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Which is larger? Yours, or mine? Australia or the United States of America, that is. With the bushfires in Australia out of control incinerating large swathes of the country a map was produced to visually depict how widespread the fires are. For emphasis the map was overlaid on top of America to give people an idea of the scope of the problem Australia is dealing with. Americans responded with disbelief that Australia was just as large as the USA. People were also in shock over how large an area, measured by size of US states, are currently burning. Responses on social media show how shocked and dumbfounded people were learning this.
- Area of Australia = 7.692 million km2
- Area of USA, excluding Alaska = 7.653 million km2
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Australian Bushfire Map Superimosed Over America Sows Disbelief
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A: Unique up on it!
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A: The tame way!
(Score: 0, Troll) by epitaxial on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:12AM (40 children)
They no longer teach geography in school. It became "social studies". I had a really old teacher who would give us blank maps to fill in states and countries, nobody else did that. Now I imagine social studies have been replaced by something to do with social justice.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:28AM (12 children)
And.. the much larger African fires are not mentioned by the fake news at all. There are literally fires that span the east-west axis of Africa right now.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:42AM (4 children)
You get news when Australia burns because Australia is considered a "western country".
You also get news and boycotts when Indonesia burns because they produce palm oil - a huge competitor to soybean oil (which doesn't get as much boycotts even though the Amazon is being cleared and burned to plant soybeans, maybe because it's harder to sell US soybeans and soybean oil to China for some reason... ).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:10AM (2 children)
If that is when I "get news", when is it that you "get news"? And how do they differ? Make a journal out of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:46AM (1 child)
Some years ago my wife and I subscribed to two Montreal newspapers -- an English-language one (the Gazette) and a French-language one (Le Devoir). We noticed that the difference between the two local newspapers wasn't just language. They reported different news.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday January 10 2020, @08:22AM
On a similar note, in the 1960s/70s, my grandfather (living in north-west Wales) had two television antennas on his house: one for watching BBC news, the other for Irish news.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 10 2020, @12:12PM
It's also a quite different type of fire in Africa, that's an integral part of slash-and-burn farming that's been going on for centuries if not millennia. They're much smaller, deliberately set, and mostly controlled. So yeah, lots of red dots on the map, but nothing like Australia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:55AM (4 children)
citation needed.
seriously though, can you provide a link?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:15AM (3 children)
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/video/climate-change/why-is-the-world-on-fire--68671 [downtoearth.org.in]
Another AC. This says "Australia tops the 10 countries with highest fire alerts between December 1, 2019, and January 2, 2020, with 0.521 million alerts. However, the remaining nine countries are in Africa, often not reported widely."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:54AM (2 children)
The reference in the previous post has such a huge problem with comma placement, it is impossible to parse the numbers.
However, it is always worth seeing more Americans realize that America is not that big in real life.
(And Texas is smaller than Chuck Norris supporters imagine).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:34PM (1 child)
It's broken up into three now, but there used to be a cattle station (Ranch) in Western Australia that was bigger than Texas. Literally. One farm, and it was bigger than the whole state of Texas.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:02PM
Sounds like the Wong Ranch, which occupies the entire western hemisphere of Mars, in about a thousand years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:14AM
https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/29/should-we-worry-more-about-the-wildfires-in-africa-or-in-the-amazon [euronews.com]
My half joking interpretation - Africa = situation normal, already fucked up ages ago. Whereas if the Amazon keeps burning it might end up looking like Africa's savannas or deserts... ;)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:27PM
Do we have an estimate for the number of dollars improvement these will cause?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:37AM (5 children)
Even the people I know who took geography or relatively well-informed were taken aback by it. I think it is because of two reasons. The first is that the standard projection used on maps is the Mercator projection. That has the well-known effect of making landmasses closer to the poles appear larger. Since Australia is closer to the equator and the Continental U.S. is closer to the poles, the latter will appear larger on the map. The second cause I think is at play here is most people don't hear about Australia very much, so whatever picture they have of it is bound to physically shrink because if it were large and important, we'd hear about it more.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:07AM
I'd add to this the fact that the US is adjacent to Canada, which is further north, and looks even bigger in a Mercator projection: the continent of North America looks huge compared to Australia, and half of a huge thing is still going to be pretty enormous. Australia on the other hand, is surrounded by ocean, so looks like an "island". And those are always small, right?
My unconcious estimate was that Australia would be somewhere around three quarters the size of the US (simple east-west length, not area). So it's still a little surprising to me that they're so similar, but perhaps my assumption wasn't scandalously bad.
Mind you, I live in a European country that's only ~20,000km2, so they're both blooming huge to me!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nuke on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:28AM (2 children)
I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's world map. California alone is about twenty times the size of Australia :-
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~292186~90064336:The-world-according-to-Ronald-Reaga [davidrumsey.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 08 2020, @04:21PM (1 child)
Decades ago when I saw a version of Ronald Regan's world map, it had a spot in the icy north labeled "Palestinian Homeland (proposed)".
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:23PM
The version I linked to does show that - on Svalbard by the look of it, or maybe simply on the icecap.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:02PM
Gen-Xers and boomers have "Crocodile Dundee" movies to remind them of Australia.
Younger folks only have Steve Irwin and depressingly he died like 15 years ago.
The best Australia has today is David Jones the EE blogger. EE stuff typically causes instant vaginal dryness among roughly 50% of the population, unlike crocodile dundee in the 80s, so naturally this is going to impact survey results when only people who know how to properly set base bias current in each transistor of a class B bipolar transistor amplifier have even heard of Australia in the last decade or so.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:03AM (6 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:12AM (3 children)
You have a fair point, but so does the thread grandparent.
You can't expect people to make any kind of smart choice in politics(or anything, really) if they don't even understand where they are on a map.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:25AM (2 children)
Why? So if someone doesn't know exactly how large every country is, they can't, say, have an informed opinion about universal healthcare?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:32PM
> So if someone doesn't know exactly how large every country is, they can't, say, have an informed opinion about universal healthcare?
If we back off from your extreme statement to something like this: "about how large most countries are", then I'd say,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:47PM
You confuse entitlement and capability. Any human being is entitled, whether they're capable is another matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @03:15PM
"They're one step from the greatest information resource humanity has ever had access to..."
Oh, I do talk to myself sometimes, yes...
(with apologies to the writers of Dr. Who)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:02AM
Yeah, what the hell is a 'libnraries'?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:33AM (1 child)
Teaching geography in school is the most likely *cause* of this problem, because they almost certainly use the Mercator projection where you can see the US is indeed much bigger than Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:52AM
no it's not bigger. the US is below the great lakes.
when has it become ok to confuse North America with the USA?
and yes, I am ignoring the ridiculously distorted Alaska, because this overlay also ignores the ridiculously distorted Alaska.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:22AM (9 children)
Because knowing random factoids such as how large a certain country is compared to some other country is almost completely useless. We should focus on encouraging critical thinking skills and understanding, rather than mindless rote memorization of facts that just aren't that important to begin with.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @12:23PM (8 children)
You're mostly right, but
Naw. Knowing that Vietnam, Egypt, Germany, Iran, and DRC all have similar populations, at a bit under 1/3 of the USA, is not meaningless. Knowing the size of the Atacama and Sahara, of the Amazon basin and the Mississippi basin are not meaningless. These things allow us to do important estimates with ease.
Here's an example. I had someone at a holiday meal who was loudly proclaiming that 250,000 children were being killed a year in the USA by whatever it was he was bullshitting about. Because I know that's roughly 0.1% of the US population (and I don't live in the USA, so for me that's knowing international stats) I was able to pretty quickly show how it was impossible for that claim to be true. I completely shut down a bullshit claim and heavily nationalist argument with one simple datum.
This is like knowing that solid elemental iron is less sense than solid elemental gold. It's just a useless factoid until the right opportunity arises, and either there's a eureka moment or a lack of insight.
So you're wrong, because you're wrong to say that having a store of knowledge is unimportant. Do the 2nd, 3rd sig figs in these things matter? Naw. But the broad strokes, applied at the right times, allow us to understand the world around us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:31PM (7 children)
I know those facts you listed, but it does not matter that I know those facts because I am not in charge of foreign policy of any country, much less America's. I can laugh at politicians who are in charge of foreign policy screwing up those facts, but it still doesn't matter that I know they screwed up because I am not solely in charge of whether or not that politician holds office.
All things being equal, I am glad that I know more about the world instead of less. It is not, however, material to anyone else in the world or to me either, for that matter.
It's well known, and amply demonstrated in this thread, that Europeans and others snear at how ignorant Americans are. They quite neglect that a number of Americas have traveled extensively and lived in their lands and have met and known their incredibly ignorant and blinkered countrymen that they ignore because they exist outside their own urban, educated bubbles. They also don't realize how ignorant they are in comparison to your average, say, Japanese junior high school student who is cramming at a juku to pass his university entrance exams, wherein they cram you full of all kinds of useful factoids like the specific terms for all the parts of a lotus root.
So it's pleasing to not be ignorant of those facts and to be able to hoist the snearing classes on their own petards, but it's not material. It does not make me richer, or them poorer. It does not take away the luxury car in their driveway and put it in mine. And so on. So how useful are such facts as the relative sizes and populations of nations, really?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pipedwho on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:42PM (6 children)
In a democracy, the people are responsible for who is running the show. And if those people are ignorant (of whatever, not necessarily geography), they are easier to control. For example, that politician that you know is an ignorant twat and don't want in office is being kept there because too few people see how ignorant he really is.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:10PM (5 children)
No, they aren't. It's a nice theory, but in practice in a democracy the outcome is nearly always the same because it does not matter who gets elected. There might be some tinkering around the edges, but the big things, the important fundamental things, are decided by shadowy parties who control all sides of the government.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:34PM (4 children)
This is true because people keep voting for the people they are told to vote for by their favourite media outlet. With no critical thought, they just vote their 'party' even though the party's policies and actions are actively against their best interests.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:41PM (3 children)
And the party works very hard to make sure nobody can make an informed decision because they obfuscate policies in tens of thousands of legalese. It's the same thing as software engineers dumping gigabytes of code on laymen and saying, "See! It's all right there."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by sfm on Friday January 10 2020, @01:19AM (2 children)
Would the Australian fire situation have been more improved
by an aggressive CO2 abatement policy or better rangeland fire
prevention projects (such as clearing brush/dead trees and
prescribed burns) ?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 10 2020, @02:00AM
Nobody knows; it's not settled. I saw a graph a couple days ago of the high and low annual temperatures for Australia for the last century. This year's are not remarkably atypical, so it seems not so straightforward to pin bush fires on the climate. Meanwhile there have been reports [mercurynews.com] of arsonists [abc.net.au] setting at least some of them; FWIW, the second link, from an Australian source, makes it sound like people setting fires during summer holidays is a common thing.
As for fire management policy, I can't speak to bush fires in Australia but have a little bit of a window on forest fires in the American West. When Yellowstone's forests caught fire in 1988, they let it burn because it had been their long-standing policy to do so; it was controversial at the time because it is a popular park and the fires were so extensive, and because it was contrary to the fire management policies pursued at every other park and place throughout the West. 36% of the park burned down.
For contrast, the summer of 2018 was an active fire season with 98 large fires in the West and smoke that didn't let up until central Pennsylvania, and those fires were on land that the Forest Service actively works to mitigate fire potential.
In other words, mitigation or no, some years are just bad.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Friday January 10 2020, @03:28AM
The fires couldn't really be prevented with local political action, however, the current pro-corporate administration in Australia actively denies climate change since they are heavily paid for by the coal industry. They've done this for a long time, and they (and people that listen to them) look for other excuses while ignoring the real problem.
The issue in Australia is due to global changes in climate that are directly impacting Australia. There are some good month to month temperature graphs that show the changes over the last 100 years. This year is hotter and dryer than any year previous. The graphs show a steady and gradual increase that seems to accelerate around 1980.
Hazard reduction (clearing, chopping, hazard reduction burning) is always ongoing in Australia, some of which was hampered by year on year cuts to the fire service budgets. However, these fires have grown so huge that gales have driven embers from the fire fronts across large rivers and started new fires up to 6km away.
Some of the most problematic fires have started in remote locations (eg. due to lightning strikes) where, by the time anyone realised anything was happening, the fire had become a monster burning across huge dry forest areas. This can always happen, but there have been more than a few dry thunderstorms over the last couple of months. That isn't a regular occurrence. The combination of all these things has made it incredibly difficult to keep the fires under control, providing too many and too large out of control fronts that the fire services can't handle them.
People lighting fires (either intentionally or otherwise) is a misdirection of what's happening. That has always happened, and is no worse this year than any other. However, the conditions that sustain the fires are worse than ever before, so any fire becomes more problematic than it otherwise would have been if the same fires had started 20 years ago.
If it wasn't this year, then it'd happen next year or the year after. Average temperatures are continually increasing across Australia and it was only a matter of time before a big bushfire season like this occurred.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dwilson on Wednesday January 08 2020, @05:43PM
We've had Social Studies in Canada for decades now. I'll admit it's badly named and could use a new one. It's History, Geography, Economics, Political Science, Critical Thinking, and some other odds and ends, all rolled in to one.
...yeah, that sort of thing was pretty common when I was in primary school too. Part of the whole 'Geography' aspect of the class. Ours even oceans and inland bodies of water to identify! Thankfully things got a wee bit more complicated once high school rolled around.
Look, a piss-poor teacher can ruin any subject. So can a politically-motivated education board with poorly thought out curriculum changes. But frankly, the people I hear speaking against Social Studies as a subject/class, are usually the same ones that make me question the wisdom of a democratic system where every vote is equal. The worst of the lot put it in air-quotes like it's not a real thing to be taken seriously, or pounce on the word 'social' and try to work in a tie to some sort of activist/socialist/leftist movement-thing. There isn't one (Or wasn't twenty years ago, anyway. The current SJW/mob-rule insanity that our society is suffering seems to infect everything it touches, though).
As far as preparing a young person to go out in to the world, social studies is one of the most important subjects there is. I could make a pretty good case for it being the most important, with math and the sciences as a close second.
Pity that so many perceive it as a waste of time.
- D
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 09 2020, @02:40PM
Geography, shmeography. See how old I am - born in 1956. I, and a handful others, learned how to read maps, how big the world is, and all sorts of good stuff. MOST of my classmates couldn't be assed to remember which states bordered our own state, or which countries border the US, or even which hemisphere the US is in.
Don't blame the crappy school system, and don't blame millenials, or Gen X'rs, or whatever. On average, Americans have always been geographic idiots. Well, always for all of my life, at least.
Maybe they need to start drawing maps like the really old-time people. Maps with sea serpents and dragons on them, and mythical creatures captured my imagination first. As I matured, I realized all of that was make believe, but maps were still fascinating.