Pretty neat. One tip it took me a while to realize is that after you tap on a country, the compass rose (now the same color as the country) can be used to rotate it.
But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?
I think part of that is an illusion, since for something bowing upwards, the usualy anchor point of top left seems rotated clockwise.
But there is still a real rotation - look at wyoming or colorado for a perfect rectangle. My guess is the div element isn't quite centered - perhaps too much padding on the right edge, causing the center point to be off to the right. So when it bows you get the rotation bias
Mercator projection striking again.
The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.
We need a new world map that accurately portrays countries by size. The downstream effects would go crazy.
You think that doesn't exist? You think the cartographers and mathematicians in Mercater's age were just sitting on their hands?
Like a globe?
There's already several, Gall Peters being the most (in)famous. Other than accurately showing size, such maps are pretty useless. Mercator is actually useful for navigation because it maintains angles, all "size accurate" projections have to sacrifice that.
No wonder china is investing so heavily into Africa, including having Chinese settle there.
Very nice
[dead]