Basic Geography for Politicians

The Three Baltic States

The Balkans

Le Monde reported last week (here’s an English report) that when Baltic leaders Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania, Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia and Raimonds Vējonis of Latvia met at the White House with Donald Trump on April 3rd of this year, the president chastised the leaders “for starting wars in the 1990s that lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia.”

It’s not unreasonable for lay people to confuse the Baltics and Balkans. Both regions are made up of small countries at the periphery of Europe. But one might hope that the American president had been briefed (forget about his reading on his own) a little more closely. Especially since one of his potential briefers, his wife, was born in Yugoslavia.

Maps from Wikimedia Commons.

A Different Weather Radar Perspective

Click it to have a look. Via Jan Lenaerts, @lenaertsjan

Fun Map Tool

You know how flat maps use projections that distort the actual size of objects on a globe, don’t you? Of course you do. Here’s a fun little tool you can use to show the actual size of the country you live in as compared to others around the world.

Here, for example, is how big Greenland would be if it were located on the equator. Play around with it yourself at TheTrueSizeOf.com.

 

Scratch This

Is this a thing? C’mon. Honest?

Track your travels with this interactive map.

I guess you can actually get out there in the world, or you can hang back and try to sell dumb stuff like this for the amazing price of just “$23.99, or 46% off.”

46% off what?

Map of Empire, Airline Edition

From an intriguing website, new to me, called Tubemapcentral.com.This map comes from a pdf newsletter available on the site. Best way to properly view it might be to download the pdf and then enlarge the map. Brings back a disappeared world. Not entirely forgotten, especially probably if you were a non-British resident somewhere far out in the empire.

The keeper of the newsletter writes:

“Many of you will be familiar with a particularly splendid poster from 1937 advertising air services by Imperial Airways. This included a schematic map in an inset, detailing mileages and frequencies of flights to all sorts of exotic destinations.”

Kill Two Birds with One Stone in European Languages

An interesting map, used with permission, from an interesting web site, jakubmarian.com. It’s full of this kind of stuff.

Another interesting site for cartophiles is A Map A Day, on Instagram.

Countries Visited Map

Updating your countries visited map shows the areas you need to work on. Pretty clearly, we need to bear down on the area from Africa to the ‘Stans.

Make your own countries visited map.