Someone's emailed us asking which country's shape is most like a square.
What a stupid question.
Totally pointless.
Slovakia?
No.
Georgia?
No.
Bangladesh.
No, Bangladesh looks like a wizard.
You think everything looks like a wizard.
Ghana.
Too long.
North Macedonia.
Too round.
Liberia?
No.
Malaysia.
Jay, Malaysia is not a square.
But there must be one somewhere.
But not in Oman or the UAE,
and Yemen's more a rectangle.
yes, I can see.
Russia's nothing like a square.
Too long as far as I'm aware.
Mali starts off strongly, but right here it goes to pot.
Burkina Faso is irregular, four-sided it is not.
Hmm... Italy's a boot
So is Papua New Guinea
What about Benin and Togo?
No, they're both far too skinny.
What about these little countries, Costa Rica, Lebanon?
There's no square in Singapore, Brunei, Mauritius or Gabon.
Kuwait looks like a little thumb, Madagascar looks quite lean.
Burundi looks quite like a heart, Qatar looks like a bean.
India's a diamond and Slovenia's a splot
Cuba's very long and thin and both Koreas are short and squat.
Mozambique has got too many sides, Uzbekistan as well.
Little Paraguay's no paradigm, Mauritania's an L
And Malawi's like a seahorse, Guinea-Bissau's a weathered rock
and Nauru's nearly a circle and Somalia's a sock.
France is famously a hexagon, that fact is quite well known.
But it's not the only one, it's joined by Sierra Leone.
What about these landlocked countries like Nepal or South Sudan?
They're not square and nor are Denmark, Finland, China, or Iran.
Luxembourgers are all squares which their borders don't reflect
And Australia's a cat dog, and Japan we must reject.
Guatemala has two squarish sides in this bit in the north.
but it won't meet our criteria cause it needs a third and fourth
- Timor Leste? - Doesn't pass the test.
- Moldova? Guinea? - Don't be silly.
- Little Rwanda? - Doesn't stand a hope in hell
Nor does Israel.
Are we seriously going to go through every country?
Yes, I think it's important.
Both the USA and Canada have squares in large amounts.
but we're only counting countries and states don't count.
Poland would look like a square if it invaded to the south
Kazakhstan looks like a turtle with a leaf stuck in its mouth.
Despite a square's efficiency, the Germans don't come close
and Peru is like a resting dog, Guyana's like a ghost.
Ethiopia and Switzerland look like potato wedges
Norway, Sweden and New Zealand all have far too crinkly edges.
If you have a lot of coastline then your sides will not be straight
So the squareness of the Philippines, Greece and Ireland won't be great.
Tajikistan's quite funky, as is elephant head shaped Thailand
There's no square in Indonesia's eighteen thousand tiny islands.
If your country's made of islands then a square you'll never be
There are loads of island nations that are mostly empty sea:
Trinidad and Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, the Seychelles
The Maldives, Micronesia, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis,
Sao Tome and Principe, the Bahamas, Cape Verdi, Tonga, Vanuatu.
The Netherlands is flat, although its edges do not fit
And the following are countries with a sticky outy bit:
There's Afghanistan, Namibia, the DRC's got two.
There's Ukraine, Venezuela, Eritrea, Cyprus and Kosovoo.
- Is Morocco square? - No, it's more a stair.
- Kiribati? - Not square alas.
- Senegal? - Not square at all.
- San Marino? - San Mari-no.
The C.A.R. so near, so far, Botswana's like a flounder
Chad looks like Jay Leno, Eswatini couldn't be rounder
Mongolia looks like a bat, the Congo's kind of foxy
Myanmar's like a genie and not even slightly boxy.
Belize has one edge here that's straight but this bit's rather lumpy
Algeria and Kenya are pentagons, Honduras is too bumpy.
Sri Lanka's like a raindrop, Kyrgyzstan's a bird in flight
While Iraq and Jordan's lines are straight, the angles just aren't right.
Colombia's kind of squarish though its borders are quite rough
and Iberia would pass but Spain alone's not square enough
If Bolivia expanded, then a square it just might be
Nicaragua would look square if you viewed it in 3D
Little Liechtenstein and the Argentines are not square in the least
The Dominican Republic, that just tapers to the east
Lesotho's sort of squarish but the angle's on the wonk
Cameroon is like a chicken with a huge badonkadonk.
Mexico?
No no no no.
Portugal
Too thin, too tall.
The Saudis?
Too much on a slant.
The Vatican?
The Vati-can't.
Listing every country by its shape is not an easy job
when inevitably loads of them look only like a blob.
So to make things more efficient, as I'm sure you've got the gist
here are all blobby countries in a quick compiled list:
Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Belarus, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Cambodia, Czechia, Djibouti, Dominica, Estonia, Granada, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia
St. Lucia, Tanzania, Uruguay, Zimbabwe.
Samoa's like a butterfly whose wings have been removed
But add Ecuador and Bahrain, and it's massively improved.
Little Monaco's so tiny you can see the piers within
Chile's very very very very very
long and thin.
Uganda cannot be a square because of all the lakes
The Gambia, Vietnam and Panama all look like snakes.
Haiti, Croatia and Zambia all have shapes that wrap around
Syria's just a bit too slopey, and El Salvador's too long.
That doesn't rhyme.
Palau looks like a jellyfish, Pakistan looks like a duck
Azerbaijan looks like a bird that's been run over by a truck.
This monkey is Armenian, this shooting star's Laotian.
Jamaica, Malta and Niger are creatures from the ocean
Greenland's not a real country even though it's really big
The UK looks like an old witch sitting sideways on a pig.
Comoros would if it were glued
Some parts of Tuvalu look rude
Turkmenistan looks like something or another
Tunisia and Albania look like each other.
South Africa's too wobbly, Bulgaria's too nobbly
Brazil is too triangular, Turkey is too rectangular
Now the only countries left are ones whose squareness are the best
If you know which ones are coming we're incredibly impressed
Little Montenegro's square if you rotate it some degrees
South Sudan has left behind a very square North Sudanese.
The angles in Angola mean it's nearly good to go
and Nigeria comes close, although it bulges down below
Libya is nearly square, it's more a parallelogram
and Cote d'Ivoire and Suriname do well in our exam
Equatorial Guinea's very square but unfortunately
Since its capital's on an island, then the squarest it can't be
So the winner of our contest
fitting all our tight prescriptions
It's the squarest of the squarest
the nation of the Pharaohs
the land of Cleopatra
the country where the Sphinx is
It's the land of the Egyptiaaaaans!
Any more interesting emails come in?
There's one asking for every capital city in the world.
D'oh, that would have made a much better song.
(radio static)
...and next on the Day After Yesterday Programme, Professor John Whitstable joins us
to discuss the life and work of Noel Edmonds.
Finally, a topic I'm really interested in!
- Professor, good morning. - Good morning.
I'd like to start with Noel's first television appearance on Swap Shop in 1976...
What? No it wasn't it was Top of the Pops in 1972
...Swap Shop was of course one of Edmonds's most influential works...
Excuse me, are you listening? I said it was Top of the Pops.
- and was this the show that made Edmonds a household name on ITV? - Yes it was...
No it wasn't, Noel Edmonds never had a show on ITV!
Please correct your mistake and apologise.
Of course, Noel Edmonds went on the play Captain America in the Marvel movies...
Hello? You're talking rubbish! Can anyone hear me?
(phone rings)
Hello?
Hello there, I'm just calling to find out if you're happy with your current audio listening platform.
Well actually I'm not. I've been talking to my radio and it's been completely ignoring me.
Would you like to hear about a new app called Stereo that lets you join in the discussion?
Well yes, I would.
So Stereo is a completely free app that you can download onto your phone
and you can listen to live conversations happening between people from across the world
and you can actually leave your own comments for them to listen to and play out.
That sounds great. Can I broadcast my own conversations too?
So you can actually broadcast your own conversations as well
either by scheduling a chat with a friend, or the app will randomly place you with another Stereo user
and you can just start chatting and broadcasting immediately.
So it's a great way to meet new people.
So to get started, all you do is download the Stereo app
and create your own avatar and you can accessorise that too if you like.
Can I have a halo and a monocle?
Yep, absolutely you can have a halo and a monocle, I'll just put that through for you now.
So any shows you'd recommend?
So we're currently recommending a show called Map Men Get Lost
That will be on at 6:30pm today, that's 12th of April 2021.
it's a great opportunity to ask the Map Men any questions you might have.
So if you'd just like to click on the link in the description below
that'll take you straight through to the show, okay?
Okay!
Okay, anything else I can help you with today?
No thanks, I'll download Stereo immediately. Bye!
Now how do I find the app store?
(radio) It's on your phone, stupid.
have to find out where they are jay where would you put mark and mark where would you put jay
what i would do is find um a field where you are convinced that you're really far away but it's
as close as possible to your house yeah i would like to place you in the darian gap uh between
panama and colombia that connects central america and south america to thick jungle and marshland
and swamp and really inhospitable i just want to see if you'd survive i'm just a cruel thing to do