On Being as Careful as I Can Be, Seriously, I Care

Doing this background checking for the whole world was truly a wonderful and enlightening experience! Many times did I leap or shout out wide-eyed in excitement discovering some new connection or being shocked by the variety in things like population density and religiosity in countries I could barely have found on a map before. Fascinating stuff, the world *is* incredible.

The reason why I care so much though, is because *all* of these countries have governments and dynamics and 100s of thousands or millions of people. 

People who live and care and have fully functioning brains and lives. As this is the case I’m not going to be dismissive of any country and make every best effort to represent every nation as fairly as possible. 

I’ve been wanting to mention that as every time I’ve felt even a moment of doubt or started getting blasé (Cape Verde I’m looking at you) I’ve thought: “Wow, ½ million people live there! I wonder what it’s like for them?” and been able to continue to be as careful as I can be.

View of downtown Mindelo en Baía do Porto Grande, São Vicente.

The smallest countries and pieces

(You got me Uruguay)

A country could confidently have it’s own piece starting at an area ~270K km2. It just works this way -- I can’t provide logical reasoning here and now but probably could if pressed to.

There is a dilemma for countries that are smaller than this size, that is too small to have their own piece -- which surrounding country’s piece should they be included with? Every single one of these needed to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The piece here that has caused me the most anguish is Uruguay (A4). At ~175K km2, 89th/203 -- it’s too small to have it’s own piece. It is. The next smallest country to have its own piece is ranked 76th (~250K km2) by area and only got its own piece on a technicality near the end (to be discussed later this is a special one). The 75th is Ecuador (~255K km2) which is quite borderline, but I have a soft spot for this country and added (the removed then added again) the Galapagos (because they’re awesome).

Yet despite Uruguay being lose-ably small there was simply no way culturally I could put it in with any of the surrounding pieces. I looked at regional history, economics and ethnography, it is truly quite independent. It wouldn’t be right to say, tack it on to Brazil. I gave it some extra ocean to try and make it bigger so it doesn’t get lost, but it’s an exception that wouldn’t conform.