Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above shows the huge difference in the size of the UK vs Japan’s highspeed rail networks in 1963 compared to 2025.
Given the UK’s invented passenger railways it seems even more strange. So why is the UK network’s so small compared to Japan’s?
This is shown alongside the approximate lifetime of Philo of Byzantium, who documented them and was alive when they all existed simultaneously.
And at the bottom you can see the relative height of each of them.
Dates in bold green indicate construction, while dates in dark red indicate destruction.
Here’s more about them:
You can see each map in more detail below, followed by an explanation.
Here’s a full explanation from Milos:
In many areas Germans made up to 95% of the population. So what happened?
To start in 1914 there was not Polish state and the Polish people were split between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
For more on that process see:
The map was made by Helen McKenzie who has her own website here and has an online shop here.
Now if you aren’t from the UK, what is Nando’s?
The map above shows the wealthiest person on each continent, or at least those who disclose their wealth.
It’s a little crazy to me that the wealthiest person in Australia (population: 27 million; $1.88T GDP) is worth 3x more than the wealthiest person in Africa (1.5 billion; $2.82T GDP).
Here’s a list I compiled awhile ago of the top 200 billionaires in the world from the Forbes World Billionaires List for 2024. (note as share prices move so do net worth numbers, which is why they differ from the above)
However, before we get to that here’s what the author had to say about their map:
The map above shows what the English idiom, “It’s all Greek To Me” (something is completely unintelligible or impossible to understand) is in other European languages.
For example, in Greece it translates to: “It’s Chinese to me”. Other alternatives include Hebrew, Spanish Villages and railway stations?
See below for a list by language (from Omniglot the source for this map) including some that didn’t make it onto the map:
