The map about Eurovision titled, “532 From Sliceland to Baku: Extreme Geographics of Eurovision 2012” is a good one. The first thing that made me chuckle is the title. Instead of “extreme sports” they say “extreme geographics.” I like the way the writer has a way of writing a light, fun piece about the map.
The map is interesting, too. Europe used to be so small. Now the European Union is welcoming a lot of new countries into the union. This map of the European Union includes both the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The south eastern part of the map is looking a lot like the old Ottoman Empire. It’s great that the map is different because of a music contest instead of imperial conquests.
Map 131 is titled “US States Renamed for Countries with Similar GDPs.” It is such an unusual map. I like the map because it is unique and because just by looking at the map you can learn a lot about the world. The map does not weight either the states or the countries with their population numbers. Still it gives some very interesting information. For instance Connecticut is shown to have the same GDP as Greece. So I have to wonder when every night on the news we hear about ‘poor’ Greece, “How poor are they in that country really?”
Tennessee is named Saudi Arabia which is very interesting because I always think of Saudi Arabia as being wildly rich. They must not have a big population. Tennessee is number 13 in the blog post which lists the states’ rankings. Saudi Arabia is ranked number 25 in the world with a GDP of $222 billion.
The top state is California (#1) which ranks the same as France. France in the world rankings is number 8.
Second is Texas. The author says that Texas has exactly half the amount of GDP as California. In the world rankings Texas is compared with Canada (#10 in world ranking) which has a $1,08 trillion GDP.
The state ranking third is Florida which is compared to number thirteen in the world’s ranking, South Korea. South Korea’s GDP is reported to be $786 billion.
Great blog, I’m glad to know about Big Think and the Strange Maps Blog.
Reference
Jacob, F. Strange Maps. Big Think. Blog. n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. Retrieved from
<http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps>.
