16 Comments on "Hats off to Greenland"


  1. Greenland a nation? That’s awesome if they are. I thought it was a protectorate or a defensorate or a sort of designated preserve.


  2. > It would be nice to have the same map, but with the countries represented by size, not colour.

    There’s a name for that: “area cartogram”.


  3. I imagine NZ is often mentioned in the same breath as Australia. Now, because Australia has five times the population, each joint mention drives up the ratio for NZ five times as much. C.f. how much Mongolia stands out between China and Russia. Surely that’s because it only has 3 million citizens, not because it was mentioned so often in the news.


  4. The idea that NZ is often mentioned in the same breath as Australia is just plain dumb. That’s like saying that Mexico is often mentioned in the same breath as the USA.


  5. The phrase “Australia and New Zealand”, restricted to “site:nytimes.com”, gives over 11000 hits on Google. “USA and Mexico”: 13 hits. So, no, one is not like the other, and calling the idea plain dumb doesn’t turn out to be all that smart.


  6. Search results for “New Zealand” in nytimes.com in the past year = 359

    Search results for “Australia New Zealand” in nytimes.com in the past year = 118

    Thus about one third of the time that New Zealand was mentioned on nytimes.com in the past year, Australia was also mentioned. However, when Australia was mentioned (which occurred 1,156 times), New Zealand was also mentioned only 10% of the time.

    So you’re both right!

    (PS – When Mexico was mentioned, the United States was also mentioned close to half the time.)


  7. Well, OK, when you change ‘USA’ to ‘United States’, which sounds more like the NYT, you get over 11000 as well. But anyway, the idea is still sound: Australia, excluding the term “New Zealand”, gets about 800,000 hits on nytimes.com, NZ by itself about 100,000, and both together about 70,000. So, (not quite) half of the time NZ is mention, it’s mentioned in conjunction with Australia, and every time that happens it increases NZ’s ratio 5 times as much.


  8. What’s a bet that the majority of the >28,172 times Greenland is mentioned (Pop 56,344) it is in relation to Climate Change or the Gulf Stream.

    I think the map’s not really of use, given that you would expect the NY Times’ coverage of U.S. issues to be state or city based rather than a generic country label. As for other countries, stock market and political pieces would often refer to the capital city than the country itself.

    I do wonder as to the colour of Antarctica given it’s population of 4,000 in summer and about 1,000 in winter.


  9. Saying that one of Dorothy’s maps is not really of use is like saying that because they keep driving in circles, Nascar drivers aren’t really getting anywhere.

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