From www.worldmapper.org - quite cool !

Cool, does it bite?

That looks painful.

There's a small lesion on the lower central lobe. Lots of swelling to the right. Not enough nutrients on the left. It's amazing that thing can fly!

And China, appropriately, appears to be swooping in for the kill:

(From Daily Telegraph, London, today)

OK being thick here but do those weird shapes actually show something?

As much as the average inkblot <g>.

OK that's what I thought

The idea is that you start with a standard area map of the world, and then create cartograms (or density-equalizing maps) - resizing each territory to relate it with the variable being mapped, in this case, population.

As explained on the worldmapper website.

"They are equal area cartograms, otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The cartogram re-sizes each territory according to the variable being mapped."

"In order to make it easier see what a these cartograms are showing, we try to preserve the shapes of individual territories, and keep them adjacent to adjacent territories and sea. The sea is always the same proportion of the map and gives the cartogram shape. (Antarctica is treated as sea.) In a sense the maps are all to the same scale, and every map is comparable with any other however the data was measured. Every map shows the worldwide distribution of something, called a variable. If a particular country is larger on one map than another, it follows that it has a higher proportion of the world total of the first variable."