Fantasy League U.S. presidential elections

Click to enlarge. Source Philip Kearney Cartography.

Could Bill Clinton have beaten Donald Trump?  Could Ronald Reagan have beaten Barack Obama?  Who would have won if Bill Clinton had somehow been able to run against Hillary Clinton.  George H.W. Bush, the elder, against George W. Bush, the younger?

A cartographer-blogger named Philip Kearney calculated hypothetical results, based on the percentage of the popular vote each candidate won in each state the first time they ran.  The answers to the questions are “no,” “no,” “Hillary” and “Bush 41.”

Why we misjudge the size of nations

The geography of marriage

About 50 percent of Americans are married, 31 percent are single (never married), 11 percent are divorced, 2 percent are separated and 6 percent are widows or widowers.  But as the Flowing Data maps above and below show, married, single and divorced Americans are not distributed evenly across the country.

State data maps you’ve never seen before

Click on 19 Maps That Will Blow Your Mind by FlowingData.

Africa is bigger than most Americans realize

Double click to enlarge.

When I learned geography in school, our maps for the Mercator projection, in which the lines of longitude are the same distance apart, all the way from the North and South Poles to the Equator.  This makes Greenland look larger than Africa, and islands in the Canadian north seem larger than important South American countries.

I knew this wasn’t so, but this map helps me to grasp just low large the continent of Africa is.  Africa is not all one country.  It is made up of many nations that are at least as diverse as Europe, even if you only look at the countries south of the Sahara.  I don’t know much about Africa, but I do know that much.

Washington Post maps that explain the world

Max Fisher of the Washington Post has compiled 40 interesting maps that do throw a lot of light on what’s going on in the world.   I linked to some of them in my posts on country comparisons of religion and IQ and racism and diversity.

You can click on 40 maps to see them all, starting with a geopolitical map of world powers as of 200 A.D. and ending with an interactive time-lapse map of the earth as seen from space over 12 months.

Many of the maps have links to accompanying Washington Post article.  If the video link above doesn’t work, you should be able to see the same video on the 40 maps link.

Rearranging the map

If the size of countries matched their populations, the Chinese, the world’s most numerous people, would occupy the territory of Russia, the world’s largest country in area.  The Indians would occupy Canada, the Canadians would occupy Pakistan, the Pakistanis would occupy Australia, and the Australians would live in Spain.  North and South Koreans would relocate to southern Africa, but would still be neighbors.

Here is what the world would look like.

Double click to enlarge

The United States is one of the few countries whose relative size matches its population.  Others are Brazil, Ireland and Yemen.  Click on Rearranged World for details and commentary.