Some fun weekend reading

Prompted by a discussion about Sarah Palin and Alaska, some co-workers recently asked me which US state was smallest. Since Rhode Island didn't really mean much to them, they wondered just how small it was, and I wasn't entirely sure. When we looked it up online, Wikipedia's 1500 square miles didn't really mean that much to us... so we tried to find other things that were about the same size (if my last studio professor taught me anything, it was how important a scale figure is in a drawing...). This search brought up a surprising number of people trying to do the same, as apparently many things in the USA (Californian forest fires are a popular one) use Rhode Island's area as a comparison.

Right. The point. I somehow ended up on a website that compared the size of most of the countries in the world to the size of American states. Brilliant! Ever wondered how big Cambodia is? Well, that would be about the same as Missouri. Madagascar? Two Arizonas. So check it out...

Americans, know thy world, Part 1
Americans, know thy world, Part 2