be worth noting that Kai Krause seems to have explicitly put his graphic in the public domain, so there's nothing illegal in what Tariq Rauf has done here. That doesn't stop it being extremely unimpressive.)
But Hacker News readers: I really hope the general size of the African continent is not news. Knowing the general size and arrangement of the continents is basic geography...
