This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre.
I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall Munroe’s snarky joke doesn’t change the metaphorical power of the expression.
But what a glance at Munroe’s own map shows is that the bulk of the land on Earth is located north of the Equator, so if we picked a speck of terrain at random, it’ll more often fall north of the Equator. What if, I then wondered, I got rid of the Equator and split the Earth in half by area, in effect making an “Area Equator,” so that a randomly selected point on land would have a 50% chance of landing in the “South” as opposed to the “North.” What might that world look like?
Enter Quantum GIS. I downloaded a shapefile of the world, and it had area already keyed in as an attribute for each country.1 I was ready to calculate the areas of each polygon, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. Then I added polygons until the sum of the areas of the selected polygons was about half of the total sum of the area. Next, I chose an outrageous color scheme. The results:2
The world, split by area. (click to enlarge)
What’s interesting is that this map is not so terribly different than the map of the North-South Divide provided by Wikipedia. The main difference is that I include Australia, while they include much more of Asia. China by itself has a larger area than Australia, so subtracting the Aussies from my area list and adding China would already knock the swing out. But my point is, at this stage, strictly cartographical.3 One can now sort of see where the “Area Equator” of the Earth is.
So this doesn’t let JFK off the hook, but it might nuance the point a bit.
- There were some errors. A handful of small countries and Eritrea reported 0 for their area. [↩]
- I ran the test twice, with and without Antarctica. Mostly adding in that frozen landmass means that I have to deselect much of the Middle East, Pakistan, and, I think, Algeria. So it’s not terribly different. Remember: Antarctica is never as big as it seems on unprojected maps. [↩]
- Another caveat: I have no idea where the “area” calculation came from, so who knows how reliable my results are. [↩]
Tags: geography, GIS, Global South, Quantum GIS, Randall Munroe, xkcd
June 16th, 2010 at 20:26
Great minds think alike I guess. This whole theme came up at Edge of the American West where I hazarded a guess that your research confirms.
As I said on twitter, I think a joke that depends on pedantry for its punchline to work deserves some pedantic play in response.
The thing that strikes me (again hazarding a guess) is that with India and Mexico in the “South” the distribution of world population between North and South is much closer to even than I would have expected, even if China counts as part of the North.
July 12th, 2010 at 21:10
You might also consider the population “equator” of the world; the latitude that half of all people live south of. Again, it’s far enough north that the Global South map on Wikipedia is a good approximation of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.....lation.png