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  #61  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 7:52 PM
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There was a nice post about Africa earlier arguing that the Mercator projection makes it seem smaller than it is but really I am not surprised by it's size. I always knew Africa was huge.

Another place that does tend to get the short end of the stick since it is shrunk on US maps and placed in a corner is Alaska. Here is an analogous image depicting the true size of Alaska.

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  #62  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 8:03 PM
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I'm not sure what they are trying to communicate with that image but there's no consistent scale applied. Connecticut looks to be about 1/4 the size of the contiguous United States.

The 48 contiguous states cover about 8 million square km while Alaska is 1.7 million square km, just a bit bigger than Quebec.
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  #63  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 8:07 PM
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Here's a typical map of Canada:


Source


Another projection that shows latitude as horizontal lines and longitude as vertical lines (areas are distorted, but north/south/east/west relationships are preserved):


Source
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  #64  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 8:25 PM
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There is a misconception that you can see the Rockies from Edmonton. That is, unless you're in an airplane at least maybe 10,000-15,000 feet or so above the city and the weather is super clear (true thing - I've experienced this myself).

I've run across quite a few people coming into Edmonton for the first time expecting to see the Rocky Mountains from there maybe almost as well as from Calgary.
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  #65  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 9:15 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
I'm not sure what they are trying to communicate with that image but there's no consistent scale applied. Connecticut looks to be about 1/4 the size of the contiguous United States.

The 48 contiguous states cover about 8 million square km while Alaska is 1.7 million square km, just a bit bigger than Quebec.
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Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
Here's a typical map of Canada:

Source


Another projection that shows latitude as horizontal lines and longitude as vertical lines (areas are distorted, but north/south/east/west relationships are preserved):

Source


I think I have a better understanding of you now. You seem to take what is said too literally, missing the humour, irony and sarcasm.
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  #66  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 9:19 PM
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Originally Posted by mcminsen View Post
I think I have a better understanding of you now. You seem to take what is said too literally, missing the humour, irony and sarcasm.
Clearly I was being sarcastic in my first post, lol. I guess my joke didn't stick,
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  #67  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 9:24 PM
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Clearly I was being sarcastic in my first post, lol. I guess my joke didn't stick,
Yes, you were clearly being sarcastic and I thought it was very funny. I literally laughed out loud. I'm not sure someone123 understood.
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  #68  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 9:24 PM
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It's hard to tell with that Alaska map; it seems to be either full of intended irony which many might still miss, or it was done by an incredibly inept and stupid person?
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  #69  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 9:44 PM
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I really enjoyed that Texas was half the size of Connecticut and Pennsylvania is pretty much 80% of the continnental United States.
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  #70  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 10:14 PM
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Originally Posted by Architype View Post
It's hard to tell with that Alaska map; it seems to be either full of intended irony which many might still miss, or it was done by an incredibly inept and stupid person?
No one is that inept, it's obviously a joke.

In the same vein (and to reverse the size of Texas from that Alaska map posted above ) I've always liked this one; who wouldn't feel pity for the poor people stuck living in the states of Misery, Miss Again, Canned Turkey, etc.

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  #71  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 10:45 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
No one is that inept, it's obviously a joke.
When reading stuff on the internet I tend to follow this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

As far as my post goes it doesn't matter whether it's a deliberate parody or not (except apparently to mcminsen, who seems to want to get back at me, I guess for the weather thread thing from weeks ago, an offense I already apologized for; maybe it's all really a joke I'm not getting though). I didn't call the creators idiots for making such an obviously wrong map, I just posted some observations/numbers.

My second post wasn't meant to be related to the first one, it's an example of what people were talking about a while back but never posted examples of. It's kind of a weird one because the projections chosen for Canada are often the ones such that the country fits well into a rectangle.
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  #72  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 11:08 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
No one is that inept, it's obviously a joke.

In the same vein (and to reverse the size of Texas from that Alaska map posted above ) I've always liked this one; who wouldn't feel pity for the poor people stuck living in the states of Misery, Miss Again, Canned Turkey, etc.

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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
No one is that inept ...
^ I guess you live in a bubble then.

Would love to see a map of Canada on that idea.

However, they missed the obvious "Tick's-Ass" for their own state.
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  #73  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 11:31 PM
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  #74  
Old Posted May 8, 2018, 11:47 PM
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Driving.
Jasper is 365. Banff 416.

I used to have a project in Jasper that had me out every 2 weeks. I did the drive from My place in St Albert in 3:10 if I did not stop.
I should of said faster to drive to Banff than Jasper. From my place near McNally it is about 3:45 to Jasper and I can make Banff in 3:30 no problem driving no more than 10 over to each place. The slowdown after Hinton is the game changer.
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  #75  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 12:20 AM
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I'm surprised Atlantic Canada being perceived as north seems to be so common.

Only one I've heard about Vancouver is surprise that it's not on Vancouver Island, which, fair enough.

Within Vancouver though, there seem to be lots of misconceptions about the rest of Canada. One is the assumption that southern Prairie cities (i.e. not Edmonton) are further north than they really are. Since coming to Winnipeg, lots of my friends have commented on me being all the way "up there," when really it's south of Whistler. People also underestimate how far south Eastern Canada is.

As far as people's confusion with populations and things like that, I've learned to let it go. The average person doesn't give a flying fuck what the population of different cities is, and when you don't have something as a reference point, it's easy to not even have a general understanding of these things, leading to interview answers including the population of Canada as 50,000. Aside from feeling better about yourself on internet forums, the populations of different cities really don't matter to most people, so you can't blame them for not knowing anything about them. Think about how much the average person struggles with knowing how our elections work. We have bigger fish to fry.
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  #76  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 12:42 AM
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Originally Posted by GlassCity View Post
I'm surprised Atlantic Canada being perceived as north seems to be so common.
Not just farther north but also remote and cold/rugged, which is true compared to say the Mid-Atlantic US but not so much compared to where most Canadians live.

As others have mentioned it gets funny when you do a one day drive (8-12 hours) and on arrival people talk to you as if you came from the North Pole. It used to be pretty common in Montreal or Quebec City for people upon hearing I was from Halifax to say something like "I hear it's nice but you must get tired of shovelling all that snow!". It's possible they think of the Maritimes as being like a more extreme version of Gaspé, or they think of places like Edmundston as being representative of the region. That would be kinda like travelling to the Peace Country in BC from Alberta and thinking you visited a typical part of BC.

Americans do the same thing with all of Canada. The 6-8 hour drive from New York up to Montreal or Toronto is like a trip to the Arctic Circle for some. I'm not sure if they treat road trips to the Midwest or South in the same way, but I would not be surprised.
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  #77  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 12:45 AM
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Originally Posted by GlassCity View Post
I'm surprised Atlantic Canada being perceived as north seems to be so common.

Only one I've heard about Vancouver is surprise that it's not on Vancouver Island, which, fair enough.

Within Vancouver though, there seem to be lots of misconceptions about the rest of Canada. One is the assumption that southern Prairie cities (i.e. not Edmonton) are further north than they really are. Since coming to Winnipeg, lots of my friends have commented on me being all the way "up there," when really it's south of Whistler. People also underestimate how far south Eastern Canada is.

As far as people's confusion with populations and things like that, I've learned to let it go. The average person doesn't give a flying fuck what the population of different cities is, and when you don't have something as a reference point, it's easy to not even have a general understanding of these things, leading to interview answers including the population of Canada as 50,000. Aside from feeling better about yourself on internet forums, the populations of different cities really don't matter to most people, so you can't blame them for not knowing anything about them. Think about how much the average person struggles with knowing how our elections work. We have bigger fish to fry.
^ These are common misconceptions I've encountered as well, also it's common to find people in Vancouver who don't know anything about Atlantic Canada, or even that it exists at all. I encountered someone last week who didn't know that Newfoundland is an island. I've often had people tell me that they'd been to Newfoundland, only to learn that they were actually in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.

However, people do actually care about populations more than you might think. It is almost an obsession if you live in, or are involved in any way, in a small town, that you are watching your population decline, inevitably towards zero.
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  #78  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 12:58 AM
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Originally Posted by Architype View Post
^ These are common misconceptions I've encountered as well, also it's common to find people in Vancouver who don't know anything about Atlantic Canada, or even that it exists at all. I encountered someone last week who didn't know that Newfoundland is an island. I've often had people tell me that they'd been to Newfoundland, only to learn that they were actually in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.

However, people do actually care about populations more than you might think. It is almost an obsession if you live in, or are involved in any way, in a small town, that you are watching your population decline, inevitably towards zero.
I'll admit before I became a geography/urbanism nerd, I distinctly remember always having difficulty in school naming the Atlantic provinces on a map. I could always name New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland - I could just never remember which was there. It's definitely the common blind spot for people out on the west coast.
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  #79  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 1:03 AM
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Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
Not just farther north but also remote and cold/rugged, which is true compared to say the Mid-Atlantic US but not so much compared to where most Canadians live.

As others have mentioned it gets funny when you do a one day drive (8-12 hours) and on arrival people talk to you as if you came from the North Pole. It used to be pretty common in Montreal or Quebec City for people upon hearing I was from Halifax to say something like "I hear it's nice but you must get tired of shovelling all that snow!". It's possible they think of the Maritimes as being like a more extreme version of Gaspé, or they think of places like Edmundston as being representative of the region. That would be kinda like travelling to the Peace Country in BC from Alberta and thinking you visited a typical part of BC.

Americans do the same thing with all of Canada. The 6-8 hour drive from New York up to Montreal or Toronto is like a trip to the Arctic Circle for some. I'm not sure if they treat road trips to the Midwest or South in the same way, but I would not be surprised.
This might be showing my own geographic misconceptions, but the differences of weather in Canada outside the Lower Mainland always seemed (seem?) so exaggerated to me. People from the Prairies, Ontario and the Atlantic all comparing where it's colder or where it snows more, when from a Vancouver perspective, it seems like these differences can't possibly be that great.

Like I said, this could be another misconception, but my perspective is that the average coastal BCer doesn't distinguish between the rest of the country; it's all just "cold."
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  #80  
Old Posted May 9, 2018, 1:33 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity View Post
As far as people's confusion with populations and things like that, I've learned to let it go. The average person doesn't give a flying fuck what the population of different cities is, and when you don't have something as a reference point, it's easy to not even have a general understanding of these things, leading to interview answers including the population of Canada as 50,000. Aside from feeling better about yourself on internet forums, the populations of different cities really don't matter to most people, so you can't blame them for not knowing anything about them. Think about how much the average person struggles with knowing how our elections work. We have bigger fish to fry.

This isn't about knowing population stats, though. If the woman being interviewed would have said that Canada's population was 20 million or even 10 million, then I think the interviewers (I wasn't involved) would have probably let it go. But when she said "50,000" it just revealed that she lacked even the most basic critical thinking skills.

If you're like me, you probably don't know anything about the fashion industry or textiles, but if you asked me to estimate the total length of all the tiny threads that are woven together to make my shirt and I said "three feet", I wouldn't blame you if you didn't hire me.
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