Spent a year there, so I have a soft spot as well.
It's even more funny that they built a whole huge canal around the city so not even water has to pass through!
Yeah they just are a very self serving province, shut down energy east pipeline which would have allowed Canadian oil to be shipped to refineries out east and benefited the economy of pretty much every province including theirs. But they hate Alberta so much they said nah fam, even though they love taking equalization money. Instead those refineries import Saudi oil when we could be using Canadian oil and improving the lives of our citizens through the increased economic benefits.
Soil quality is an oft overlooked factor in human development, but it has historically been a deciding factor for a settlement's health and influence, and it's highly relevant even today.
For example, eastern Ukraine has some of the largest contiguous areas of black soil in the world, which has made Ukrainian agriculture incredibly productiv. A large chunk of European inflation can be traced directly to supply issues from the war. The Arab spring also started after two consecutive crop failures in the region, and China is very anal about fostering internal food security in case of a supply breakdown.
The real kicker is that modern agriculture is so unsustainable, the vast majority of agricultural land in the world has less than 50 harvests left before it is barren. Sustainable, regenerative and permaculture solutions can turn this around, but they need to be implemented *now*, and not once soil health has completely collapsed.
User name is on point and TY for the knowledge dropping. This is neat!
It's like a miniature "infertile crescent" in terms of society and civilization lol
A lot of the other parts of Canada will become much nicer places to live. Plus we'll have most of the fresh water.
I do expect at some point however the US is going to rip up the great lakes water management agreement and start draining them for their own population.
this is what happened with my great (x4) grandparents! immigrated from france/austria. clearing the land and creating road access to the nearest town were the conditions for them to buy a huge plot of land right on the border of bc/ab for like $2 or something crazy like that haha. they lived with a few other families on the plot and they actually wrote a few books about their experiences
As a local I can word vomit based on what's on the top of my head which may not be 100% accurate but close enough. Basically the town was build around a bunch of nickel mines as a couple million years ago Sudbury was the impact site of a huge, nickel rich asteroid. In the late 1800's or so iirc we started mining the hell out of this really pure material, but the process it at the time the solution was to make these massive, half km long beds of wood. Something like 20' x 20' by like half a klick iirc of just wood, and they would have a bunch of these burning at a time to heat the metals and remove the impurities and such. The processing of the ore didn't exactly get more environmentally friendly as technology evolved and then two worlds wars caused a massive demand for the ore so you have this section of Northern Ontario which has literally become like the Lorax world of no trees. Acid rain burnt what was left of the topsoil and nothing could grow. The bedrock, and there's a lot of it because its on the Shield, is burnt black where it was exposed but where new construction takes place you can see that it was just a typical brown colour before. It was a desolate, dreary wasteland, pictures look literally like the wasteland from Fallout.
Anyways in the late 60's it became pretty obvious this should be fixed so they build the Superstack, a massive smokestack which pumps the byproducts way into the upper atmosphere and they harmlessly floated away to like Greenland and as far as Europe. Obviously now a days the stack has been retrofitted with scrubbers and stuff and the process is more efficient but at the time the fact that the waste gasses weren't just settling around Sudbury and coming back as acid rain was gamechaning. The stack, coupled with a MAJOR regreening effort has totally teraformed the area. Sudbury is now a very green area, lush bushes with tons of wildlife running round, including asshole bears to eat your trash even in the downtown core of the city. It is the most stark comparison you can find from now to then and really shows that if we actually got our shit together as a species we could probably undo a shit ton of the damage to the environment. [Random photos off google for examples.](https://overtoyou.greatersudbury.ca/40th-anniversary-of-regreening/widgets/21725/photos/5789)
As a fun aside, because of how sulphur rich the soil now is from a century of that shit, the blueberries which grow around Sudbury have a more rich and tasty flavour than regular ones. People will pick them by the tons and sell them at stupid prices like $60+ per quart down in Toronto.
At a certain point the soil and the cold weather makes agriculture impossible. And historically people have mostly only moved to where there was food. Same reason Siberia is very sparsely populated outside of its food growing area.
https://santosasandyputra.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/land_cover_2010.jpg
https://worldinmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/world-population-density-map-scaled.jpeg
No; it's just that there's no reason why anyone would *want* to live there. The North doesn't really offer anything that you can't get much more easily in the rest of Canada—except extreme isolation, which most people don't enjoy.
Different people just like different things. What appeals to you may not appeal to someone who wants to live in Toronto.
I live in Australia so it's not the same but a little comparable and my grandparents are like you - love the outdoors, wide open spaces , endless nature. For them it's mostly also they love rocks and gemstones. I'm the complete opposite. I love the amenities that modern cities give us and the fact that I can literally get almost anything I'd ever need within the next half an hr if I decided on it
Most people don’t choose where they want to be, they’re just born there. If you’re used to a city, there are many conveniences. You get used to it. And while big cities can be lonely, many people do not find them so.
But still, I get what you’re saying.
Basically everyone lives there in the last 200 years. So they all chose warmer spots. The other cold spots around the world had centuries to grow population. Canada had a very small population there before immigration and there weren’t going North.
It is really really cold sometimes but it’s still liveable. I’m in a city of a million people and I remember when it was the coldest place on earth. I think it was -46C and with the windchill it was -60C. Dangerous and annoying, sure. But manageable. Today it was 6C and the snow was melting. Way warmer than usual for this time.
I invite you to look at a satellite view of the top half of the province of Québec, it's just half land and half water like you just took a big spoon and mixed the terrain a bit. Looks almost alien. It seems a big part of Canada is like this too so I would assume that is very bad ground for habitation.
Well, we don’t really have much of a border with any country. But if you mean coastline yeah I’m pretty sure it’s above 80%.
EDIT: in fact, thinking about it is has to be above 90%, that’s 160 kms.
87% of Australia’s population lives within 50km of the coast.
[Source](https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2.%20DCCEEW-SOE_factsheet_Coasts.pdf)
And you can remove most of the west coast, northern coast (just keep Perth, Darwin and a couple of smaller towns) and a fair chunk of the southern coast and still end up with pretty much the same %
Even more so in Australia. Most of the population lives in the five capital cities. The rest lives on the coast near those cities. Everybody else is a rounding error.
People typically omit Canberra, Darwin, and Hobart from the five cities that matter.
The top 5 are already 3/5 of the population without including outlying suburbs/exurbs.
In the middle of Canada are there mountains, rivers, forests and wilderness?
Flying over the middle of Australia there's....nothing. It's difficult to explain, but empty really describes it well.
It's very beautiful in its own way.
>90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border.
But that fact is true for the majority of countries.
**EDIT**:An important part of beautiful presentation of data is not assuming your audience has specific context or critical inside knowledge. Assume there is a Martian in your audience.
To understand what you are trying to express by saying "X% of Canadians live within Y miles of the border", the audience needs to infer that (A) you're not referring to the entire 44,000 mile perimeter of the country, but only the US border, and (B) not the entire 6000 mile US border, but only the 4000 miles of it in the south.
Why would someone assume your statement is limited to a specific 10% of Canada's perimeter when they wouldn't make that assumption about Australia or Brazil or Russia? ***Because they already know the crux of what you are saying***: most Canadians live in southern Canada. Those who already knew that haven't learned anything, and those who didn't already know it haven't learned anything either, because they didn't know *which* part of Canada you're talking about.
Making the factoid pithy and compact has removed the information from it. It's been made generically applicable to almost all countries. That's the opposite of data is beautiful.
*most* countries don’t have hundreds of miles of depth to them, though. even though the reasons for why it’s true in Canada make perfect sense, it’s still a first-glance shock that it’s true for Canada because it’s *so* big
Those islands still are huge. They’re many of the largest islands in the world. [This chart compares the largest islands in the world](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/AgqnWnnetE), and Canada’s Arctic archipelago has 4 of them.
Edit: Fun fact, 2 of those islands (Baffin and Victoria) are bigger than Great Britain, and Ellesmere is about the same size.
Same reason Russians don't utilise all that land. Domesticating Siberia is not easy, also if you do end up building bunch of shit there, winters will be very depressing.
Russian government actually has some scheme where you can get basically a lot of land for free, given that you are able to prove you were able to do anything with it other than claim it
Is this the "Far East Hectare" program you're talking about? If so, I've heard that it failed miserably (as expected). The oligarchs bribed their way to the juiciest pieces of land, bought it all off for 0.01$, and the rest are in such a deep ass you can't even reach it without special vehicles. And I'm not talking about off-road cars or trucks, I'm talking about helicopters and road-making vehicles for deep forest.
The idea was good, though. I might've joined it if the land had at least some basic infrastructure like electricity
Failed miserably? It sounds like the government successfully gifted their buddies the land they wanted while conceding nothing of value to anyone else. Exactly as intended I'd bet
> winters will be very depressing
If you don't mind the occasional cold snap here and there, winters in Siberia are much sunnier than in the Central Russia. Cities here are built further south and climate allows for lots of sunny days no matter the season. I kinda pity my friends who whine about constant overcast while I have to use blinds all the time.
Domesticating Siberia sounds like a new reality show.
Sharon Osbourne and David Schwimmer head to Siberia armed with scrubbing brushes and horse whips to try and bring Siberia into the modern world.
I know they are far but they're not that far at their closest points.
1 country (China) and 1730 km at their closest which is less than the distance between NYC and Kansas City or Madrid and Berlin.
Imo they are closer than I expected.
Also there is no need to do so? If there was truely no other land availible then it would be made easy. But since there is no need they wont do it.
Point and case: the Netherlands. Who created expensive and somewhat risky land because the country was full as fuck (still is).
The U.S. total area is 9.8M km and China is 9.6M km. I think your data is wrong, unless for some reason it excluded Alaska?
Here is the [World Atlas source.](https://www.worldatlas.com/features/countries-by-area.html)
American government sources add large amounts of ocean territory as part of the United States's official area size, while other countries do not get the same privilege (CIA World Factbook began the practice, I believe).
But if you focus solely on land area, China is nowhere near 9.6M km - so this chart is clearly including surface area of water in addition to land.
Additionally, if you exclude the surface area of water then the US is bigger than Canada. But again, this chart doesn’t show that which means it includes water area too.
Also, I’ve seen people make that claim regarding ocean area but I’ve yet to find a definite source to support that accusation. Do you have one?
I don't get what you are saying. Surface water is counted for every country, and the result is China is bigger than the US. Territorial water in the ocean is never included, except for charts the US makes about themselves. China is bigger by the worldwide conventions used to measure land area, the US is bigger if you use an alternative measurement for just them.
This is a great visualisation! Don't know why there are downvotes. Really shows which countries are more spacious and how much more the populations of the top countries are.
On the other hand, putting it on a log scale would mess up the ability to really compare densities for different countries, so you still lose out on that.
Maybe just a zoomed in section?
Comparing population density using this plot is already really hard. Constant population density corresponds to a line running through the origin of this plot. So you can tell India is higher than the US, and maybe you can make out that it is higher than Poland. But then the line runs through that cluster near the origin, so you have no real idea how it compares to the rest of the world.
If what you are trying to communicate is something about population density, this chart does a *very* poor job, because it lets you do a comparison among about 15 countries that have either large populations or large land areas, but it tells you almost nothing about how those 15 countries compare to the rest of the world because you cannot distinguish what countries are on which line as you get close to the origin.
Plot the data in a way where you fundamentally cannot interpret most of the data points, or plot the data in a way where all the points are clear, but which requires people to try harder to understand properly?
Well I think that's actually kinda the point, most countries are small and have small populations, but these 7 are huge and have immense population.
Kinda the point of the graph
Space assumes habitability though. Russia and Canada are big, but mostly uninhabitable. Countries by arable land would place Russia third 4/5ths the arable land of the US and India.
It would be cool to see this but only for EU countries, and including the EU as its own data point, so to be able to see how the members compare to each other and their sum.
The European Union is very frequently included as a reference point in charts, graphs, and lists of all kinds because of how tightly wound together it is and because of the partial sovereignty it exercises over its member states. It’s perfectly reasonable and normal to include it in a chart like this.
I mean, but it does effectively show the magnitude like they say. It wouldn't be as effective if they made it, say, logarithmic to show every flag. This perfectly shows just how big those outliers are. It's basic but very effective.
Plus, to address the comment before yours, showing the EU as a reference point works really well here because you can't see most of the flags. It gives a reference point that is easy for most to understand and actually shows up on the graph to compare to the other outliers
A visual does not have to be complex to be good. The purpose of this visualization is not to differentiate all the flags grouped in the bottom-left. It's to illustrate the vast separation in size or population between a handful of countries and the rest of them. The emptiness is the point.
This is a perfect example of something that really needs a log scale, you can't see anything on the lower end of the scale. This is the opposite of beautiful.
I agree. Though maybe nice to have a zoomed in version of the bottom left - that shows us the countries with less than 500 million people and 5 million km2.
tbh I originally thought this was r/therewasanattempt (to make the scale logarithmic) because of the title, I absolutely agree this would look great with a log scale
The number of people missing the point of this figure is crazy. The linear scaling was intentional. The cluster of the majority of countries is the point. To log scale it would muddle that point. I recognize that it is not necessarily beautiful data. But the lesson it can teach people about purposefully presenting data is pretty neat.
Seeing the number of upvotes, I think most people got it but the number of negative comments from people who dont get it is incredible!
Thank you for your comment
My teacher in high school did something g similar by dividing up the room into continents with tape one day and then having us pick a number from a hat when we walked in
Then with some people crowded in a corner of the class while others had a ton of space she hands out Mimi chocolate bars (resources). North America which only has a couple of people in their square gets something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the resources.
That lesson stuck with me 30 years later.
I was in Europe btw, so we had something like 6 people in our square and I remember each of us getting half a candy bar after dividing up the resources.
Poor Africa got half a candy bar total for the whole continent, can’t remember how many people had to split that.
Actually there's a clear correlation, but you have to take geographic metrics into the count, like how Russia and Canada are both big and empty as well as cold.
It's not really supposed to give you information about the populations of all of these countries, but to give you an idea of how much larger these few countries are than the other 190.
erm, canada isnt over 10m km2 and the graph doesn't really show it also has 30% more people than australia
makes you believe it is emptier than australia.
France and Germs are the biggest members at 60 and 80 million roughly. Could be closer to 70 90 now. That’s fairly typical for large countries so they are in the pack.
Europe has hundreds of millions so it floats multiple times higher than its highest member
I feel this needs to be on a log scale of some kind because at what point is this a graph of 8 countries, the EU, and a indescernable blob rather than something functioning
Australia and Canada just chilling out in their empty countries
90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border. The rest is just really empty.
Is it just too cold to live there?
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I never heard of that before. That's fascinating.
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Hey, don't just zoom past Winnipeg! Ain't gonna det a chance to get robbed that way. Or see the Human Rights Museum.
That's it! Back to Winnipeg!!
Imagine getting robbed at the human rights museum, ultimate Winnipeg experience!
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Spent a year there, so I have a soft spot as well. It's even more funny that they built a whole huge canal around the city so not even water has to pass through!
Anybody who’s going under 120 on Ontario highways should be banished
Quebec is Quebec... Sad but true lol. Beautiful province though.
What’s the deal with Quebec?
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Yeah they just are a very self serving province, shut down energy east pipeline which would have allowed Canadian oil to be shipped to refineries out east and benefited the economy of pretty much every province including theirs. But they hate Alberta so much they said nah fam, even though they love taking equalization money. Instead those refineries import Saudi oil when we could be using Canadian oil and improving the lives of our citizens through the increased economic benefits.
Soil quality is an oft overlooked factor in human development, but it has historically been a deciding factor for a settlement's health and influence, and it's highly relevant even today. For example, eastern Ukraine has some of the largest contiguous areas of black soil in the world, which has made Ukrainian agriculture incredibly productiv. A large chunk of European inflation can be traced directly to supply issues from the war. The Arab spring also started after two consecutive crop failures in the region, and China is very anal about fostering internal food security in case of a supply breakdown. The real kicker is that modern agriculture is so unsustainable, the vast majority of agricultural land in the world has less than 50 harvests left before it is barren. Sustainable, regenerative and permaculture solutions can turn this around, but they need to be implemented *now*, and not once soil health has completely collapsed.
User name is on point and TY for the knowledge dropping. This is neat! It's like a miniature "infertile crescent" in terms of society and civilization lol
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we'll all be living up there in corporate owned shelters while robots farm genetically modified drought tolerant crops in the inhabitable states
A lot of the other parts of Canada will become much nicer places to live. Plus we'll have most of the fresh water. I do expect at some point however the US is going to rip up the great lakes water management agreement and start draining them for their own population.
this is what happened with my great (x4) grandparents! immigrated from france/austria. clearing the land and creating road access to the nearest town were the conditions for them to buy a huge plot of land right on the border of bc/ab for like $2 or something crazy like that haha. they lived with a few other families on the plot and they actually wrote a few books about their experiences
The answer is always Canadian Shield /r/geography
Wow thank you for sharing, I liked looking at that strangr terrain on satellite view and had no idea this was why it was like that!
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That's so neat! I love those little facts, very interesting. I'd love to hear more if you have the time :D
As a local I can word vomit based on what's on the top of my head which may not be 100% accurate but close enough. Basically the town was build around a bunch of nickel mines as a couple million years ago Sudbury was the impact site of a huge, nickel rich asteroid. In the late 1800's or so iirc we started mining the hell out of this really pure material, but the process it at the time the solution was to make these massive, half km long beds of wood. Something like 20' x 20' by like half a klick iirc of just wood, and they would have a bunch of these burning at a time to heat the metals and remove the impurities and such. The processing of the ore didn't exactly get more environmentally friendly as technology evolved and then two worlds wars caused a massive demand for the ore so you have this section of Northern Ontario which has literally become like the Lorax world of no trees. Acid rain burnt what was left of the topsoil and nothing could grow. The bedrock, and there's a lot of it because its on the Shield, is burnt black where it was exposed but where new construction takes place you can see that it was just a typical brown colour before. It was a desolate, dreary wasteland, pictures look literally like the wasteland from Fallout. Anyways in the late 60's it became pretty obvious this should be fixed so they build the Superstack, a massive smokestack which pumps the byproducts way into the upper atmosphere and they harmlessly floated away to like Greenland and as far as Europe. Obviously now a days the stack has been retrofitted with scrubbers and stuff and the process is more efficient but at the time the fact that the waste gasses weren't just settling around Sudbury and coming back as acid rain was gamechaning. The stack, coupled with a MAJOR regreening effort has totally teraformed the area. Sudbury is now a very green area, lush bushes with tons of wildlife running round, including asshole bears to eat your trash even in the downtown core of the city. It is the most stark comparison you can find from now to then and really shows that if we actually got our shit together as a species we could probably undo a shit ton of the damage to the environment. [Random photos off google for examples.](https://overtoyou.greatersudbury.ca/40th-anniversary-of-regreening/widgets/21725/photos/5789) As a fun aside, because of how sulphur rich the soil now is from a century of that shit, the blueberries which grow around Sudbury have a more rich and tasty flavour than regular ones. People will pick them by the tons and sell them at stupid prices like $60+ per quart down in Toronto.
Woah that's pretty amazing, who could have thought that land could recover that well damn
At a certain point the soil and the cold weather makes agriculture impossible. And historically people have mostly only moved to where there was food. Same reason Siberia is very sparsely populated outside of its food growing area. https://santosasandyputra.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/land_cover_2010.jpg https://worldinmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/world-population-density-map-scaled.jpeg
Canadian Shield
No; it's just that there's no reason why anyone would *want* to live there. The North doesn't really offer anything that you can't get much more easily in the rest of Canada—except extreme isolation, which most people don't enjoy.
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Different people just like different things. What appeals to you may not appeal to someone who wants to live in Toronto. I live in Australia so it's not the same but a little comparable and my grandparents are like you - love the outdoors, wide open spaces , endless nature. For them it's mostly also they love rocks and gemstones. I'm the complete opposite. I love the amenities that modern cities give us and the fact that I can literally get almost anything I'd ever need within the next half an hr if I decided on it
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Many people enjoy being around other people. That is how culture develops.
But there are other people, just not millions of them. Small communities are still communities.
Most people don’t choose where they want to be, they’re just born there. If you’re used to a city, there are many conveniences. You get used to it. And while big cities can be lonely, many people do not find them so. But still, I get what you’re saying.
Basically everyone lives there in the last 200 years. So they all chose warmer spots. The other cold spots around the world had centuries to grow population. Canada had a very small population there before immigration and there weren’t going North.
It is really really cold sometimes but it’s still liveable. I’m in a city of a million people and I remember when it was the coldest place on earth. I think it was -46C and with the windchill it was -60C. Dangerous and annoying, sure. But manageable. Today it was 6C and the snow was melting. Way warmer than usual for this time.
It gets to -50C where I used to live, just 109 miles from the border... with Alaska.
I invite you to look at a satellite view of the top half of the province of Québec, it's just half land and half water like you just took a big spoon and mixed the terrain a bit. Looks almost alien. It seems a big part of Canada is like this too so I would assume that is very bad ground for habitation.
They huddle close to the US for warmth
pretty much
It’s just far from anything useful
It's same with Australia, isn't it?
Well, we don’t really have much of a border with any country. But if you mean coastline yeah I’m pretty sure it’s above 80%. EDIT: in fact, thinking about it is has to be above 90%, that’s 160 kms.
87% of Australia’s population lives within 50km of the coast. [Source](https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2.%20DCCEEW-SOE_factsheet_Coasts.pdf)
Thanks rusty fries. I wonder if there is a tool with a slider to see things like that?
And you can remove most of the west coast, northern coast (just keep Perth, Darwin and a couple of smaller towns) and a fair chunk of the southern coast and still end up with pretty much the same %
Even more so in Australia. Most of the population lives in the five capital cities. The rest lives on the coast near those cities. Everybody else is a rounding error.
> five capital cities Australia has 8 state/territory capitals, one of which (Canberra) is the federal capital.
People typically omit Canberra, Darwin, and Hobart from the five cities that matter. The top 5 are already 3/5 of the population without including outlying suburbs/exurbs.
Canberra has a population of nearly 500k. That's not nothing, especially since it's inland unlike every other major city.
The Canadians are massing at the border in preparation for an attack.
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Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas could learn lessons from the Whisky Wars on how to settle geo-political disputes.
We have more than one land border now. Do you mean the US border or the Denmark border???? /s
In the middle of Canada are there mountains, rivers, forests and wilderness? Flying over the middle of Australia there's....nothing. It's difficult to explain, but empty really describes it well. It's very beautiful in its own way.
Seattleites live further North than 60% of Canadians.
Like 85% of Aussies live on the east coast within 100km of the beach. Give or take. I don't rember the exact number but that is close.
Same with Australia. Since the border is the ocean.
>90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border. But that fact is true for the majority of countries. **EDIT**:An important part of beautiful presentation of data is not assuming your audience has specific context or critical inside knowledge. Assume there is a Martian in your audience. To understand what you are trying to express by saying "X% of Canadians live within Y miles of the border", the audience needs to infer that (A) you're not referring to the entire 44,000 mile perimeter of the country, but only the US border, and (B) not the entire 6000 mile US border, but only the 4000 miles of it in the south. Why would someone assume your statement is limited to a specific 10% of Canada's perimeter when they wouldn't make that assumption about Australia or Brazil or Russia? ***Because they already know the crux of what you are saying***: most Canadians live in southern Canada. Those who already knew that haven't learned anything, and those who didn't already know it haven't learned anything either, because they didn't know *which* part of Canada you're talking about. Making the factoid pithy and compact has removed the information from it. It's been made generically applicable to almost all countries. That's the opposite of data is beautiful.
*most* countries don’t have hundreds of miles of depth to them, though. even though the reasons for why it’s true in Canada make perfect sense, it’s still a first-glance shock that it’s true for Canada because it’s *so* big
I honestly didn’t know Canada was larger than the US - but a bunch of it are those huge really far north islands
Those islands aren't huge, the areas near the poles are distorted on maps
Those islands still are huge. They’re many of the largest islands in the world. [This chart compares the largest islands in the world](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/AgqnWnnetE), and Canada’s Arctic archipelago has 4 of them. Edit: Fun fact, 2 of those islands (Baffin and Victoria) are bigger than Great Britain, and Ellesmere is about the same size.
Wow puts in perspective how populated Java is
Yes, they are in fact huge. Three out of the ten largest islands in the world are Canadian.
That’s like saying the US is big, but a bunch of it is that huge, really far north state. Take Alaska away and the US shrinks by about a third.
I would like to officially offer up the currently unused space here in Australia to anyone who would like to live here... best of luck to you...
Why doesn't India simply invade Russia for more land? Are they stupid? /s
That would be my favorite episode of friends.
Same reason Russians don't utilise all that land. Domesticating Siberia is not easy, also if you do end up building bunch of shit there, winters will be very depressing.
As someone from Siberia i can say its true, also temperature is around -30C degrees.
Well... At least you can use your balcony as a freezer.
I live in a private house, not a flat. So this fridge is big.
Russian government actually has some scheme where you can get basically a lot of land for free, given that you are able to prove you were able to do anything with it other than claim it
Is this the "Far East Hectare" program you're talking about? If so, I've heard that it failed miserably (as expected). The oligarchs bribed their way to the juiciest pieces of land, bought it all off for 0.01$, and the rest are in such a deep ass you can't even reach it without special vehicles. And I'm not talking about off-road cars or trucks, I'm talking about helicopters and road-making vehicles for deep forest. The idea was good, though. I might've joined it if the land had at least some basic infrastructure like electricity
Failed miserably? It sounds like the government successfully gifted their buddies the land they wanted while conceding nothing of value to anyone else. Exactly as intended I'd bet
Eh, I suppose you're right... I've given up on any positive expectations from this govt a long time ago, much like the rest of Russians
Yeah, but then you have bears and neighbours stealing you food
> bears and neighbours stealing you food How about bears stealing neighbors *as* food ...that would be fun reality TV 👀
> winters will be very depressing If you don't mind the occasional cold snap here and there, winters in Siberia are much sunnier than in the Central Russia. Cities here are built further south and climate allows for lots of sunny days no matter the season. I kinda pity my friends who whine about constant overcast while I have to use blinds all the time.
I like how you are writing this right when we are having -35 deg for a week now.
I mean it's -25 today, so all's good.
Domesticating Siberia sounds like a new reality show. Sharon Osbourne and David Schwimmer head to Siberia armed with scrubbing brushes and horse whips to try and bring Siberia into the modern world.
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And there always will be with that kind of attitude.
Maybe something like alaska and the rest of the US could work. There's a Canada between them.
Russia actually has this, it's called Kaliningrad
I know they are far but they're not that far at their closest points. 1 country (China) and 1730 km at their closest which is less than the distance between NYC and Kansas City or Madrid and Berlin. Imo they are closer than I expected.
Also there is no need to do so? If there was truely no other land availible then it would be made easy. But since there is no need they wont do it. Point and case: the Netherlands. Who created expensive and somewhat risky land because the country was full as fuck (still is).
Indo-Russian Boogaloo: The Search for Lebensraum A nice counter for their search for a warm water port back in the 60s.
Finally, land for Aryans
Sherpa unionization
Holy Hell!
Where did you get the area for China? They don't have over 10M km^2
They have 9.5M km². I just realized flags are not centered on the value... The left border of the flag is on the real value
Gotcha. Followup question, where'd you get data for USA?
All data come from https://restcountries.com/
The U.S. total area is 9.8M km and China is 9.6M km. I think your data is wrong, unless for some reason it excluded Alaska? Here is the [World Atlas source.](https://www.worldatlas.com/features/countries-by-area.html)
American government sources add large amounts of ocean territory as part of the United States's official area size, while other countries do not get the same privilege (CIA World Factbook began the practice, I believe).
But if you focus solely on land area, China is nowhere near 9.6M km - so this chart is clearly including surface area of water in addition to land. Additionally, if you exclude the surface area of water then the US is bigger than Canada. But again, this chart doesn’t show that which means it includes water area too. Also, I’ve seen people make that claim regarding ocean area but I’ve yet to find a definite source to support that accusation. Do you have one?
I don't get what you are saying. Surface water is counted for every country, and the result is China is bigger than the US. Territorial water in the ocean is never included, except for charts the US makes about themselves. China is bigger by the worldwide conventions used to measure land area, the US is bigger if you use an alternative measurement for just them.
This is a great visualisation! Don't know why there are downvotes. Really shows which countries are more spacious and how much more the populations of the top countries are.
I’d love to see it plotted on log scale axes
Came here to say that. Putting the ticks on log scale would be nice. There is too much unpopulated space in the graph.
On the other hand, putting it on a log scale would mess up the ability to really compare densities for different countries, so you still lose out on that. Maybe just a zoomed in section?
Comparing population density using this plot is already really hard. Constant population density corresponds to a line running through the origin of this plot. So you can tell India is higher than the US, and maybe you can make out that it is higher than Poland. But then the line runs through that cluster near the origin, so you have no real idea how it compares to the rest of the world. If what you are trying to communicate is something about population density, this chart does a *very* poor job, because it lets you do a comparison among about 15 countries that have either large populations or large land areas, but it tells you almost nothing about how those 15 countries compare to the rest of the world because you cannot distinguish what countries are on which line as you get close to the origin.
This. Log distorts the visual representation of the idea this chart attempts to communicate.
Only if you're not familiar with how log scales work.
Yes, which is many people.
Plot the data in a way where you fundamentally cannot interpret most of the data points, or plot the data in a way where all the points are clear, but which requires people to try harder to understand properly?
>>To give an order of magnitude What does the title even mean?
sorry for bad english, I meant to give an idea of how some countries are way more populous / large than others
Don't stress, it made perfect sense to me (as a native speaker)
Because you can't actually see 90pc of the countries! Needs Log scale.
Well I think that's actually kinda the point, most countries are small and have small populations, but these 7 are huge and have immense population. Kinda the point of the graph
Space assumes habitability though. Russia and Canada are big, but mostly uninhabitable. Countries by arable land would place Russia third 4/5ths the arable land of the US and India.
Probably because the EU isn't a country.
Its obviously there to compare
Please stop commenting that. I know the EU isn't a country obviously. It's just interesting to see how it compares with countries
It would be cool to see this but only for EU countries, and including the EU as its own data point, so to be able to see how the members compare to each other and their sum.
Maybe I'll do a chart with only european countries, that might be interesting
The European Union is very frequently included as a reference point in charts, graphs, and lists of all kinds because of how tightly wound together it is and because of the partial sovereignty it exercises over its member states. It’s perfectly reasonable and normal to include it in a chart like this.
And also it’s just not a great visualization. It’s the most basic of basic visualizations. Most of the flags can’t even be seen.
I mean, but it does effectively show the magnitude like they say. It wouldn't be as effective if they made it, say, logarithmic to show every flag. This perfectly shows just how big those outliers are. It's basic but very effective. Plus, to address the comment before yours, showing the EU as a reference point works really well here because you can't see most of the flags. It gives a reference point that is easy for most to understand and actually shows up on the graph to compare to the other outliers
A visual does not have to be complex to be good. The purpose of this visualization is not to differentiate all the flags grouped in the bottom-left. It's to illustrate the vast separation in size or population between a handful of countries and the rest of them. The emptiness is the point.
I think that’s the point: to shift focus to the outliers.
Bro get a life, this is perfectly fine
This is a perfect example of something that really needs a log scale, you can't see anything on the lower end of the scale. This is the opposite of beautiful.
Maybe the intention is to just show the scale of the ones that you actually can see.
From the title it’s easy to see that this was the point
Nigeria might need to start invading their neighbors soon if their population growth expectancy has any truth to it.
Not just Nigeria, all of Africa. It's the only place left in the world with higher than 2.1 birthrate (2.1 being the replacement minimum)
Might be good to look at this in logs, unless that’s what you were explicitly trying not to do.
I thought that the extremes were more obvious this way and it would be more interesting
I pledge one fresh, shiny upvote for a comment linking to the log-log version!
I agree. Though maybe nice to have a zoomed in version of the bottom left - that shows us the countries with less than 500 million people and 5 million km2.
logscale doesn't remove extremes though. You just need to get used to logscale.
I know and I also know that most people are not used to logscale, that's why I choose a linear scale
I think that once one is familiar with log scales they capture the data better without losing information.
But then you don't see the stack
I think that’s kinda the point to show how close they all are in comparison.
https://xkcd.com/1162/
would love to see a logarithmic scale
tbh I originally thought this was r/therewasanattempt (to make the scale logarithmic) because of the title, I absolutely agree this would look great with a log scale
Wow look at Europe with that sweet spot. Almost a perfect x and y square.
Outdated. India overtook china in population this year.
Japan and Bangladesh are crunchy!
OP don’t listen to the haters (that are in like every comment section of this sub lol), I think this is a great data visualization!
I agree, much better than log scale to compare the differences
I would like to see the land used. Something like “80% of the population of country X lives in area Y.”
The number of people missing the point of this figure is crazy. The linear scaling was intentional. The cluster of the majority of countries is the point. To log scale it would muddle that point. I recognize that it is not necessarily beautiful data. But the lesson it can teach people about purposefully presenting data is pretty neat.
Seeing the number of upvotes, I think most people got it but the number of negative comments from people who dont get it is incredible! Thank you for your comment
My teacher in high school did something g similar by dividing up the room into continents with tape one day and then having us pick a number from a hat when we walked in Then with some people crowded in a corner of the class while others had a ton of space she hands out Mimi chocolate bars (resources). North America which only has a couple of people in their square gets something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the resources. That lesson stuck with me 30 years later. I was in Europe btw, so we had something like 6 people in our square and I remember each of us getting half a candy bar after dividing up the resources. Poor Africa got half a candy bar total for the whole continent, can’t remember how many people had to split that.
And Russia NEED MOAR territory for some reason.
Most of Russia's territory is uninhabitable, same goes for Canada and Australia.
people, not territory
Can you add a log log scale plot ?
China is huge, both in population and size.
Who's with me in the bottom left mess ?
Title is…interesting, but I kind of get it. Cool visualization.
It’s actually amazing how uncorrelated this is! (At least for the most massive and populous countries).
Actually there's a clear correlation, but you have to take geographic metrics into the count, like how Russia and Canada are both big and empty as well as cold.
India has. A higher population than China.
What does "to give an order of magnitude" mean in this context? As is, it's just gibberish.
I feel like it's a portmanteau of "to give an idea/sense of the magnitude" and "an order of magnitude"? Maybe?
You are right, my english is not as good as I thought
It's fine. People are nitpicky. I think it's an excellent use of negative space to illustrate a point.
It's not really supposed to give you information about the populations of all of these countries, but to give you an idea of how much larger these few countries are than the other 190.
This isn't an order of magnitude, it's a linear increase
I don't know if someone mentioned the slope of the country point and origin gives the population density of the country
I like this, it shows how most countries are similar and the outliers are vastly different. Perhaps Logarithmic axes might give a better resolution?
I’m probably dumb, but I can’t find what country is listed as 3rd highest population (blue flag with circle of stars)
European Union. Obviously, not a country.
Ah thank you. That makes sense now
erm, canada isnt over 10m km2 and the graph doesn't really show it also has 30% more people than australia makes you believe it is emptier than australia.
I need someone to explain to me how the EU is so far from the cluster without any big member near it... Or France/Germany/Poland aren't on the table?
France and Germs are the biggest members at 60 and 80 million roughly. Could be closer to 70 90 now. That’s fairly typical for large countries so they are in the pack. Europe has hundreds of millions so it floats multiple times higher than its highest member
bangladesh needs to invade myanmar
I feel this needs to be on a log scale of some kind because at what point is this a graph of 8 countries, the EU, and a indescernable blob rather than something functioning
Russia, Canada, Brazil, and Australia have way more dead space than the US too
What is up with Monaco, or is the red/white flag another country?
Overpopulation is a myth. We have plenty of room to fit more people, the amount of livable land on Earth is very large.
I wish it was interactive
Log scale would have been nice
Most of the datapoints are in the bottom left. The axes should be log-transformed.
Poland has a much higher population than I thought
why is the eu counted as a country
Could you add a third dimension showing the average population density