My Map Is Bigger Than Yours

The other night, we had a dinner with a local couple that we know through Rachel's work. We had some interesting conversation, and one of the things brought up by -- we'll call him Harry -- was that he had just recently viewed a program on the telly in which Americans were surveyed and basically found to be ignorant of geography. Most Americans, Harry claims, would agree that London was in France, among other mistakes. I argued back that even though there might be some truth to that, the USA is so much bigger than most of the European countries, that our states are similar to their countries. And most Americans have a decent idea where each state is and what big cities are in the state. Then I got to thinking, as I do too often, how do the two sides of the pond really compare when you look at the numbers from a common viewpoint?

I took Hereford, and I took Chicago, and found the distances from each of those places to other big cities. In the following list, the first city is about the same distance from Hereford as the second city is from Chicago. These are estimates, but they aren't too far off.

• London, England = Madison, Wisconsin (115 miles)
• Dublin, Ireland = Indianapolis, Indiana (170 miles)
  
• Glasgow, Scotland = Detroit, Michigan (270 miles)
  
• Paris, France = Cleveland, Ohio (310 miles)
  
• Brussels, Belgium = Lexington, Kentucky (320 miles)
  
• Berlin, Germany = New York, New York (680 miles)
  
• Madrid, Spain = Dallas, Texas (800 miles)
  
• Moscow, Russia = Las Vegas, Nevada (1600 miles)
  
• Chicago, Illinois = Hereford, England (3800 miles)
• San Francisco, California = Bucharest, Hungary (5200 miles)
  

You get the idea pretty quickly -- in my head, Chicago to Las Vegas is a quick flight, but here, in my little office at the Lilacs, I feel like Moscow is a million miles away.