prase comments on Minor, perspective changing facts - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 22 April 2013 07:01PM

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Comment author: Stabilizer 23 April 2013 12:47:47AM * 25 points [-]

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.

Comment author: prase 23 April 2013 09:16:30PM 2 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, what population did you expect Japan to have?

Comment author: Username 23 April 2013 09:31:09PM 8 points [-]

Not OP, but I expected Japan to have about 40-50 million, about on par with California and South Korea. 130 million is huge.

Comment author: Desrtopa 23 April 2013 10:14:41PM 5 points [-]

The Tokyo metropolitan area alone has approximately the population of California. The population of Japan has pretty intense urban concentration.

Comment author: Stabilizer 23 April 2013 11:26:46PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Roxolan 24 April 2013 06:03:58AM 10 points [-]

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.)