GeoTron 5000 has dedicated his artificial life to comparing one place to another. How tiny would Rhode Island look if someone plopped it on top of Brazil? Is Texas really bigger than the Yukon? How does the shape of that place we've never been compare to the shape of the place where we are now? With a nimble computer brain that pulls data from the best Geographic Information Systems on planet Earth, our out-of-this-world friend GeoTron uses the most accurate maps and statistics to satisfy your geo-quizzicisms.
GeoTron will be the first to tell you that there are lots of options and tradeoffs when it comes to representing three-dimensional Earth on a flat, two-dimensional map. Steve Waterman's poem introduces some of the issues: http://www.watermanpolyhedron.com/worldmap.html. GeoTron also loves this classic xkcd comic, which provides a psychological profiling of preferences: http://xkcd.com/977/.
What should GeoTron's depictions preserve? Latitude, land area, relative rotation, jars of fruit? Since the whole point of GeoTron is to get a visual feel for the relative sizes of different places, he uses a set of "equal area projections" for the images, and he bases his calculations for the textual comparisons on land area.
We hope you download and enjoy our mappy little robot, and we hope you'll show him off to all of your friends. Map on!
