Populations

The map at right (and click on it for a larger view) is sold by ODT; I’m not sure who actually created it. If you look at it closely, you’ll see all the countries look a mite odd. What they’ve done is to keep the boundaries of all the countries in at least roughly the right place, but they’ve changed the area of each country to correspond to its population. So some physically large countries (say, Greenland) are very small on this map because they have very small populations; likewise some physically small countries (like Japan) appear to be much larger because their populatiosn are large.

There were several surprises on this map for me. One was Russia, which really shouldn’t have surprised me, as I know its population really isn’t that large. And then there’s southeast Asia in general — yikes!

Study this thing, and I promise you’ll have some sobering moments…