They're both just naming human made shapes.
I think the periodic table would be rather less important. What I wonder is, how many people in positions of power in the US, those who actually manage its international projection a.k.a meddling, know about foreign geography, customs, etc. They're drawn from those people who filled in those maps, but I hope that someone un-idiotises them along the way, for all our sakes. Do you remember Dan Quayle?
But you need some knowledge to apply first
Well, that's the idea I was getting at. It may be less important to us, but more important to other people. It also works the other way around, as people would emphasize memorizing the table over countries on a map.
If it doesn't actually mean anything to you, or you don't use it the knowledge on a daily basis, no on can fault you for not memorizing it. Just because some random person off the street can't locate Albania on a map doesn't make them stupid, it just means that they don't need to know where Albania is on a map to get on with their daily lives. That's why we have books, and computers, to memorize all the useless crap for us so we can reference it when we need to.
And it's always gotten on my nerves for people to take these ridiculous little things and then apply them to a country at large as if it means something. Implying that one, the answers weren't cherry picked for maximum humor value, two, it constitutes an actual sample of the country at large, and thirdly, that the fact being presented is somehow necessary knowledge for one to not be an "idiot," further implying that such a thing exists and intelligence isn't relative.
