Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above shows the world’s military camouflages. It’s based on the country’s primary camo and does not taken into account different branches of the military in each country. Moreover, the original map creators are aware that there are a few inaccuracies and out-of-date designs included.
I’ve seen a lot of bad maps in my time, but the one above has to be among the worst. Vexillology or flag maps can be a beautiful thing when done right. The map above, on the other hand, is hilarious in its randomness.
The cartogram above is an updated version of this one from 10 years ago. Since that time a few things have changed.
The map above shows the relative size of the world’s 26 largest islands. Combined they cover 7.7 million square km (roughly the size of Australia) and have 540 million people living on them (behind only China and India).
If you’re curious to learn a bit more about them, below you can find their names, what country (or countries) they belong to, their areas and the population of each island (data from Wikipedia):
While I’m sure you know the Pacific Ocean is big, I’d say there’s a good chance you hadn’t realized how big, until you look at the map above. As difficult as it may be to believe, the Pacific Ocean is larger than the landmass of every single continent and island combined.
In numbers:
Here’s the last post for awhile about flag colours. Previous posts have looked at The Shade of Red Each Country Has On Its Flag and Countries Whose Flags Contain Red and/or Blue. The map above looks at what happens when you blend all the colours from each country’s flag proportionally.
Somewhat surprisingly there is a relatively large variety of colours, given that red and blue so often appear on flags.
Below you can see what happens when you do the same thing for individual US state flags:
As we saw in a previous post, the vast majority of the world’s countries have at least some red in their flag. The next most popular colour is blue, with only a handful of countries having neither colour in their flag.
The following countries have neither red or blue, but do all have green:
The map above simply shows the shade of red that appears on each country’s flag, assuming of course it has red on it. The data comes from here, which shows that 148 out of 192 countries (77%) have some red in their flags.
The reddest flags are:
The map above shows all countries whose capital was not their largest city, based on population, in 2010. This explains why South Sudan does not appear as a separate country, however if it did it would not be among the countries included (Juba is both the capital and largest city of South Sudan).
Here are a few of the more interesting facts about these countries and cities: