After the leap…
(via)
Also, this may as well be an open thread.
Reader Interactions
47Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.
Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
No Justins, No Peace
Second rate reporter says what?
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
Please don’t feed the bears.
We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.
I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.
Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!
The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.
“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.
Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.
I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.
John Bird
Nice.
marcopolo
Hmm this would explain why I can see Munich from my bedroom window…
Yutsano
This reminds me of my useless factoid:
Japan and Montana are almost the exact same size in square footage. Put 120 million people in Montana. Now put 120 million people in a sixth of Montana. That’s how population dense Japan is.
BGinCHI
Way to put the US where all the oil is.
And for poetic justice, Italy ought to be right on top of Ethiopia. Che cazzo?
Brian J
@Yutsano:
Someone recently said that you could put the entire U.S. population in a state out west–maybe it was Montana, but I am not sure–and everyone could live comfortably.
If that’s true, then it just shows you that we aren’t really running out of space. We just aren’t using natural resources efficiently.
John - A Motley Moose
And this is relevant how? Comparing the size of countries to a continent with 47 countries on it?
OldK
This is great, but all it really shows is that Europe is tiny. Replace China with Canada, replace India with Mexico, put Alaska back in there, and what you’ll see is… Africa is about 20% larger than North America. And the majority of Europe happens to fit into that 20%.
TheWesson
Stand on Zanzibar
> Someone recently said that you could put the entire U.S. population in a state out west
Everyone on earth could live on Madagascar and each and every one would have a 10 meter x 10 meter space to themselves.
That’s without building UP.
Sly
Obligatory plug for the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality.
Spaghetti Lee
I guess this is supposed to make some commentary about the global village, but all I see is a big ol’ drunken orgy between countries. Nice to see China and Japan get so cozy after all the wartime atrocities.
Jeremy B
It’s relevant because most people totally underestimate the size of Africa – when, as this demonstrates, Africa is bigger than the US, Europe, India, Japan and China COMBINED.
Check out this version with additional commentary:
http://gregosuri.com/true-size-of-africa-6
marcopolo
I am hitting the sack soon but would like to hear from folks here about which Cabinet level appointees under Obama they think are doing the best/worst jobs. My knowledge is limited and your mileage may vary but here are a couple on either side for me:
Best: Norm Mineta @ Transportation; Hilda Solis @ Labor
Worst: Timothy Geitner @ Treasury; Arne Duncan @ Education
I’d add that Gates and Clinton are working hard and seeming to do a good job as well. Any other comments on the lower profile positions?
Stan
Pretty interesting.
Is this an original work? If not, I’d like a cite to the author.
Mnemosyne
@Sly:
That is probably my favorite “West Wing” moment ever. At the very least, it’s the one I still quote to this day.
p mac
Very cool map. What I get out of it is that the Sahara is one big, big wasteland. It’s the size of the entire continental US!
Steve
@marcopolo: Norm Mineta is doing such a good job, the Department of Transportation is basically running itself after he left in 2009. Perhaps you were thinking of Ray LaHood, who I agree is doing a fine job. I think Gates is a fantastic Secretary of Defense and I’d be happy to see him in the job forever, but I don’t want to sound like I only like Republicans.
I think you need to put Salazar in the bad column for failing to fix up the MMS. It’s not just hindsight, either. All you had to do is read Daily Kos or TPM during the Bush Administration to know that the MMS took dysfunction to a new level.
Yutsano
@Brian J: Japan is more or less stuck by the constraints of topography. Nevertheless they’ve managed quite well in a rather small space. It’s why even in feudal times the Japanese tended to build upwards. Lots more vertical than horizontal.
Mnemosyne
@marcopolo:
I do think that Hillary Clinton is doing a great job as Secretary of State. I think Steven Chu can be added to the “good” column as Secretary of Energy, and I think Kathleen Sebilius is doing a great job with HHS.
In the bad column would be pretty much everyone involved with the economy, unfortunately.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: Sebelius rocks my existence. To wit:
Clowning Chuck.
Every time I watch this I crack up.
Roger Moore
@Brian J:
Think about it this way: if you put the entire population of the US into Connecticut, the population density would still be lower than that of Manhattan. Manhattan might be denser than most Americans would like, but it’s clearly livable. If you put them all in Ohio, the density would be lower than the Los Angeles urban area.
IndyLib
@Yutsano:
Yes, lots more vertical than horizontal, there isn’t a flat spot in the entire country, I swear.
We lived in a house in Yokosuka that had a driveway so narrow you could only fit one car in it and you had to park it against one edge of the driveway so that you could open the opposite door all the way. And we were lucky, most of the people that lived in the little alleyway our house was on didn’t have any driveway and if they had a car they had to park it at the top of the hill in the tiny rental parking lot dug out of the mountain. I couldn’t even pull the car into the driveway forward, I had to go to the top of the hill, turn around in the tiny parking lot, and go back down the hill and back the car in from the other direction.
They built a new apartment building right behind our house and when the building was completed and the plastic sheeting came down we realized that the balcony of the nearest apartment could actually be touched from my daughters second story window.
The lack of space was really difficult for us to get used to, it’s a completely different way of living.
asiangrrlMN
I do not see Taiwan. Am I missing it? By the way, I love Ace of Cakes. The fact that the two Asian American women on it are from Taiwan (their parents are) only makes it better. They were making a globe cake, and one of the woman said, “I put Taiwan on it.” Then she high-fived the other Asian American woman and said, “I represented us!”
But, I gotta say, the guy who tricked his girlfriend into going to the store and having the gang bake a broken fortune cookie cake with a fortune that read, ” (Insert name here), will you marry me?” was taking a big risk. What if she had said no?
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. That’s hysterical! I love her.
MTmofo
@Yutsano:
Currently, there are about 975,000 people in MT, approx 2 per square mile. But, a lot of that land isn’t exactly suitable for habitation. Glacier Park and the badlands topography in West Dakota, especially.
Yutsano
@IndyLib: I’ve heard tell that you’re better off on base in Japan for numerous reasons, but mostly because the housing isn’t so cramped. We were always stationed stateside (they get a little cranky about where they base the nukes and all that) so I never got to see it, but Navy housing is uhh quaint. Yeah that’s it, quaint.
Although after seeing 29 Palms, I’m pretty damn thankful we lived where we did. That place is a fucking rathole.
stirner
@Brian J: The U.S. population could actually fit into New Hampshire, though we’d have about the same population density as Brooklyn. If you’re curious, here’s a neat little infograph.
mclaren
@Roger Moore:
No it isn’t. Manhattan is a toilet bowl, a cesspool made of concrete, and the very definition of “unlivable.”
Doug M.
Which is why half the world wants to move there.
Doug M.
IndyLib
@Yutsano:
Base housing over there was much easier for us to deal with, though it had it’s interesting little quirks. We lived at the satellite housing area 7 miles from the base. That 7 miles took 1 hr 15 minutes to drive on regular surface streets and 45 minutes to drive if we were willing to pay 400Y to take the toll road and the toll bridge. We could take the train if we wanted, but despite the fact that I could walk out of my 9 story apartment building and see the train station through the base fencing, it was a mile walk because the base gate was 1/2 a mile away. Then after the little jaunt to the station the train took an hour to get to Yokosuka and you had to change trains once or twice depending on the time of day you went. When the train got you to Yokosuka it was another 1/2 mile walk to the only gate onto the base, then at least another 1/2 mile to the commissary/NEX or to my husband’s ship. There was no real way to use the train to get groceries, you’d have to go every 2 days, which is how the Japanese shop. The train stations don’t have any accommodations for for taking small children on the train, no elevators or escalators to get up and down from the train platforms with a stroller, because the Japanese don’t take their small children out in public unless absolutely necessary.
The base housing we lived at in Ikego (Zushi township) was actually really nice and in a beautiful area. So beautiful and roomy compared to the normal living conditions that the Japanese lived in that most of them in the area were quite unhappy that the Japanese gov’t had leased it to the US for base housing. We had a swimming pool, soccer/baseball fields (we did share those with the local community), huge parking garages, our own elementary school for K-3rd grade, a restaurant/bar and a mini-NEX. We had a camping area actually on the housing base which we also shared with the community.
If I was Japanese I think I’d have been a bit grumpy about our living conditions compared to theirs, too.
Our housing in San Diego was great. We lived in Pacific Beach, a mile and a half from the Ocean. We had a free-standing house with a 2 car garage and a huge yard. It was the nicest housing in the San Diego area, the houses were older, but had been completely renovated. Most of the other housing in San Diego area weren’t as nice as ours, but it was pretty damned good on the scale of Navy housing. Except for Honolulu all of the other Navy housing I’ve seen or lived on has been of the quaint variety.
And yes, 29 Palms is a hellhole.
Japan lets nuclear ships in now. My husband is headed to the USS George Washington in Nov.
magurakurin
@mclaren:
can you add a snark tag, because I can’t tell if it’s snark or not.
New York, nobody lives there anymore, it’s too crowded.
I must admit though I never saw a shithole with 2 million dollar two-bedroom apartments, though. Jeez, all those millionaires in Soho and Chelsea must be dumber than a bag of rocks.
brantl
@John – A Motley Moose: It shows you that we have a sense of self importance that is disproportionate to our resources, size and status.
KCinDC
How is equating geographic size to importance any more valid here than it is in those infamous red-blue maps of the US that show that we’re “really” a Republican country because of all that mostly empty space colored red?
Sly
@Roger Moore:
Manhattan is certainly livable. But make a Manhattan the size of Connecticut, and that’s a different story. We likely don’t have the technological sophistication to logistically support a dense megalopolis of that size. It may just be Manhattan x 200 (or whatever the number is) on paper, but there’s a whole range of engineering issues that crop up as you further urbanize an area and stack people into it.
I’m trying to envision how a sewage network for a city that size would function, and that alone is giving me nightmares.
BR
This is yet another argument for the Peters projection map which is an equal-area map unlike the usual Mercator.
marcopolo
@Steve: Oops, yeah I meant Ray LaHood. I obviously should have gone to bed sooner.
ciotog
I fully support the aim of this map, but they’ve put the British Isles, NOT the UK, into Madagascar. Ireland has a small part of its area in the UK, but emphatically not the whole island.
Sarcastro
It’s relevant because most people totally underestimate the size of Africa …
Most people couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and a GPS unit. I’m not sure how informing them of a geographical factoid makes said factoid particularly relevant (unless we’re talking about navigation).
David Brooks (not that one)
Years ago, some Afro-centric ass (a Democrat, for sure) complained that we care so little about Africa, it’s in the back of the atlas.
Clearly she didn’t bother with fact-checking. New Zealand is in the back of every atlas I ever had, although I understand the poles occupy the place of dishonor in some.
I forget why this is relevant.
Adam Lang
@mclaren:
A sadly common attitude, but it’s still the equivalent of someone who comes to a party, gets drunk, and spends the entire time trash-talking the host’s home.
In other words, perhaps you can imagine how someone might find it offensive when you call the place they live in and love a cesspool? I wouldn’t go back to suburbia for all the tea in China, but although I will certainly call it unsustainable (since it objectively is), I wouldn’t insult it in terms that call into question the sanity and intelligence of the people who choose to live there.
ornery curmudgeon
@mclaren: “Manhattan is a toilet bowl, a cesspool made of concrete, and the very definition of “unlivable.”
I much want to find something you say that I can agree with, mclaren … you’re just a negative spew machine but I’m going to keep trying.
Cris
@mclaren: unlivable
eponymous
For those interested in high-density living, check out the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
With regards to the Peters Projection – yes, it does a decent job of depicting the size (area) of landmasses, but it creates other distortions (as all maps do). A Mercator Projection was designed/created to preserve accurate directions at the expense of distorting other cartographic concerns (such as the shape and size of landmasses). As such, it is inappropriate projection if you want to convey the correct shape or size of landmasses.
The Robinson Projection does a decent job of minimizing the distortions for the four basic cartographic concerns – distance, direction, shape, and area (size) – and why you see it often used in thematic maps (another is the Winkel Tripel Projection which is used by National Geographic, among others).
Keenan
@Yutsano: While Montanans are simply dense.
The Ghost of Yogi Berra...wait!
@mclaren: And “nobody goes there anymore” for the obvious reasons.
ThresherK
Obligatory plug: This place does that kind of thing. Warning: You can spend a lot of time looking at the pictures there!
joe from Lowell
@mclaren:
Ah, that must be why it’s so crowded and expensive. Because nobody can, or wants to, live there.
E. D. Kain
@Stan: I put a (via) in there beneath the map. Certainly not an original work.
SaminMpls
Ugh.
Okay, so:
1) Americans don’t care about Africa unless Angelina Jolie or Bono are involved.
2) Mercator maps suck.
Getting rid of the latter does what to help the former?
Is there something about using the AIPAC model that people don’t get?