21Jan/1121
World According to Americans
by Jeff
Image text: It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!
Click the image to see the big version. This group of Americans is remarkably well informed. This is no "Jay Leno" man on the street ridiculousness.
Sorry for the very late post, but you did not need to much help on this one.
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Complex Conjugate »
January 23rd, 2011
The other doubly-landlocked country is Liechtenstein which is surrounded by Switzerland and Austria. Doubly-Landlocked means that a country is surrounded by landlocked countries. A country is landlocked if it has no access to the open sea.
January 29th, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_landlocked_country#Doubly_landlocked_country
January 23rd, 2011
Well, I don’t get it. I mean, I “understand” it, but don’t see what’s funny. Unless it’s just meant to show that most Americans would have screwed this up.
So, I’m hoping I missed something obvious.
January 23rd, 2011
You didn’t miss much — the “funny” is that the stereotype of an american is to know nothing of geography outside of the US, and Randal’s survey fails to confirm this stenotype. — and then the funny notes on the map as Harm points out below
February 11th, 2011
Test 1 >
Test2 >
Test 3 <
Test 4 <
Test 5
January 24th, 2011
There’s a somewhat well-circulated image on the internet entitled “The World According to Americans” which plays on the stereotype of the ignorant American. In it, the entirety of Eastern Europe and most of Asia are entitled “commies” and the Middle-East as “evil-doers,” and so on.
Later, other people created similar maps to re-do the concept. It later spread to other cultures.
This is an anti-joke playing on that idea. You expect to see something which plays on the stereotypes that exist in American culture of various parts of the world. However, instead, the map is remarkably well-informed.
If you aren’t familiar with the original joke map, then this doesn’t mean much to you.
January 24th, 2011
Oh! That helps out. I’ve never seen the original. Glad I stopped by.
January 24th, 2011
The original (probably. decent representative, anyway) here: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/11/the-world-according-to-americans/
February 6th, 2011
Pretty sure this one came first. Similar idea, anyway.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070123035221/uncyclopedia/images/e/ea/Badamerica.gif
January 23rd, 2011
There’s actually a lot of funny stuff written on the map (Risk, the varying projections, Antarctica, etc.). I think it’s meant to say that all Americans are not as stupid as the rest of the world likes to think.
January 24th, 2011
They spelled Philippines wrong
January 24th, 2011
Hey, what’s wrong with the Peter’s Map?
January 27th, 2011
The Peters projection is an equal-area projection, so it gets the relative areas of Africa and Greenland right, but gets their shapes horribly wrong.
January 29th, 2011
“Sorry for the very late post, but you did not nee to much help on this one.”
A dictionary! A kingdom for a dictionary!
Honestly, not all of the references in the map are self-explanatory.
OK, i can do a google search on the unknowns, but then why is this website called explainxkcd?
Boxing Day?
Robinson Projection?
No proper border between Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Rainforest DRC? (turned out to be Democratic Republic of Congo – and it is the only state on the map – besides Taiwan – where the full title is given).
Why is Tierra del Fuego listed separately – it´s not a state?
“but i admit i only know this from risk” – does really every reader of this site know that risk is a board game?
“Paupa New Guinea” – was this an accident?
Google tells me it was not!
February 6th, 2011
This website is “explainxkcd”, not “explaingeography”.
February 7th, 2011
What I still don’t understand is why the map is still grossly over-simplified.
Is this the point? That even when Americans try hard at geography they are still beaten by a 12-years old average European kid?
February 21st, 2011
correct, think of it in terms of “are you smarter than a 5th grader.” If you were to go up to a random person, hand them a blank globe, and ask them to approximately fill it it, they probably wouldn’t know very much. The “random” people who were asked to fill out the map actually knew much more than the average American would have thus disproving the stereotype that all Americans care about is America.
February 14th, 2011
A kingdom for a spell-check apparently.
February 9th, 2011
Cape Horn is on the wrong continent….
April 19th, 2012
Good point! That’s one glaring mistake they (the Americans on the street corner) made when they tried to show off my including it. Cape Horn is the southern tip of South America; the southern tip of Africa is the Cape of Good Hope!
April 19th, 2012
I do think that the map is too simplified for the premise that these were students who had just been to a geography bee… I think they would have started drawing and labelling more individual countries, such as in Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America (even if they admittedly weren’t that good at African political geography…) Of course, they may have been running out of time.
Another possible mistake they make is “Do we have to label All the Virgin Islands” when apparently they mean the Lesser Antilles (Barbados, Martinique, etc.) – it seems unlikely that they would be going into such detail as to actually label the U.S. Virgin Islands of St. John, St. Thomas & St. Croix, and/or the British Virgin Islands (which Wikipedia tells me are Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Jost Van Dyke, and Anegada) – since they weren’t labelling, for example, the much larger (and presumably more likely for them to know) U.S. States, European countries, etc.