Geographic Perspective is an Amazing Thing

What you see above is an outline of Victoria, Australia sitting atop Europe. It seems absurd, at least it did to me, that Victoria is bigger than Belgium, the Netherlands and most of Germany. It's also outrageously larger than Ireland, and similar to the entire UK.

New South Wales, it turns out, is substantially bigger than Texas, and even larger than Iraq. It blows my mind that the entire Iraq/American war which has been going for almost a decade now has taken place entirely within an area the size of NSW. Hundreds of thousands of people have died within an area the size of NSW. It may be my Australian upbringing, but NSW doesn't feel all that big - hell, you can drive across it in a day.

I really think it delivers some great perspective at this macro-scale. But it works just as well on a smaller scale. The program/website (not a lot of different these days) I've used for the above images is called MAPfrappe.com. Its a Google Map plugin that lets you draw out an area and compare it anywhere around the world. It adjusts and scales appropriately for the zoom level/location on the map (given that google maps is not inherently and totally to scale). For instance, if you wanted to compare a land holding in Sunshine and see just what kind of development actually fits into that area, you can fly around the rest of the city and see what else fits into that area.

Give it a whirl: http://www.mapfrappe.com/