Ranting to /dev/null

Outrageously cool maps

Someone from the University of Sheffield has put together Worldmapper, a map site that resizes countries based on various criteria. There's 100 maps in all. The first is pretty obvious: land area. The first few are population based, with things like total population and total elderly.

Then it gets freaky. How about refugee origin? Rail freight? Container ports (apparently China has a heck of a lot of internal traffic)? Medicine exports (note that Europe, not the US, is the world's largest net exporter of medicines [also note that that's net])? Machine exports (non-vehicular)? Or, perhaps the most dramatic, finance and insurance exports (the US is a large exporter, but net importer)?

This, my friends, is cool.