I thought it’d be fun to see how Europe would look if all borders were redrawn so that every point was in the same country as its nearest capital city, so I quickly wrote a wee program to illustrate this.
Some countries don’t look that different, but Italy is completely dismembered, and Scotland, Wales and parts of English all become Irish. (Just in case you’re wondering what happened to Luxembourg, I decided to exclude very small countries.)
The distance calculations are based on the distances on the actual map used, which means the borders are slightly wrong compared to what would happen if they were computed based on the actual Earth Globe.
Update: The Perl program I wrote to generate this is here.
I like the way Denmark grows back to the glory of old times 🙂
The alternative way to look at that is that Copenhagen is placed where it made sense in old times, not where it would be accessible to Danes now. 🙂
That is another way of expressing my excitement 🙂