How would you eliminate almost half the planet by subtracting just 5% from it? This map shows you how: delete the countries that constitute the bottom 5% of global GDP contributors, and you scrap almost 3 billion people from the equation. Those people mainly live in Africa and South East Asia, as demonstrated by the disappearance of those areas beneath the waves.

This map was first shown on the political website FiveThirtyEight (”Politics done right”), in reaction to an argument that climate change would affect global GDP by “only” 5% over the next 100 years. Quite rightly, the point was raised that a reduction in potential GDP might not be an adequate measure of the human impact of such society-shattering change.

As per-capita GDP varies across the world’s countries by a factor of 800 (or 2,000 if you count Zimbabwe), this is a rather cynical (or at least cold-hearted) way of measuring the worth of human lives, making the average Rwandan life hundreds of times less important than that of the average Luxembourger.

To demonstrate the impact of a reduction of global GDP by a mere 5%, FiveThirtyEight erased the countries constituting the bottom 5% of global GDP (IMF estimates for 2008), in reverse order of magnitude:

Zimbabwe (1), Burundi, DR Congo, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Malawi, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Niger, Afghanistan, Togo, Guinea, Uganda, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Nepal, Myanmar (Burma), Rwanda, Mozambique, East Timor, the Gambia (2), Bangladesh, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Lesotho, Ghana, Haiti, Tajikistan, the Comoros, Cambodia, Laos, Benin, Kenya, Chad, the Solomon Islands, Kyrgyzstan, India (3), Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Mauritania, Pakistan, Senegal, Sao Tome and Principe, Ivory Coast, Zambia, the Yemen, Cameroon, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Nigeria (4), Guyana, the Sudan, Bolivia, Moldova, Honduras, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Bhutan, Egypt (5), Vanuatu, Tonga, Paraguay, Morocco, Syria, Swaziland, Samoa, Guatemala, Georgia, the Congo, Iraq, Armenia, Jordan, Cape Verde, the Maldives, Fiji and Namibia (6).

All in all 81 countries (almost half of the 192 UN member states), representing nearly 2.9 billion people (about 43%) of the world population. But still, a mere 5% of world GDP…

Thanks to Jackson Wagner for providing me with this link to the FiveThirtyEight page.

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(1) 0.02% of global GDP, or $55 p.p.

(2) the list of countries up til now represents only 0.27% of global GDP.

(3) apparently constitutes only 2% of global GDP, surprisingly

(4) the list of countries up til now represents 3.6% of global GDP.

(5) the list of countries up til now represents 4.4% of global GDP.

(6) these countries together constitute 4.99997% of global GDP.

The Bir Tawil Triangle is a desert of sand and rocks on the border between Egypt and the Sudan. It is also officially the most undesired territory in the world. Bir Tawil is the only piece of land on Earth (*) that is not claimed by any country – least of all by its neighbours. For either of them to claim the Bir Tawil Triangle would be to relinquish their claim to the Hala’ib Triangle. And while Hala’ib is also mainly rock and sand, it is not only ten times larger than Bir Tawil, but also adjacent to the Red Sea - so rather more interesting.

This bizarre situation started out with what is supposed to be the simplest of borders: a straight line. By the Condominium Treaty of 1899, the British drew the line between Egypt and what was then still known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan at the 22nd parallel north, resulting in a straight-line border of about 1,240 km (770 miles) from Libya to the Red Sea.

Straight-line borders are not uncommon in the sparsely populated Sahara desert, from Egypt all the way to Mauritania. But the border between Egypt and the Sudan apparently proved a bit too straight. In 1902, the Brits amended it in three places. A small area north of where the Nile crosses the border was handed over to Sudanese control on account of the local villages being more accessible from the south. The Wadi Halfa Salient is still Sudanese, but claimed by the Egyptians, who solved most of the problem by submerging all of the villages in the salient in Lake Nasser after the construction of the Aswan Dam.

The Bir Tawil Triangle, east of the Wadi Halfa Salient and south of the 22nd parallel, was handed over to Egypt because a tribe on the Egyptian side of the border used the area as grazing lands (Bir Tawil apparently means ‘water well’). Conversely, the Halaib Triangle, north of the 22nd parallel but touching Bir Tawil, went to Sudan because the locally dominant tribes were based in the Sudan.

Actually, Bir Tawil is less of a Triangle than a Trapezoid, its northern edge (the 22nd parallel) 95 km long and its southern edge, around 30 km to the south, 46 km long. Its total area is just over 2,000 km². The Hala’ib Triangle is about 20,500 km² in size.

De iure, the conflict between Egypt and the Sudan over Hala’ib and Bir Tawil is still unresolved, although Egypt has asserted itself as the de facto administrator of the larger of both areas in the 1990s. I have been unable to ascertain whether either country exerts any practical control over Bir Tawil, leaving open the exciting possibility that it is indeed the only officially ungoverned territory on Earth.

A rug, to quote The Big Lebowski, can really tie a room together. The Dude (or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) opted for a pretty run-of-the-mill carpet – a classic Persian or Oriental design, if I recall correctly.

Here is an example of an exciting subgenre that is sure to be a conversation piece at your next cocktail party. Or after-bowling get-together. The Afghan War Rug is a modern reinterpretation of an age-old art. Where the regular oriental carpet has an abstract design, these rugs are figurative, including tanks, guns and other weapons, and usually show a map of Afghanistan. They also deal with a very specific subject matter – the troubled recent history of Afghanistan.

Examples include rugs celebrating the defeat of the Soviets, who withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, to this one. It is similar to the Soviet Exodus mats (note the column of tanks heading north). However, it is dated to the year 2002.

Some of the lettering is in Latin script, the top text is in Farsi, apparently reading “The army of al-Qaeda is leaving Afghanistan”. According to the website www.warrug.com, which specialises in selling modern carpetry of this type, this rug “is a transitional piece between the Soviet story rugs and the War on Terrorism rugs (…) Until the US eliminated the Taliban regime, this style of rug was woven by refugees in Pakistan. After we drove al-Qaeda and the Taliban back to the age of the Cave Man, these weavers were able to return to their native homes and produce these rugs around Mazar I’Sharif and Sherberghan.”

An interesting afterthought: in weaving recent history into mats, these Afghan artisans are unwittingly imitating the tapestry-as-news school of carpetry that had its most famous early example in the Bayeux Tapestry, which detailed William the Conqueror’s usurpation of the English throne.

Irrespective of whether it’s entirely mythical or merely missing, the ‘lost’ island of Atlantis is one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in history. The oldest source for the stories of a once mighty land now vanished beneath the waves are two of Plato’s Dialogues (4th century BC). But while Timaeus and Critias place Atlantis beyond “the Pillars of Hercules” (i.e. the Strait of Gibraltar) in the Ocean that still bears its name, evidence of Atlantis has been proposed and presumed in places as far apart as Sardinia, Antarctica, Cuba and Indonesia.

These days, most serious scientists prefer one theory over all others; that the drowning of Atlantis is a folk memory of a catastrophic volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (present-day Santorini) some time around 1600 BC that caused a tsunami, wiping out the Minoan civilisation. Many pre-modern scientists held to Plato’s original thesis, that Atlantis was once lapped by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. One of them was Athanasius Kircher, who produced this map in his book Mundus Subterraneus (’The Underground World’, ca. 1665).

A biography published in 2004 dubbed Kircher (1601-1680) was titled The Last Man to Know Everything, and the German Jesuit’s interests and expertise were certainly wide and deep enough to rival Leonardo Da Vinci’s. Both would be close contenders for the title of Ultimate Renaissance Man. Kircher wrote 40 books, on subjects as diverse as geology, music theory, Coptic grammar and magnetism (typically for his syncretic style, both of the gravitational and amorous kind).

Like Da Vinci, Kircher was fascinated by the invention and perfection of mechanical contraptions. He designed what has been described as the world’s first megaphone, perfected a magnetic clock and invented a cat piano, whereby a pin would pierce the tails of the animals which would then yowl at specific pitches (it’s not clear whether Kircher ever realised this scheme, although Monty Python in one of their sketches adapted the idea to a ‘mouse organ’). He is also credited with inventing the magic lantern.

That Kircher’s international fame was eclipsed by Rationalism later in his life may be understood from some of his more outlandish theories. Although still considered one of the founding fathers of Egyptology, he believed that Egyptian was so ancient that it must have been the language of Adam and Eve. Centuries before the hieroglyphs were deciphered, Kircher convinced himself that he had cracked the code, producing volumes of nonsense translations. An equally early pioneer of Sinology, Kircher thought the Chinese descended from Ham, and Confucius identical to Moses. In Arca Noë, he discussed the logistics – including the feeding schedules – of Noah’s Ark voyage.

Mundus Subterraneus is a blend of vision and error typical of Kircher. He correctly postulates “fires” raging inside the earth, but links the tides to the interaction with an underground ocean. Included in the work is this map of Atlantis, placing the lost island (or rather mini-continent) between Spain and America. For some reason, the map is oriented upside down, with the south on top. The main island of Atlantis is accompanied by two smaller, unnamed ones to its right (west).

Is anyone familiar enough with Latin to hazard a translation of the text on this page?

Many thanks to Barry Ruderman for sending in this map. A larger-scale picture can be seen here on Rare Maps, the website of Mr Ruderman’s antique map dealership. The website has a special section detailing many other antique print curiosities, both cartographic and otherwise.

How long does it take to travel from London to elsewhere? The answer is provided by this map, showing a set of expanding circles centered on the British capital, each bigger one delineating two extra hours of travel time.

The familiar shape of the world is morphed into grotesque, contorted shapes as these isotemporal lines replace the usual lines of longitude and latitude for frame of reference. Not surprisingly, as different modes of transport must have been taken into account: fast transatlantic jet to New York, slower ground-based transport (car or train) to Penzance. This makes the difference in travel time to both cities from London less than 2.5 hours, while the actual distance between both is a formidable 3,264 miles (5,253 km).

This map predates the opening of the Eurotunnel, which has allowed faster connections between London and Paris (about 2 hours) than shown on this map. Travel time distances from London are:

Under 2 hours

• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Southampton

Under 4 hours

• Norwich
• Manchester
• Amsterdam
• Glasgow
• Edinburgh
• Paris
• Dublin
• Dusseldorf
• Swansea
• Hull
• Milan
• Aberdeen

Under 6 hours

• Newcastle
• Madrid
• Inverness
• Burnley
• Holyhead
• Fishguard

Under 8 hours

• Penzance
• Workington
• Pwllheli

Under 10 hours

• New York
• Stranraer
• Montreal

Many thanks to blogfok for sending in this map, found here on Erik Laakso’s website.

Fixing her regional loyalty in indelible ink on skin, Julia had a map of Portland, ME tattooed on her shoulder. A comparison with the more conventional map on the right indicates that her tat clearly shows the Portland peninsula, the Fore River, Back Cove and surrounding coastline, plus a large part of the road network connecting Maine’s biggest city to its hinterland.

None of the places on her map are named, though. The tat might be not just an overt symbol of regional fealty, but also a covert signal to help identify similarly loyalist Portlanders – as they would be most inclined to recognise a blind map of the area. Others might mistake the map for a representation of the Arabian Peninsula.

In a national context, the city of Portland is usually mentioned in the same breath with its state, making it sound as if the city’s called Portlandmaine. This is done to distinguish it from Portland, Oregon. A distinction not without its practical consequences, I once found out, as the hotel room I had booked online turned out to be in Portland, OR while I was headed for Portland, ME. Some fun facts about the town once dubbed Forest City:

• Maine and Oregon don’t have exclusive rights to the name; there are at least 16 other places in the US called Portland; as a toponym, the name refers back to the Isle of Portland in the UK.
• The Isle of Portland is the southernmost part of the county of Dorset, connected to the mainland via Chesil Beach. Its excellent natural harbour has been in use since before the Romans (who might or might not have called it Vindelis), its limestone was quarried for Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The novelist Thomas Hardy called it The Gibraltar of the North, for its similarity in physical geography.
• The southernmost point of Jamaica is also called Portland Point.
• In the original Portland, a taboo rests on mentioning rabbits. Polite conversation generally steers clear of the subject, but if unavoidable, they are called underground mutton. The bunnies (another euphemism) were feared by quarrymen, as they would (literally) undermine the stability of their workplaces.
• With a population of only 65,000, Portland is the biggest city in Maine. Its namesake in Oregon, on the other side of the country, was actually named after it. The Oregoners obviously were desparate for East Coast respectability; an alternative suggestion would have made the city’s name Boston, Oregon.
• The first settlement of the Portland, ME area was in 1623 by Christopher Levett, who called it York, after his hometown. This first “New York” of the New World was lost without a trace; the name survives in York County, adjacent to Cumberland County, which contains Portland. The first permanent settlement was called Casco (1633), later renamed Falmouth (1658), an expansion of which was to be called Portland (1786).
• The city’s motto Resurgam (Latin for “I will rise again”) refers to the rebuilding of the city after no less than four fires that devastated the city, one of which was the Great Fire of 1866, started on Independence Day (July 4), most likely by a firecracker. Killing only two but destroying 1,800 buildings, the fire rendered almost 10,000 people homeless. It was the greatest fire ever in America until the Great Chicago Fire (1871).
• Portland was ranked #1 in Forbes’s Most Livable Cities index for the year 2009.

This is not the first example on this blog of someone exhibiting the affection for their hometown by a map tattooed on their body. Here is an arresting map of Hanover: #126.

Many thanks to Christian McNeil for sending in this map, found here at the Strange Maine blog. As the entry shows, Julia not only has a map of Portland on her right shoulder, but also a map of Maine on her right leg.

If there were only 100 people in Ireland, 55 of them would be speaking only English, 39 of them would be speaking mainly English, and occasionally Irish, 2 of them would be speaking mainly Irish and one would be speaking Polish. Three would be speaking other languages.

Michal Boleslav Mechura collected these and other data from the Irish Census 2006, and crafted them into a few interesting cartograms.

Many thanks to him for sending in this map. Visit his website here for more, reflecting immigration, religion and residence intrapolated (if that’s the right word) from Republic of Ireland’s 4.24 million actual residents (Census 2006) to only 100 representative ones.

Portugal, on the southwestern periphery of the European continent, is a medium-sized EU member state. Its population clocks in at 11th place out of 27 (10.59 million, in between Belgium’s 10.66 million [10] and the Czech Republic with 10.40 million [12]). Size-wise, it’s a bit further down the list: 13th (at 92.391 km2, between Hungary [12] at 93.030 km2 and Austria [14] at 83.871 km2).

Yet Portugal is loath to think of itself as a small country. Or at least it was, before its overseas empire collapsed. Built up over centuries of exploration, trade and colonisation, the Portuguese Empire once spanned four continents. The jewel in its crown was Brazil, but Portugal lost control over its South American colony in 1822.

By mid-20th century, Portugal still held on to Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome & Principe, Angola, Mozambique, Macao, East Timor and its Indian possessions (Goa, Daman and Diu – three smallish footholds somewhat grandiosely labeled “Estado da India”).

As the legend to this map indicates, all these territories together added up to an area larger than (Continental) Spain, France, the UK (mislabeled “Inglaterra”), Italy and Germany put together, explaining why, as the title claims, Portugal não é um país pequeno. If that sounds a bit defensive and self-justifying, that’s no coincidence.

In the early 1970s, Portugal languished under a dictatorship determined to hold on to the vestiges of its former colonial glory. The increasingly costly and impopular wars against freedom fighters in Portuguese Africa eventually led to the overthrow of the regime, in a virtually bloodless military coup in April 1974, the so-called Revolução dos Cravos. This Carnation Revolution would lead to a swift liquidation of Portugal’s overseas assets and ultimately to democracy within Portugal. 

Portugal’s African possessions were all granted independence. Indonesia took advantage of the turmoil “back home” to take over East Timor (India had forcibly annexed Goa etcetera in 1961). Only Macao remained in Portuguese hands, until 1999, when mirrorring Hong Kong’s reversion in 1997, it was reintegrated into China. The Azores and Madeira, ethnically and geographically closest to the mother country, are still part of Portugal.

This map was sent in by Nuno D. Alves, who studied it in history class, when studying the pre-revolutionary dictatorship. “It is a propaganda map, suggesting that our country was important. Portugal’s orientation towards its colonies, away from Europe, “was used to justify the isolationism of the regime, and its neutrality in World War II (…) [The map] shows the Portuguese colonies that remained by that time superimposed on a map of Europe, going on to compare surface size with the main European countries. All in all very silly.”

Original context of the map here, at the Portuguese National Library.

PS – this map is reminiscent of another size comparison map posted earlier on this blog (#35).

The mean centre of US population is “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the US would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census”, in the definition of the US Census Bureau itself. 

That bureau has been holding censuses every decade since 1790; these censuses form the backdrop for this string of mean centres of population in the US. The map shows an ever westward shift of that centre, obviously in parallel with the westward expansion of the US and its citizenry. The mean centre of population of the US has shifted thusly:

• 1790: 23 miles east of Baltimore (MD)
• 1800: 18 miles west of Baltimore (MD)
• 1810: 40 miles northwest by west of Washington, DC
• 1820: 16 miles east of Moorefield (VA, now WV)
• 1830: 19 miles west-southwest of Moorefield (VA, now WV)
• 1840: 16 miles south of Clarksburg (VA, now WV)
• 1850: 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg (VA, now WV)
• 1860: 20 miles south by east of Chillcothe (OH)
• 1870: 48 miles east by north of Cincinnati (OH)
• 1880: 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati (OH)
• 1890: 20 miles east of Columbus (IN)*
• 1900: 6 miles southeast of Columbus (IN)*
• 1910: in the city of Bloomington (IN)
• 1920: 8 miles south-southeast of Spencer (IN)
• 1930: 3 miles northeast of Linton (IN)
• 1940: 2 miles southeast by east of Carlisle (IN)
• 1950: 8 miles north-northwest of Olney (IN)
• 1950: 3 miles northeast of Louisville (IL)**
• 1960: 6-1/2 miles northwest of Centralia (IL)
• 1970: 5 miles east-southeast of Mascoutah (IL)
• 1980: 1/4 mile west of DeSoto (MO)
• 1990: 10 miles southeast of Steelville (MO)
• 2000: 3 miles east of Edgar Springs (MO)

This list refers to the nearest city, which might be in a different state than the mean centre itself. For a more complete listing, including precise sets of decimal coordinates, please see this Wikipedia article. 

Some mean centre trivia:

• The very first census’ mean centre was near Chestertown in Maryland – very close to the nation’s capital (the location of which was chosen exactly for its centrality). Westward expansion has made Washington DC increasingly eccentric, not just in a literal, geographic sense, but also by the steady eastward “mean streak” of its statistical population centre, depicted here.
• The most appropriate mean centre surely was the one near the very aptly named town of Centralia, Illinois (1960).
• The addition of Hawaii and Alaska to the Union (in 1959) didn’t cause as much of a shift as one might expect : it moved the mean centre only two miles south and ten miles west (1960).
• Interestingly, the mean centre of the European Union has moved in the opposite direction, as the EU has continued to expand into Eastern Europe (if anyone knows of nice maps representing that eastward drift – they are welcome.)

Many thanks to Kees Huyser for alerting me to this map, illustrating the aforementioned Wikipedia article.

* Corrected Columbus, OH to Columbus, IN (thanks to all who pointed out the error).

** Please note that the double mention of the 1950 census (with a different result) reflects one and the same set of data, calculated according to an earlier method and the current one, respectively.

At last, the worlds of cartography, vexillology and population statistics meet! This map was inspired by earlier maps of the US, with its states renamed for countries with a similar GDP (see posts #131 and #135).

It shows each US state covered by the flag of a country with a population of comparable size. This map was made by James Richards, who also sent in a list of the pairs of US states and flags of corresponding countries. But I agree with him that “unlabeled, it’s a fun test of your knowledge of nations, can you guess them all?”

Update: the full list is posted as provided to me by Mr Richards in comment #36.