Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
If you’re not following @sadtopographies on Instagram, you should. The account shows the places with saddest and most depressing names on earth.
Examples include everything from Cape Disappointment to Point No Point to Sad Road. And while Americans and Australians are usually thought to have sunny dispositions they also have a lot of unfortunate place names.
21 of our favourites are included below:
Kiribati is one of those countries you never hear anything about yet has some very unique and interesting geographic anomalies. These 3 maps created by reddit user evening_raga show a few facts about this overlooked part of the world.
The map above shows the relative position of major European cities if they were suddenly moved to Texas. Depending on your point of view, it either shows that Texas is really big or Europe is very small.
With the New Horizons probe putting Pluto back in the news, just how big is it?
The map above shows a rather surprising and counterintuitive fact, Europe’s population is not only relatively further north than America’s, but even further north than Canada’s!
Tourists and locals experience cities in strikingly different ways. For example, in London most tourists will visit Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oxford Street, etc. but will probably not end up visiting East Croydon, Hendon, Dagenham or any of the other parts of London outside of Zone 1.
Conversely, Londoners can go years without ever visiting the tourist traps of central London. To see just how different these two worlds are, have a look at the map of London above based on where people take photos.
The map above shows the names of Arabic speaking countries in Arabic with romanizations to help those who don’t actually speak Arabic. Interestingly, most are quite different from the English name for the country.
Reddit user Pinuzzo, who created the map, explains that:
For example: