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Stabilizer comments on Minor, perspective changing facts - Less Wrong
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Things that have made me sit up:
Japan has a population of 130 million. It is the largest (by population) non-western developed nation. Edit: It is also the second-largest developed nation in the world.
Areas of countries, especially African nations. For example, Mali is larger than France, Germany and Italy combined.
My idea of real-world violence changed dramatically after reading Randall Collins. In short, it is far rarer than you think, everybody involved is extremely fearful of it, nobody is very good at it and it really is nothing like the movies. For example, they are usually very short: O.K. Corral was 30 seconds long.
Chile is in the same time zone as the East Coast of the US.
In a similar vein, Canada has a population of barely 35 million -- that's 9 times smaller than the US population -- while being the second largest country (by territory) in the world. It is almost as big as the whole continent of Europe, and yet there are 8 European countries (or 7 if you don't count Russia) with higher population counts. Most Canadians live within 100 km from the border with the US. The rest of the country is basically empty.
Huh. I thought Canada would be a lot bigger than Europe, probably because I know that Western Europe is not that big and tend to forget how big Eastern Europe, especially the European parts of the former USSR, is.
Another possible factor is that Mercator maps increase the size of areas that are farther from the equator.
Yes. I somewhat compensate for that (e.g. I don't expect Greenland to be ginormous), but apparently I don't do that enough.
Speaking of European countries and size/distance, according to google maps it takes almost an hour less time to drive between London and Paris as it does to drive between San Francisco and LA.
If anything, I expected the difference to be larger: London is in the far south of Britain and Paris is in the far north of France, so they are quite close together, whereas SF and LA are pretty much at opposite ends of California. (OTOH, I had no clear idea how long it'd take to take the train in the tunnel below the Channel -- according to Google Maps it takes one hour and a half to drive from Dover to Calais.)
(Exercise for the reader: guess how long it takes to drive from Milan to Rome and how that compares to those two.)
The California-Oregon Border hits the coast at the 42 parallel, and the California Mexico Border starts at 32.5. SF's latitude is 37.8, making it only 55% of the way up the coast. Far from being on opposite sides of California, San Francisco is only a bit past the midpoint. The misconception that SF is at the opposite end of California is likely due to the fact that past San Francisco, Northern California is pretty sparcely populated (an Oregonian friend of mine once describe Northern California past the Bay as "not inhabited by humans").
I think more people get caught off-guard by the fact that Chile is in the opposite season of the US.
Those people must not like pomegranates nearly as much as I do. I spend several months of each year appreciating that Chile is in the opposite season.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was full of many exotic things, but the fact that temperatures were hotter when the characters went north was still reliably weird for me.
Just out of curiosity, what population did you expect Japan to have?
Not OP, but I expected Japan to have about 40-50 million, about on par with California and South Korea. 130 million is huge.
The Tokyo metropolitan area alone has approximately the population of California. The population of Japan has pretty intense urban concentration.
Likewise. I was thinking that it'd be about a rich European nation. I was very surprised because Japan is tiny in area; it's smaller than Montana.
Another fun population fact: there are about 250 million people in Indonesia.
Making it the largest Muslim country in the world.
(Before learning this fact, Indonesia wasn't even on my radar when discussing Islam. It's quite moderate, so it rarely makes the news.)
And the fourth largest country of any sort :)
India is the second biggest
I assumed around 60/70 based on ananlogy with the UK.
China is not considered a developed nation? Dang. The things you learn.
(sure, if you look at average well-being including all the people not living in urban areas and average per-capita economic statistics and other similar things, it doesn't look like a major developed power at all... but China has launched manned space missions, has massive high-tech cities, has some pretty darn good scientific projects, and the parts that aren't backwater farms look pretty damn first-world apart from all that oppression-from-the-state business)
At any rate, going by all that's happening over there and all they're doing, I would've expected them to be one by now.
I was thinking more in terms of human development. Nations with large populations and high HDI are important because they support a very large number of people with a very high standard of life.
China has a HDI-rank of 101. Japan has a HDI-rank of 10.
Yeah, that and China's low per-capita everything. I also doubt China has a bigger service sector than its industry and farming.
I was correcting my erroneous assumption based on other correlates of developed nations (space missions, nuclear power, high-tech, lots of science, etc.).
Yes, China included developed and not-yet-developed areas. An interesting question would be how many people live in the developed parts of China -- I'd guess that's in the same ballpark as Japan.
China seems to have an urban population of about 690 million. So much more than Japan. But this doesn't tell us much, as you can live in a city but not necessarily enjoy high standard of living.
The real interesting question is: how many people in China have the same standard of living as the average person in Japan. So Japan has a HDI of 0.912. Based on this list the only regions of China with a comparable HDI are Hong Kong (0.944), Macau (0.944), Shanghai (0.908) and Beijing (0.891). The populations of these cities combined is about 51 million. So, about 40% the population of Japan. Excluding Hong Kong and Macau doesn't change it much: get's it down to about 43 million, about 30% of Japan. But easily comparable to the population European nations. So yes, China definitely has a developed nation 'embedded' in it.
Must be the archaic designation of it as a "second world" country, whereas the developed and developing countries roughly match "first world" and "third world".
Well, the wikipedia articles on human development and developed nations seem to indicate that to be considered a "developed nation" you have to have good per-capita rates, widespread infrastructure (admittedly, while China has first-rate infrastructure, it is only present in urban centers, to hell with rural areas!), and probably the most critical point re China is that you are into a Post-Industrial economy, with a larger service sector than industrial sector.
As far as my readings and knowledge can tell, the above are indeed points where China fails.