Map Sizes Proving I Have No Sense Of Scale
Maps, by their very nature, are big fat liars. Despite what the Flat-Earthers would have you believe, the world is indeed spherical, meaning any 2-D attempt to depict it has to be a distortion. One of the worst of these distortions is the famous Mercator projection, which makes Greenland look like Africa, despite it being a whopping 14 and half times smaller.
If you're looking for more accurate world maps, James Talmage and Damon Maneice's The True Size Of app has you covered. By dragging the outlines of countries and continents across the Mercator projection, you get to see what it would be like if, say, Florida was as exaggerated a peninsula as Sweden and Norway, or if Canada got taken down a peg and didn't benefit from its exaggerated, Mercator-enhanced form. The true size of Africa is perhaps the most shocking revelation: the Mercator projection dwarfs it, but it is actually large enough to contain both the United States and Australia. The slideshow below features some of the most surprising and eye-opening examples of what the app can reveal.
