Check Out These 42 Fascinating, Thought-Provoking Maps

I love maps. They’re such a clean way to order and process information. Without them, it would be exponentially harder to figure out where you’re going, to gauge space and to understand population density. Unfortunately, maps can also be extremely misleading at times and bring with them their own set of biases. For example: how big do you think Africa is? The size of the United States plus Canada maybe? It turns out Africa is actually larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, France, Italy, the UK, Germany, Spain and Eastern Europe put together.

That’s pretty well illustrated in this handy dandy map, which is one of forty-one fascinating and eye-popping visuals featured in the brilliant new Blog Brothers video 42 Amazing Maps. Put together by Hank Green, the collection covers everything from those soda vs pop maps to distorted maps correlating the size of each country to the number of actual residents it has.

In just under four minutes, the whole thing flies by, but luckily, Hank was nice enough to place links to every single discussed map inside the comment section on YouTube. That way, when one draws your eye and you feel like spending (or wasting) the next two hours of your life examining every detail of the offerings, you will be able to do that quickly without trying to figure out how to describe it for Googling purposes.

Between Vlog Brothers and Mental Floss, there are few better people to go for knowledge than the Green household. John and Hank seem to always be churning out thought-provoking and interesting ideas, and fortunately for them, they’ve built up very devoted fanbases because of it.

Here’s a look at John’s informative, non-partisan thoughts on health care…