During your daily activities, how much do you stop and think about just how big the world truly is? Recently Kai Krause, posted work on Creative Commons as a “contribution in the fight against rampant immappancy”- Immappancy being the idea that most people normally think of certain land masses as larger than they actually are.

By combining the area of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, The United States, Eastern Europe, India, China, Japan and others he creates a map which shows that the area of many of the “big” countries combined still don’t equal the size of Africa! He goes on to state that “a survey with American school kids let them guess the land area of their country [and] unexpectedly the majority chose “largest in the world”.  And while critics are saying that it is difficult to compare a continent with countries and that his map used improper projections which can distort scales, it is still interesting to take a minute and just realize how big the world is and all of the amazing heritable knowledge still waiting to be documented! 

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