Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
Earlier this week reddit user nerkuras challenged r/Europe to Draw a map of Europe from memory only.
Several American users took on the challenge and created the hilariously bad maps you can see here. However, there’s not one but two unexpected twists to the story, revealed in the maps below:
The map above shows the probability of a white Christmas, defined as having snow on the ground on December 25th, across Europe. The map was created by Finish reddit user Haayoaie who states that:
The European Union’s (EU) 28 member states vary enormously in population. From tiny Malta with just 425,000 people to Germany with 81 million. But what if they all had the same population? How would the map look?
The Platypus is native to Australia, and was not encountered by Europeans until as late as 1798. Yet despite their relatively recent discovery, there is no agreed upon etymology for their name across European languages, as you can see in the map above.
The map above shows the most common European surnames that have their origins as a specific type of occupation. Both Millers and Smiths are particularly popular.
The data is somewhat unscientific as it comes from Wikipedia, supplemented with data from reddit.
Nevertheless, there are a few interesting facts:
Why are there there so many immigrants in France & the UK, so many Irish in Portugal and Portuguese in Luxembourg, so many dashcams in Russia and so many cats everywhere?
Think immigration is too high in Europe? If so, do you know how many foreigners do you think live in your country? The numbers may be far lower than you think.
The map above shows the percentage of the foreign citizens (split between EU and non-EU nationals) living in many European countries. While the media loves to portray the continent as being overrun with foreigners, the truth is quite different.
Below are the percentage of foreign citizens by country, based off data from Eurostat:
The map above is elegant in its simplicity. It shows Great Britain and Ireland drawn from pubs. Each blue dot represents a single pub using data extracted from OpenStreetMap with the Matplotlib Basemap Toolkit.
Interestingly, if the same map had been drawn using the number of pubs from 1980 it would have looked quite different.
The map above shows how many young European adults (25-34) still live at home with their parents. Not surprisingly, there are large North-South and East-West divides. These can likely be explained for two reasons.