Ah I'm glad. That's much better than the solution I had in mind of using the sand from the desert to expand the land into the sea to add extra 100k km of land area, to hide all this embarrassment under the rug.

I actually measured the size of (parts of) Yemen on maps a week or two ago, trying to figure out the population density of the Houthi-controlled areas, which contain the majority (~70-80%, hard to say exactly as the population distribution has been changing rapidly in the past decade) of Yemen's population in about 1/3 of it's land.

Something about eyeballs and all bugs being shallow...

A casual review of the satellite view of the border with Saudi Arabia shows that much of it is desolate uninhabited sand dunes, so it's not like there's border markers such as the US/Canada have. Or likely an accurate survey (you'd need high precision GNSS equipment and something that can traverse serious sand dunes as a vehicle, because no fixed markers and traditional surveying methods have any chance of success there).

A bunch of countries are suspected of undercounting their population because so many people are living "off the grid" or deliberately overcounting to get more funding. Probably some of the cases are real and some are just conspiracy theories.

These kinds of issues have existed since the first human started recording what they owned, and will probably continue plaguing us until the last one dies.

Imagine how much of published science is statistically significant only due to clerical errors and mistakes in calculation...

(See e.g. The misreporting of statistical results in psychology journals; Bakker, Wicherts; Behaviour Research Methods; 2011.)

Although I do hope too that people don't lose their sense of meaning and curiosity too much, it's worth keeping in mind that this article was published in 2024 which was a very different world from now. Curiosity requires energy, and it'll be hard for a creature relying on energy for survival to justify using their own energy for some activity when there's a more energy-efficient way to reach a specific goal. But just like going to the gym makes your body healthier despite the fact that this requires energy, thinking on your own will be increasingly important for maintaining a healthy mind and the sense of self.

You could check, but it would be quite shocking if they weren’t.

3D topographic surface area has the "coastline problem" where the more precisely you measure it, the more it grows.

2D area is stable under increasing measurement precision.

Well, this is a pretty perfect usecase for AI (although it's also easy to just get shapefiles from NE and do it yourself, obviously).

Interestingly all of UAE, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have significant discrepancies between the World Factbook and their shapefiles (in every case overestimating), probably all related to not having had a demarcated border in the Rub Al Khali.

I will write you every day.

(I suppose people downvoting this don’t know the reference. Way to make us feel old :) )