HN eschews pop culture references, the down voters are almost certain to include those that are aware of US sitcoms.

This happens more frequently then one imagines. Quite a few things fail to start from scratch and instead rely on compounded errors over time. Projections, budgets, etc., are sometimes based on stale information.

Always picture it larger, but it's roughly the size of France. Makes you wonder about logistical challenges there.

No - only till the second last one dies.

A bunch of countries are suspected of undercounting their population because so many people are living "off the grid" or deliberately overcounting to get more funding. Probably some of the cases are real and some are just conspiracy theories.

Imagine how much of published science is statistically significant only due to clerical errors and mistakes in calculation...

(See e.g. The misreporting of statistical results in psychology journals; Bakker, Wicherts; Behaviour Research Methods; 2011.)

Something about eyeballs and all bugs being shallow...

I actually measured the size of (parts of) Yemen on maps a week or two ago, trying to figure out the population density of the Houthi-controlled areas, which contain the majority (~70-80%, hard to say exactly as the population distribution has been changing rapidly in the past decade) of Yemen's population in about 1/3 of it's land.

Although I do hope too that people don't lose their sense of meaning and curiosity too much, it's worth keeping in mind that this article was published in 2024 which was a very different world from now. Curiosity requires energy, and it'll be hard for a creature relying on energy for survival to justify using their own energy for some activity when there's a more energy-efficient way to reach a specific goal. But just like going to the gym makes your body healthier despite the fact that this requires energy, thinking on your own will be increasingly important for maintaining a healthy mind and the sense of self.

Ah I'm glad. That's much better than the solution I had in mind of using the sand from the desert to expand the land into the sea to add extra 100k km of land area, to hide all this embarrassment under the rug.

This is why you read the code, not the documentation.

A quick lazy calculation (including adding in Antartica) the countries totals came up ~2,000,000km2 short. I don't care enough to dive deeper, but if no one is claiming that land I'll happily take it.

Ye man, this is crazy

I think a more important question is whether Yemen still exists as as single coherent political entity with the same borders as seen on ANY of those maps, which given the present situation, it clearly does not.

edit: map here https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...

and here: https://yemen.liveuamap.com/

Historically, borders in inhospitable regions where the government cannot project power used to be vague.

Early Medieval European kingdoms usually had border forests, sometimes quite deep (50-100 km), where one end of the forest was definitely Bohemian and the other end definitely Saxon or Austrian, but the exact demarcation within it bothered no one.

There were only two kinds of people crossing them: invading armies and long-distance traders on very few walkable paths. The latter would be taxed prior to entering the city markets, not on the border. The former would be interested in sieging strongholds deeper in the enemy territory, not in taking a slice of wooded territory on the border.

This reminds me of what Deming used to say: there is no correct value for any measurement, there are only the outcomes of methods chosen to measure something.

Great article. I wonder if the sum of the land areas of all countries on earth matches the global size of emerged land? Or are there other similar errors?

Human civilisation is built on such lies ;)

I suppose it's not worth checking whether Google maps areas are measured using spherical geometry?

I delved into

delved

It's an AI hallucination in slow motion.

This is such a nice article!