Sunday 3 August 2014

list of the most northern countries

Developing a Luca Pietrobon's wonderful idea already explained in the post Norte o Sur, I decided to go further and I found interesting the concept that the common perception of the real position north south of the places in a map is generally quite wrong.
if you put the names of the cities of the world in a single meridian line you'll probably be surprised to know for example that Chicago is the same "height" than Barcelona, Pyongyang, Rome or Istanbul.
That was the beginning, but when I started to bring the names of the places on the same line I found interesting that the background colour of the names kept the one of the country the cities came from. just a graphic surprise, but quite interesting cause different counties were spread in different positions in the unique meridian line.
so I decided to draw the north-south extension of all the countries of the world, from the most northern point to the most southern one. this could be interesting cause depending of the geo-political implications or of the climate idea of a place we tend to classify the north-soth position of a place in a very strange way (east-west is less interesting to me cause it has no suggestive influence about the climate and the environment in it).
I did it and I found it interesting but then I remembered that in our world or in our maps we tend to consider the northern countries as more powerful countries, more developed and more civilized. North is the power in our maps, north is above the rest of the world, so it's somehow implicit that there's a sort of competition to be more and more northern in our culture.
we try to be northern to be rich, powerful and civilized.
it's for this reason that I decided to represent this race to be northern in a sort of ranking!
so, here you have the result! you can see who are the first ones and where is your own country!
et voila:


if you cannot visualize the list in a proper way just click here to watch the first part of the list and the second part of the list

some of the data in this ranking can be really surprising! for example who could believe that Mali with all its desert lands is the same north-south extension than Vietnam that's humid and tropical?
this is also interesting if you consider to check the situation of your country and see all the other countries of the world that share with it the same latitude.
have a look to the situation of Italy, for example:


Italy share its latitudes with Canada, Russia, U.S.A., Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Ukraine, France, Austria, Moldova, Hungary, Romania, Swiss, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Japan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Spain, Montenegro, Georgia, Kosovo, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Albania, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Armenia, Portugal, Tajikistan, Greece, Iran, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria.
Not bad, isn't it?



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