And now for some fun at the expense of people who don’t know their geography.

Fool’s World Map has been linked to all over the web — I saw it first on MetaFilter — and, as usual, I’m just about the last person to link to it. It’s a collaborative map based on people’s mistaken assumptions of world geography.

One day, a Texan asked me a question when I lived in [the] U.S.

The question was “How many hours does it take to go to Japan by car?”

He didn’t know where Japan is, and even before that, he didn’t know that Japan is an island. And then, I thought. “What kind of world map is pictured in his mind?”

This was a beginning to think that it might be fun to gather those mixed up recognitions of countries and visualize it as a world map imagined by the fools in the world.

And, on the map, Japan is shown attached to the southwestern United States …

But wait! There’s more!

Related, but not affiliated, is this collection of globes hand-painted from memory:

Each “It’s My World” globe represents a unique world view, mapped from memory by professional artists from the Niff Institute with scant knowledge of world geography. Marvel at their endeavours to chart familiar-sounding continents and countries and their attempts to pinpoint the global position of such places as Kualalumpa, Rangoon and the Bay of Biscay.

All sold out now, sadly. Via Boing Boing.