Worldmapper

[nkycarbon]

The worldmapper site may be interesting to some of you. They have "a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest"

http://www.worldmapper.org/

The "Muslim" and "Christian" maps are fairly interesting to look at side by side but they have many others.

[NaruShadow]

Hmm...wow this is really interesting. Helpful for school and such too.

[SekoETC]

It doesn't have rapes. Maybe because so many go unreported or no one keeps track of them in certain countries, it would be hard to make statistics.

[*Wiro]

So basically fat countries have a lot of a certain thing, right?

[Piscator]

Alcohol consumption.

Look how Europe bulges.

[*Wiro]

Lol, and Japan with their sake.

[Miri]

Just becouse sake's so weak. They're dead after one shot of real vodka, though

Just look at Rusia - they don't need an amount, they have quality

[formerly known as hf]

I'm trying to get some more detail about the algorithm used for the maps, but there seems to be a basic problem.

The values, as with alcohol consumption above, are based upon consumption per capita. The best way to generate a value which can be compared across countries. However, to generate the above maps, a base is needed. It's not always clear if the algorithm works with land-area map (i.e: the standard world map we all know) or the population map ( http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=2 ).

For demographic data, such as alcohol consumption, I would assume the base map would be the population map. In which case, Russia has a high level of alcohol consumption, as it's size is much larger above than in the pop. map.

If, for ease of comprehension, they've use the land area as a base map (which would make more sense for people less familiar with cartography, as they will compare it with the well-known world map), then the above map indicates a low level of alcohol consumption for Russia, as it's smaller than the land area map.

Basically, without knowing which map has been used as a base to generate the output, all these maps are completely useless at best, and potentially misleading at worst.

That being said, it's a nice approach to cartography that I really like. it does away with the abstract notion of Euclidean space as somehow universal and starts to offer alternative cartography politics. But, without clear explanation, such an endeavour produces confusing and difficult to interpret results.

[Piscator]

I assumed the map was based on the total alcohol consumtion in the respective country. (Which is basically the same as per capita consumption applied to the population map.) It would be absolutely pointless to use per capita values to generate those maps, regardless whether alcohol consumption, suicide rates or export values are concerned.

You're right though, if you don't know which data is used to generate the maps, they don't have much informative value.

[formerly known as hf]

Well, it would be pointless to simply go by alcohol consumption. Countries have varying populations, so larger countries will look like they have greater consumption simply by virtue of having more people - all that base consumptiopn value would do, would be to distort the map by population size. Per capita data is the easiest way of generating figures that are comparable across countries, regardless of their size.

That being said, per capita values applied to a standard land area map or absolute consumption value to a population map would generate pretty similar maps.