Recent I received as a birthday gift from a dear old friend the Maphead book by Ken Jennings. I devoured the first chapter! I was completely identified with the author and I was thinking in all the geographical knowledge that I knew while I was learning many things that I never knew. The best was the concept of a triple island. That is, an island in a lake that is in an island in a lake that is in an inland! As a computer scientist I find surprising to find 3 levels of recursion in something so real. The largest island that has such configuration is Victoria in the north of Canada, being Luzon in Philippines the second largest.
Then I did the test at the end to see if I was a Maphead and I answered 34 correctly, so I am a Maphead (at least 31 of 40 correct). I could argue in my defense that 4 wrong answers were for North America questions and only 2 from the rest of the world. Considering that 10 questions were about North America, the test is biased (bias, a good topic for the data part of the blog).
Below is my own 3 questions test to know if you are a Maphead, a couple influenced by another Maphead, my former PhD supervisor, Gaston Gonnet:
1. Name at least 5 countries that have two separate unconnected pieces of land in the same piece of land (that is, an island does not count unless there two separate pieces of the same country in that island -if you find this particular case, you have extra credit).
2. Which animal is two different countries in two different languages (yes, this implies knowledge of more than one language which is biased against Americans and even works with 3 different countries & languages). A simple variation of this question is: name a country that is a food in another country.
3. Make groups with all the cities of the same name (e.g. all Londons are a group, all Parises are another group, etc.). Now sort the groups by the population of the second largest city in each group. Which city wins?
