[HN Gopher] Maps distort how we see the world
___________________________________________________________________
Maps distort how we see the world
Author : yarapavan
Score : 629 points
Date : 2023-06-21 17:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Good luck using a compass and using a projection other than
| mercator.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| When I was in Google Maps, a popular interview question was
| "what's your favorite projection? (don't say Mercator)" I didn't
| get asked that one, fortunately.
|
| Whenever I see one of those "the Earth from space" photos, I
| always think, "Wow, Africa is _really_ big. "
| placesalt wrote:
| I agree with many other comments here that this is more an effect
| of the practical purpose that maps are created for than any
| presumed nefarious motivation. Look at the list of supported
| projections in the PROJ database - it's a very long list, and
| they're all there to solve some particular problem.
|
| Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson
| projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-
| purpose wall maps.
|
| Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-
| purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred
| around Antarctica:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...
| drno123 wrote:
| Is this the same Pueyo who shaped Covid response through "the
| hammer and the dance"? People still consider this guy relevant?!?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Dude, that is wild! I mean, I know about the distortion but still
| watching Indonesia span that width is crazy. Or the bits about
| Brazil's Northernmost and Easternmost, or China's Westernmost.
|
| Great collection of illustrations.
| andsoitis wrote:
| To me a more interesting thing is that we always show "north" as
| "up" or at the "top".
|
| Even recognizing that it is "natural" given our use of compasses,
| one would think we can be more playful showing earth with
| different "up" orientation.
| ddmma wrote:
| The closer to Ecuador the less higher entropy so not having focus
| on productive work but maybe just enjoy the sun. Also because of
| heat people tend to be more violent.
| nntwozz wrote:
| "The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
| j_m_b wrote:
| Shame I had to get this far to see this quote. It should be in
| the original article!
| lucb1e wrote:
| Regarding "How would fish draw a map?" (image:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
| since there's no heading to link to)
|
| Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to
| shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so
| they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article
| about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article
| described how genes are transmitted globally despite having
| separate continents (iirc the waters are shallow enough near the
| north pole and around oceania to form one long line along all
| shores), but I can't remember it well enough to find it again.
| Tried checking it elsewhere but all the relevant-sounding
| Wikipedia articles don't seem to talk about the ratio of deep sea
| animals to near-shore animals. Can anyone else confirm or refute
| this?
| messe wrote:
| You've linked the wrong image (off by one); that one is the
| sarcastic depiction of the "international community".
| lucb1e wrote:
| Oh crap, thanks for letting me know. Didn't see it in time
| for the edit window though :( if only HN had notifications or
| just lets you edit, y'know, your own posts
| slibhb wrote:
| > Countries closer to the equator--which happen to be poorer1--
| seem smaller than they are.
|
| Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web
| Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
|
| One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google
| maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token,
| if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject
| a map based on whatever is centered.
| nwallin wrote:
| > The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
|
| It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator:
| Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal.
| Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts
| shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator
| doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection.
|
| Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys
| me though.
| oakashes wrote:
| > One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen.
| Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough.
|
| This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-
| dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe.
| I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom
| out enough.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| profsummergig wrote:
| Extremely well put-together article. Contains many examples I've
| seen in disparate sources before.
|
| I will use it as an example of how data visualization can
| distort.
|
| I often wonder if similar things happen with tabular data, but we
| just can't "see" it so clearly.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| If you think only in Mercator (e.g.), it's easy to fall into
| erroneous concepts. A great example of this came when, years ago,
| I had a business trip from Texas where I live to Dubai.
|
| A friend asked, cleverly aware of the distance involved, if the
| flight went east or west -- because if you have Flat Map Brain,
| that's what you default to, right?
|
| The answer is "neither."
|
| The route went mostly north from Houston, crossed Canada and
| began trending south (without turning!) over / around Iceland; we
| approached Dubai from the north, more or less.
|
| I remember the flight back home going over Iran, but it was at
| least a decade ago and regional tensions may have made them
| change that. This site
|
| https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211
|
| shows them avoiding Iranian airspace now, but the flight path
| seems otherwise about the same.
| netsharc wrote:
| This site shows the shortest path between 2 airports:
| http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB
|
| I'd imagine your flight would've avoided Russia, afaik even
| before the war they were obnoxious about who can fly over
| them/how much it would cost:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I've no recollection about flying in Russian airspace, but I
| definitely did snap a phonecam pic of the seatback map
| showing us flying between the Elburz mountains and Tehran.
| This was in 2012, so 11 years ago (per the date of the pic I
| found).
|
| The path suggested by that position absolutely implies flight
| over Russian territory, but obviously I have no data beyond
| that. It seems unlikely that an airliner would, like, zigzag
| around; n.b. that I was on Emirates, not a US carrier, and
| Russia (and other countries) probably doesn't treat them like
| they would an airline run out of a NATO country.
|
| Or, at least, probably didn't in 2012. No idea what the rules
| are now.
|
| EDIT: I found this article which notes that, at least as of a
| year ago, Emirates was flying TO Russia, so presumably
| flights through Russian airspace en route to other places
| were okay as well before the war.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/emirates-...
| netsharc wrote:
| Well, zig-zags happen, almost all airlines avoided flying
| over Ukraine after the MH17 shootdown, and no flights fly
| straight from point to point like what gcmap.com would
| show, they follow "roads", e.g:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks . It's
| also possible they'd avoid Russia if the detour costs less
| than the overfly fee.
|
| Yeah Emirates didn't join in the sanctions, so they can
| still fly to, and over Russia. A few weeks ago there was an
| Air India that was flying from India to the US over Russia,
| and had to make an emergency landing in Russia, there were
| concerns whether they'd be allowed to import a replacement
| engine into Russia because the sanctions.
| cubefox wrote:
| With the advent of the paperless office, the increasing ubiquity
| of screens, and the steady progress in 3D rendering performance -
| there will soon be little need for 2D map projections. We just
| render the Earth as a sphere and do some perspective projection.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Screens are still flat, so it would still be a 2d projection.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yes, but 3D perspective projection is what our eyes do
| anyway, so there are no unnatural distortions. Paintings and
| video games use it to create realistic images of 3D space.
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| Guthur wrote:
| Distorts nothing, it gives a particular view of the world. All
| our views of the world are highly localised by the very nature of
| our existence.
|
| We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to
| be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to
| transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be
| biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.
| interroboink wrote:
| I have a poster of a South-up map[1], which is fun to look at and
| wiggle those expectations in my mind from time to time.
|
| Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection.
|
| [1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-
| worl... (just an example; you can find others)
|
| [2] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348
| idatum wrote:
| Makes me wonder why South isn't intuitively "up" for folks in
| the Southern Hemisphere.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Save reason they observe Yule at midsummer.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I imagine having your maps rotated compared to most of the
| world (90% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere)
| would probably be a pain to deal with.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Mildly interesting then I got to then end and saw the "come back
| next week for my premium on article on WHY" and couldn't help
| feeling this was basically just a content mill article full of
| factoids trying to get you to give some random guy on the
| internet money.
|
| Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD
| AntiRemote wrote:
| [dead]
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| A hot take perhaps but now I'm curious -- Is this an American/New
| World/Big-Ass-Country (I could see Russia/China caring)
| phenomenon?
|
| A lot of British people, especially when being smug and
| nationalist online, speak about how their tiny island took over
| so many other big places.
|
| I never asked a Frenchman and obviously it's in bad form to ask
| the Germans...
|
| The Scandis ""benefit"" the most from the distortion but never
| really had empire apart from in the neighboring areas, so I don't
| know if they ever think about it.
| Exoristos wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov...
| Everybody tried to take over the world in that era. Hell, the
| Scots had Panama at one point.
| efsavage wrote:
| A good collection, I especially like the Mediterranean-in-
| Australia one.
|
| Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We
| See the World" you should see what not having a map does!
| randcraw wrote:
| There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases
| imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator
| makes North America look huge:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI
| js2 wrote:
| Probably seen that clip a dozen times and this was the first
| time I noticed Whitford manspreading in the middle of the clip
| and Janney batting his leg back. By the look on his face, it
| seems improvised to get a laugh out of her.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| it's a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the
| biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top.
| Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How
| about maps with north and south swapped?
| prepend wrote:
| Maybe more accurate is that there wasn't some nefarious
| bias that was meant to oppress people.
|
| Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It's a
| simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we'd
| be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
| arp242 wrote:
| I'd argue that, by coincidence, putting Africa/Europe in
| roughly the centre happens to be the most sensible.
| Extraterrestrials with no knowledge of humans would
| probably do this.
|
| The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical
| centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia
| to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the
| edges. If you place China in the centre then you're
| "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a
| worse map because significant parts of the world are
| pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes
| centre stage.
|
| You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far
| as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre
| still shows you _most_ of the world 's landmasses, but if
| you put China in the centre it's almost as if the
| Americas haven't been discovered yet.
|
| [1]: https://studycli.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Maybe instead of putting Europe in the middle we could do
| something sensible like put the split left-right edges
| down the middle of the widest ocean.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| >Europe was at the center because they made the maps.
| It's a simple reason. If some other culture has been
| dominant we'd be using a projection that makes it more
| useful for them.
|
| IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered
| on China is far more meaningful than changing the
| projection. The entire world revolved around China and
| trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more
| immediately understand things such as
|
| 1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east.
| (and thereby the importance of controlling that region
| and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman
| Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
|
| 2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly
| big and OP for horses)
|
| 3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of
| certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of
| years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to
| _china_ and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
|
| 4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to
| 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
|
| I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human
| History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
| mijkal wrote:
| Fyi China calls itself 'Zhongguo' -- literally 'Middle
| Kingdom' (Country)
| yunohn wrote:
| The vast majority of items are manufactured in Asia now,
| especially globes. By your logic, should they
| unilaterally start printing Asia in the center?
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map
| projection problem. And no, they should not be printing
| any part of the world in the center of the globe!
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map
| projection problem.
|
| They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous
| Poland Globe:
|
| https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-
| uncanny...
| prepend wrote:
| This isn't my logic, it's the logic of the map designers.
|
| It's not important where they are made. It's important
| where they are designed.
|
| I expect there's lots of maps with Asia in the center,
| but I don't expect people in the US to buy them.
| hnfong wrote:
| First you said the center is decided by who made the
| maps.
|
| Then you changed it to who designed the maps.
|
| In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make
| the decision.
|
| Make up your mind?
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| Unilaterally? If they want to use maps that center Asia
| in their education and work, who is stopping them? In
| fact I'd wager they start their education by learning
| about the geography of Asia first.
|
| I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the
| world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming
| Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps
| is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school,
| and not some globally-representative language (maybe
| English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".
|
| Though your mention of "especially globes" has me
| wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a
| globe...
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Saying there is a bias is not an accusation of wrong
| doing or "demonization".
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| Not necessarily, but usually. E.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422476 linked a
| clip from the West Wing that blames biased Eurocentric
| maps for perpetuating colonialism.
| fifafifi wrote:
| It's crazy how populists and misinformation agents have
| successfully convinced people that any mention of a
| potential bias is an "woke" attack on their whole
| personality and world view.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Only if you count bad evangelists as "misinformation
| agents". There are unfortunately plenty of bad actors who
| have persistently tried to use it as a social cudgel and
| an excuse to fight for social dominance, shield oneself
| from being questioned (including self-reflection), and to
| write others off. To be frank, it is no wonder people
| view it as an attack when that is exactly what it has
| been used for.
|
| For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors
| look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white
| priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have
| to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated
| against is a moral problem!
| [deleted]
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Almost no one lives in the south so they are never swapped.
| cjfd wrote:
| Actually, in China I saw a map where the cut was in the
| Atlantic Ocean. I am not sure how wide spread that is but I
| would say it makes sense for any world map used in Eastern
| Asia.
| eythian wrote:
| I recall that being reasonably common in New Zealand when
| I was growing up.
| croes wrote:
| If you nake a map for your navigation, what would you put
| in center?
|
| Your starting point or any other point?
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| It's fascinating how we're expected to believe senior White
| House officials are such perfect strawman doofuses that they
| have never seen a globe or the Mollweide projection, or were
| ever reprimanded by a geography teacher for saying "up" instead
| of "North". The only thing that scene is missing is for her to
| fall over in shock and disbelief at hearing that the Earth is
| round.
|
| They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.
| codingdave wrote:
| It is fiction. Relax and enjoy the show.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| The only way I could enjoy that farce is after multiple,
| life-alteringly serious concussions.
| varenc wrote:
| The video quality of that clip was so bad I uploaded a new
| 1080p version to YouTube: https://youtu.be/dxhWybPCEpI
|
| If you want to avoid YouTube, here's just the video:
| https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/szn691fdcgvxwh8/map_proj...
|
| edit: updated YouTube link to include the full version
| izzydata wrote:
| It ends too soon. The funniest part is when they talk about
| the northern hemisphere being on top and then them putting it
| on the bottom and her saying it is freaking her out.
| varenc wrote:
| Doh! Thanks for the spot. The 2nd part is actually from a
| different scene, but I combined them both and updated the
| links above.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Except Mercator wasn't German.
|
| He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East
| Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator
| gerdesj wrote:
| "5 March 1512 - 2 December 1594"
|
| Everything was a bit complicated in that region in the
| medieval period. In the C16, you immediately come up short
| with the concept of "Germany".
| Tade0 wrote:
| Germany the state - indeed, but German as a
| culture/language/nationality(in the contemporary
| definition) was definitely there.
|
| Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid
| XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and
| remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the
| XX century.
|
| My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define
| one's identity.
| ralusek wrote:
| This clip is always hilarious to me. Smugly declares "it's
| where you've been living this whole time," as he stands in
| front of a projection that is just as flawed, as all
| projections are, as the Mercator. The only priority of that map
| projection is attempting to account for the accurate area of
| landmasses, sacrificing correct shape of landmasses, as well as
| a ton of navigational utility.
|
| A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally
| never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!"
| Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe
| projection when you zoom out far enough.
|
| This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at
| parties.
| Jabbles wrote:
| > as well as a ton of navigational utility
|
| Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and
| these days not even them?
| ralusek wrote:
| No I mean like when you open your maps application and want
| to go somewhere with GPS, latitude and longitude will be
| vertical and horizontal and proportionally spaced due to
| the map using a projection like Mercator...
| fifafifi wrote:
| A globe is not a map projection.
|
| With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.
| ralusek wrote:
| A globe IS a map projection. It's the projection of the
| surface of the planet onto a sphere.
| bentley wrote:
| And that's the tradeoff of using a globe, whereas the
| tradeoff of the Peters projection is that the map is
| distorted in various ways, and the tradeoff of Mercator is
| that the map is distorted in other ways.
|
| Which is why that _West Wing_ clip is, frankly,
| pretentious, because it doesn't discuss the negatives of
| Peters, wrongly implies that it's "the" correct way to view
| the world, and makes no mention of other major projections,
| or even a globe.
|
| Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is
| sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a
| globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers,
| which is typically great for the continental US, but I
| probably wouldn't use it so much if I regularly made maps
| of other places!
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| To be fair, the West Wing was pretentious in so many
| other ways that this is one of the few clips that borders
| on genuinely educational. Flawed? Yes. But it's not an
| educational show, it's a bizarre hyper-liberal hour-long
| lecture to the viewer where for some reason every single
| character talks like an over the hill Jewish man with the
| same verbal tics and expressions.
|
| And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce
| an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than
| everyone at cocktail parties.
| trhfhxggf wrote:
| It makes things further from the equator appear huge. There's
| no conspiracy or biases involved, unless of course you're
| proposing that the Mercator projection was developed to give
| Antarctica a false sense of superiority.
| Taniwha wrote:
| One of the common maps used in schools cuts off the bottom
| quarter of the map, including Antarctica making the southern
| hemisphere half the size of the northern
| chippiewill wrote:
| Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a
| two-ton block of cheese. It was there, for any and all who were
| hungry, it was there for the voiceless.
| sublinear wrote:
| So... government cheese?
| [deleted]
| mcv wrote:
| Great article, with one big problem: it's guilty of the exact
| issue it tries to address: assuming specific map projections as
| the default.
|
| It starts:
|
| > Maps twist our perception of the world.
|
| > Countries closer to the equator--which happen to be poorer--
| seem smaller than they are.
|
| This is obviously not true for all map projections. It is
| famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot
| because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the
| main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. It's probably
| true for some other map projections, but definitely not for all.
|
| The article doesn't even mention the name Mercator until its
| second half.
| defrost wrote:
| > It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see
| a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and
| that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives.
|
| The Mercator _family_ is "the best" map _family_ for those who
| navigate by rhumb lines.
|
| I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth
| navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given
| the vast numbers of GPS enabled devices.
|
| I stressed _family_ , of course, as there is a continuum of
| Mercator projection maps .. _The_ (specific) _Mercator
| Projection_ that wall hangs and everbody discusses whenever
| this comes up is just one of many and whose parameters were
| chosen to weight the Northern Hemisphere for the benefit of US-
| Euro traders.
| mcv wrote:
| We don't navigate by rhumb lines, we navigate by directions
| and local shapes, and those are the important things that
| stay the same in Mercator. If some angles on the map are
| smaller than they should be while others are larger, that's
| confusing. Mercator keeps this consistent.
|
| Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to
| navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty
| terrible.
|
| Of course today with computerised navigation, we don't really
| have to use a flat projection at all; it would be even more
| accurate to calculate every view directly from a globe. Have
| your own custom projection based on where you are.
|
| But if you're going to use a flat map projection for
| navigation, Mercator is it. Or something Mercatory, at least;
| centering on Greenwich and having north up is less relevant,
| although deviating from the latter would probably confuse a
| lot of people.
|
| And outside of navigation, we really shouldn't ever be using
| Mercator. I'm not sure if that happens. When I was in school,
| I remember we had a Goode-Homolosine map on the wall, which
| is an excellent choice for that. Every map projection has its
| purposes that it's good at, and those it's not. But
| especially with the ubiquity of Google Maps, it's not
| surprising that people get more exposure to Mercator.
| defrost wrote:
| > But if you're going to use a flat map projection for
| navigation, Mercator is it.
|
| For you, perhaps.
|
| As a professional geographer since ~ 1980 (ish) I did enjoy
| the NZMG (1949) that remained in use until 2001 - it was
| centred down the mean common spine of the North and South
| Islands and minimised distortion across the entirety of the
| New Zealand land and waters [1]. It was one of only three
| (IIRC) complex-number polynomial expansion projections in
| common use - but they're ideal for certain land form
| shapes.
|
| I've seen a _lot_ of local ellipsoid+datum+projection
| mapping systems globally - I was doing global geophysical
| mapping during the transition to WGS84 and got into the
| weeds wrt transforms between that and the 300+ mapping
| systems commonly in use about the globe prior to todays
| uniformity.
|
| Pilots, of course, use aeronautical charts based on LCC
| (Lambert conformal conic projection) as straight lines
| there approximate Great Circle routes, satellite agencies
| use variations on the projections of John P. Snyder [2].
|
| I'd humbly suggest that if you honestly believe that the
| Mercator family is the be all and end all for navigation
| then perhaps you're in need of further reading [2].
|
| [1] https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-
| system/coordinate...
|
| [2] https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395\*
| mcv wrote:
| You're right. For local navigation, local projections are
| of course best. I was stuck on the unspoken assumption of
| using a global map projection. When dealing with local
| maps, there's absolutely no reason to do that.
|
| But those local map projections only work for that
| region. As soon as you want seamless transitions to other
| regions, these local projections don't work so well
| anymore.
| jeffchien wrote:
| Unrelated but I love that "The True Size of Africa" diagram lists
| area in "m km^2", also known as "Mm^2". It's interesting that
| there are some SI prefix and unit combinations that are just not
| used.
| IndySun wrote:
| It's a comprehensive telling of something that's becoming more
| commonly known. There's little sinister intent, more a giving
| readers information to conclude themselves. Some countries, Japan
| and USA come to mind, put themselves at the centre of 'their'
| world maps. Also, the distorted headshot is incredibly
| demonstrative. And seeing how much different sizes appear if you
| alter the orientation.
| luxurytent wrote:
| The overlay of Canada on Europe is always a fun one. We moan so
| much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of public transit
| and reasonable infrastructure to get around, but we're also
| comparing a population of (just recently hit!) 40,000 and
| ~700,000. Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area.
|
| This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into
| Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
| mhb wrote:
| > This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration
| into Canada
|
| I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
| jtakkala wrote:
| The size of Canada really isn't a valid excuse for Canada's
| poor public transit, nor is Canada's population.
|
| Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few
| days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: Canada is 40 _millions_ , not _thousands_. Likewise Europe
| (variously defined) is 700 million.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Look at this map, it tells another story:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjeXxfbXkAg30EZ.png
| MalcolmDwyer wrote:
| 90% of Canadians live in a "small" strip of land that is
| comparable in size to Europe. That area (along with several
| regions and city pairs in the US) could have excellent inter-
| city and intra-city transit. But we just don't.
|
| Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as
| a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build
| for people. Almost everything about our built environment is
| optimized for cars and the _result_ is sprawl. The cause is our
| public policies, building regulations, and zoning.
|
| It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because
| people don't try to commute across the country, just like
| people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin
| every day. The vast majority of travel is local and
| occasionally regional.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
|
| And fuck all the suffering along the way? Honestly Canada needs
| to address that before it can even begin to start thinking
| about more immigration. Canada is not even vaguely equipped to
| handle more people as it stands now.
| luxurytent wrote:
| Never said that there is no suffering along the way. It is
| terrible and we've made mistakes, but there's only so much
| scope I can fit into a comment!
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| > Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area.
|
| You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass.
| That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally
| within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any
| more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Seriously. Half the population is in southern Ontario.
| There's no reason we can't have a serious high speed rail
| line Toronto<->Quebec City that would serve - without
| exaggeration - most Canadians.
|
| I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in
| this corridor is a policy failure.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> We moan so much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of
| public transit and reasonable infrastructure to get around_
|
| Funny thing is that Canada _used_ to have that public transit
| infrastructure, from big cities even into tiny little towns.
| The country was built on it!
|
| We eventually ripped it up because it turns out people liked
| driving cars more. And I posit that they still do. If the will
| was there, it could be rebuilt, but it turns out moaning is a
| lot easier.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Yeah, it must be the Mercator projection why the global south is
| poor.
|
| Never mind New Zealand and Australia...
|
| Never mind that the whole post-USSR Asia is on the same level as
| some African countries...
|
| It must be those damn maps.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Actually the claim was that the global poor are close to the
| equator. Given how little motivation I have to even move when
| it's very hot, and how moving is required to generate wealth,
| and how recently A/C was invented, it's probably not totally a
| coincidence.
|
| But yea Mercator isn't the problem.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| I mean it's pretty easily explained by the Industrial
| Revolution starting in Europe, which is very far north. The
| explanation that heat induces laziness is a bit suspect given
| that in older eras many of the most prosperous civilizations
| were near the equator. (Egypt, Sumeria, the Persians, Indus
| River Valley Civilizations, etc.)
| bagacrap wrote:
| I don't really know how to compare the prosperity of
| ancient Sumeria and Denmark, but ancient Rome did conquer
| ancient Egypt and the reverse never happened.
|
| The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away
| from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are
| not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small
| sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get
| more data unfortunately.
|
| After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to
| colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it
| wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global
| superpower.
|
| Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to
| have done better at progress and wealth as compared to
| Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done
| well lately, but maybe because of a/c -
| https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-
| yew...
| pete1302 wrote:
| my brain in hurting!
| crtified wrote:
| All maps are created with selective purpose.
|
| The only thing that can possibly represent all purposes
| simultaneously is the world itself.
|
| Accordingly, every map is also a compromise.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| More generally: All models are wrong, but some are useful.
|
| -- George E. P. Box, in "Science and Statistics" (1976)
| <https://www-
| sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writi...> (PDF)
|
| See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong>
|
| Box apparently expanded on the notion in Box, G. E. P. (1979),
| "Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building", in
| Launer, R. L.; Wilkinson, G. N. (eds.), _Robustness in
| Statistics_ , Academic Press, pp. 201-236,
| doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-438150-6.50018-2, ISBN 9781483263366.
|
| Full text online at <https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skog
| en_etal_2021_meps....> (PDF)
| raldi wrote:
| A nice addition to this page would be the fact that Maine is the
| US state closest to Africa.
| yolkedgeek wrote:
| this is such an important point that rich countries don't want to
| spread that much.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| So, just use an orthographic projection and concede that
| projecting a globe onto a flat surface with boundaries is a
| futile affair.
|
| Google Maps on the Web defaults to this; so does Apple Maps.
| meitham wrote:
| The true size is excellent way to views these and is a major
| source for this article https://www.thetruesize.com/
| ggm wrote:
| To hijack discussion, here's another quirk of mapping: Border
| disputes can be uplifted into state law. Google adjusts how it
| renders maps into IN economy IPs because its _illegal_ to show
| maps about Kashmir which imply Pakistan 's claims over the
| territory are legitimate.
|
| I've had to adjust slide-ware for use in the Indian subcontinent.
|
| A different kind of "distortion" but very real.
|
| Projections can be complicated. I value mapping tools which let
| you re-center a global map off 0deg Longitude. I also value maps
| which manage to fit all of the Pac-rim island economies into some
| kind of view: No way is land mass or distance to scale, to
| usefully show this region.
|
| If you believe maps, Hawaii is almost as big as Alaska and just
| offshore of the Catalina Islands. It also seems to have a very
| squared-off moat, maybe its a border wall...
| ximus wrote:
| Fun article. Surprised it doesn't mention the Peters projection
| map.
|
| You cannot have both area fidelity and shape fidelity to
| represent countries on a map.
|
| If you want area fidelity, the Gall-Peters [1] projection and the
| Peters world map [2] (1952) by Arno Peters are the way to
| visualize countries, whereas common maps focus on shape-fidelity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector [2]
| https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-p...
| gjm11 wrote:
| There are plenty of other equal-area map projections. Several
| of them are less shape-distorting than the Peters projection.
| See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection.
| Peters did a great job of publicity, as witness the common but
| _completely false_ idea that the Peters projection is "the
| way" to make an equal-area plane map, but there's nothing
| particularly great about the projection itself.
| TiredGuy wrote:
| The gif at the top was very interesting. The shrinking of the
| North America and Russia were really surprising to me, as I had
| always looked at them as much more significant land masses.
|
| A little off-topic from projections, but I just returned from a
| trip to Seoul a few days ago, and I found a simplified subway map
| to be so much easier to use than Google Maps' more realistic-but-
| less-relevant map. Subway map design has always intrigued me in
| that it ignores so much in terms of position and proportion, but
| at the same time can relay the needed information so much more
| clearly.
| kibwen wrote:
| Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also
| emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant
| supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
|
| It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and
| then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal
| across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the
| relative distortion:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...
|
| Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which
| both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to
| concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative
| aesthetic projection:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
| zokier wrote:
| Of discontinuous projections, I prefer Waterman over Dymaxion,
| it feels more regular and is more intuitive to see how it wraps
| around a sphere (or geoid). While Waterman might have more
| distortion in some absolute sense, the regularity of the
| distortions makes it still more pleasing (subjective, I know).
| One weird thing about Dymaxion is how the 70deg parallels
| around both north and south poles are distinctly lumpy.
|
| But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with
| all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is
| to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation
| to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case
| example is probably estimating the path from South-America to
| Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental
| gymnastics to accomplish.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I printed the Dymaxion SVG on A3+ card paper. Makes a great
| icosahedron!
| afterburner wrote:
| I prefer a similar one, the Cahill-Keyes projection:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...
|
| It uses fewer major triangular sections, has a more regular
| pattern to it, and best of all tries to keep the equator more
| or less horizontal.
| simonbw wrote:
| I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes.
|
| https://xkcd.com/977/
| kibwen wrote:
| XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it
| into being a data interchange format were ill-advised
| relative to just making it a good text-based markup language,
| but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data
| interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and
| XPath that XML had from the start!
| drewcoo wrote:
| Dymaxion map: one island, one ocean.
| HPsquared wrote:
| https://earth.nullschool.net has a range of different projections
| available (on top of the main functionality of the site, which is
| itself a pretty cool map of wind/weather/atmospheric patterns).
|
| The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different
| projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be
| static images.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Pretty cool to think about the amount of work going on behind
| the covers to alter these projections on the fly. And how
| costly it was to build them originally by hand.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| work, sure, but not _that_ much. It's affine transformations
| / some fast linear algebra, for the most part. Your second
| point is for sure true, though.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder if anyone ever came up with an elaborate mechanism
| connected to a pen.
| omoikane wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd, with on-topic alt-text: https://xkcd.com/977/
|
| For a more distorted way to see the world, try:
| http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/
| jezzamon wrote:
| It's actually less distorted in some ways :)
| shagie wrote:
| I'm fond of the Dymaxion (and either the land connected or the
| ocean connected forms - as applicable) because it has some neat
| applications showing migratory routes.
|
| My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some
| birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when
| looking at other projections.
|
| Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...
| Xen9 wrote:
| The only distortion is your idea that there's something that is
| not only an approximation.
| imgabe wrote:
| This seems to come up a lot lately. I don't see why this matters.
| If you're doing something like charting a flight path where it
| actually matters what the real sizes are, I'm sure you have
| access to the correct information. If you're just going about
| your normal life as a dental hygienist or something, what
| difference does it make if Russia is not as big as you assume?
|
| > Are these maps chosen for good reasons and these distortions
| are a side-effect, or are they purposefully deceitful? Are there
| better maps we could choose? I'll explore this in the premium
| article this week. Subscribe to read it!
|
| Ah, I see. It's just bait to drive subscriptions. You can read
| for free on Wikipedia about why the Mercator projection is useful
| for navigation.
|
| What is wrong with people that they assume there is some evil
| cabal of mustache-twisting villains who deliberately make
| misleading maps?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| My current favourite alternative projection is Spilhaus, eg
| https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-P...
|
| (Edit: now I see TFA mentioned it, just not by name)
| Jun8 wrote:
| Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many
| posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!)
|
| Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not
| mentioned is the placement of North at the top
| (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-
| is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as
| "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the
| bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current
| country). This is an interesting example where an important
| geological feature trumps the maps.
|
| See these interesting answers to get more information about the
| terms Upper/Lower Egypt:
| https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...
| divbzero wrote:
| I always thought Upper/Lower Egypt referred to regions that
| were upstream/downstream relative to the Nile.
| idlewords wrote:
| There's a similar phenomenon of terminology creep with language
| terms like 'High German' and 'Low German'. This nomenclature
| has been adopted into fantasy literature to suggest a more
| noble vs. fallen version of some ancient dialect, but all it
| meant originally is that 'high' speakers were upstream (and
| therefore uphill) from the 'low' speakers.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Great example. And the Alemannisch dialect is "hoch hoch
| Deutsch," or extra-high German, being from way up in the
| German-speaking Swiss Alps.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| This is one of those 'common misconceptions' where I hear
| about its refutation more often than I encounter people who
| believe the supposed misconception. Much like anything
| talking about map projections, in fact.
| idlewords wrote:
| You may need to read more crappy fantasy books. To cite a
| completely representative example, consider 'High Valyrian'
| from Game of Thrones
| https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian, a
| liturgical language that of course is contrasted with Low
| (or Bastard) Valyrian, a degenerate family of dialects.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Upper/lower is not weird, if you're used to a country with deep
| vallies (upper part of valley, lower part of valley, follows
| the river naming exactly, of course).
| Someone wrote:
| > This is an interesting example where an important geological
| feature trumps the maps.
|
| I'm not convinced. Historically, Arabic and Egyptian maps had
| south on the top (https://muslimheritage.com/maps/)
| philshem wrote:
| I received a gift from a friend in Uruguay that is from the
| clockmaker Girosur. The clock runs backwards, rhetorically
| asking "why is North up?"
|
| https://girosur.com/como-funcionan/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Clockwise" is the angular direction that the shadow of a
| northern-hemisphere sundial appears to move.
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, that's one of the points that clock is making.
| fsckboy wrote:
| one look at that clock and I'm rhetorically convinced, it
| does no good to reverse things, let's rotate that clockwise
| and keep north up!
| jeromegv wrote:
| There was Upper Canada vs Lower Canada. On a map, they were
| inverted, but it was in reference to the St-Lawrence river and
| water from the Great Lake. You would first arrive in Lower
| Canada (from Europe) and keep navigating to reach Upper Canada.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| European / Levant maps through the mediaeval period frequently
| placed _east_ at the top of the map. This is where the sun
| rose, and "to orient" is "to determine where East lies", and
| was (for Europeans) the direction toward Jerusalem.
|
| I suspect that north-as-top orientations were strongly
| influenced by the invention / importation of the magnetic
| compass.
|
| <https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58426/why-north-
| always-m...>
| bentley wrote:
| Brings to mind one of my favorite _Calvin and Hobbes_ strips:
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/07
| jgeada wrote:
| Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection
| has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm
| constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of
| countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection!
|
| Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles
| and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate
| by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are
| exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly
| seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely
| unusable past about +- 70o latitude. Every map is a compromise.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| > I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent
| size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other
| projection!
|
| Hmm. That's not usually how the discourse goes.
|
| It's never "wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y.
| That's terrible."
|
| It usually goes something like "wow, Country X is actually
| smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes
| us think things we shouldn't have thought. That's terrible."
|
| FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate
| projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was
| tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after
| seeing the other projection.
|
| Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some
| countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural
| implications of this).
|
| I think you should be more amazed at people who _don't_ care at
| _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable
| people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map
| distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the "I don't care"
| group overlaps with the "Africa is a country" group. (Map size
| "memes" appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of
| the woodworks to complain.)
| lm28469 wrote:
| > But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after
| seeing the other projection.
|
| Can you elaborate on that ?
|
| Did you think bigger = better ?
| prepend wrote:
| > But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after
| seeing the other projection.
|
| That's odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really
| important?
|
| Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal
| or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
|
| Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of
| its size?
|
| I would expect that revelations about population would be
| more worldview adjusting (Nigeria and Indonesia are so huge).
| bluepod4 wrote:
| You have a fixed and narrow definition of what important
| means.
|
| Importance should change depending on context.
|
| Sure, you are definitely allowed to say that a certain
| metric (i.e. population size or density) has more practical
| applications and provides better signal for "blah blah".
|
| But I'm not discussing "blah blah".
| prepend wrote:
| I'm curious why you think my definition of important is
| fixed and narrow. I didn't define it and I agree that
| importance is a factor of context.
|
| I commented that it was curious that someone would think
| size is so important that learning the true size of
| countries would change their world view. In that land
| mass isn't usually very important for political or
| cultural significance (eg, Canada is huge and that
| doesn't make it important, Russia is important not
| because of its size, etc etc).
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Because you used phrases like "really important" and
| "more important". It sounds very juvenile.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > That's odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really
| important?
|
| Yes. That and population. Generally, the larger and more
| populous countries tend to be the most powerful and
| influential.
|
| > Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or
| Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
|
| Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands
| expanded their landmass by creating their empires? Ever
| wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands lost
| their power and influence when they lost their empires and
| landmass?
|
| > Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because
| of its size?
|
| Yes along with other reasons - population, geographical
| location, etc.
| prepend wrote:
| > Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend
| to be the most powerful and influential.
|
| But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of
| top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are
| relatively small.
|
| I mean you have to have natural resources and can't be
| tiny, but it's not like Germany and Japan are powerful
| because of their landmass.
|
| I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in
| rationality and people shouldn't do that. It's only silly
| people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think
| that they are powerful based on size.
| erwald wrote:
| > But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list
| of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are
| relatively small.
|
| There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and
| nominal GDP.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Assuming I've converted [1] and [2] correctly into this
| SQLite3 database and queried it correctly, not really,
| no. | name | gdp_pos | gdp
| | land_pos | land | |----------------|--------
| -|----------|----------|---------| | United
| States | 1 | 26854599 | 4 | 9147593 |
| | China | 2 | 19373586 | 3 |
| 9596961 | | Japan | 3 | 4409738 |
| 62 | 377976 | | Germany | 4 |
| 4308854 | 63 | 357114 | | India
| | 5 | 3736882 | 7 | 3287263 | |
| United Kingdom | 6 | 3158938 | 79 | 242495
| | | France | 7 | 2923489 | 49
| | 543940 | | Italy | 8 | 2169745
| | 72 | 301339 | | Canada | 9
| | 2089672 | 2 | 9984670 | | Brazil
| | 10 | 2081235 | 5 | 8515767 |
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GD
| P_(nomi...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_d
| ependen...
| dwaltrip wrote:
| The countries with the 2 highest GDPs, China and the US,
| are in the top 4 largest countries. India, #5 in GDP, is
| #7 in area.
|
| I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world
| by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.
|
| It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger
| population and more natural resources. And more space to
| carry out economic activities with said people and
| resources.
|
| Edit: I just queried Wolfram Alpha about this. It
| generated a plot for me, which shows what I expected.
| Check it out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=list+o
| f+countries+with+...
|
| Edit2: bonus feature, GPT-4 wrote me a script to plot
| this also, check it out: https://chat.openai.com/share/ff
| a45c61-8b7a-44e1-b757-041f31...
| jgeada wrote:
| Seriously, a loglog plot? Even in that, there is a
| seriously wide dispersion to your correlation. And then
| look at the same data on a linear plot.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| The linear plot in that Wolfram link is messed up. It
| doesn't show all the data (caps out at 800 billion GDP).
| Here's a corrected linear plot, from the script that I
| linked (commenting out the log-log scaling):
|
| https://ibb.co/9bBgwH8
|
| There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a
| little messy, but it's undeniably there.
|
| The starting point for this discussion was about the
| relationship between a country's size and population and
| it's power and influence. The correlation between area
| and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful
| relationship.
|
| Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log
| plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many
| orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize
| any patterns on a linear plot.
|
| I also don't understand your point about the dispersion.
| The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said
| the correlation was 99%.
|
| Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient
| for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a
| strong positive correlation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coe
| fficien...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive
| correlation.
|
| datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| >That's odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really
| important?
|
| If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting
| over it?
| prepend wrote:
| History was spent fighting over valuable resources, not
| sheer size.
|
| No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are
| huge.
| trhfhxggf wrote:
| > It usually goes something like "wow, Country X is actually
| smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes
| us think things we shouldn't have thought. That's terrible."
|
| That's not less stupid than the other statement. It's like
| looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never
| realized I was 20 feet tall."
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking,
| "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
|
| Quite the opposite, no? It's like spending your whole life
| looking at only your evening shadow (Hello, Plato) and then
| seeing yourself in a good mirror and realising your actual
| height relative to the world around you for the first time.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Exactly.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > I think you should be more amazed at people who _don't_
| care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include
| reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about
| map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the "I don't
| care" group overlaps with the "Africa is a country" group.
|
| On what are you basing it?
|
| IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me)
| "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have
| distortions.
|
| AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions
| are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad
| hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or
| racists."
|
| So again:
|
| > But a lot of the "I don't care" group overlaps with the
| "Africa is a country" group.
|
| On what are you basing that?
| bluepod4 wrote:
| I was basing it off of "IME" and "AFAICT" similar to what
| you just did in your own ad hominem attack ironically. I
| don't tend to preface things like that when commenting and
| usually I assume this when reading comments online. I used
| to write "anecdotally" but it's 2023.
|
| https://itsoktobewhite.quora.com/
|
| On Quora, there's a "group" sort of like a subreddit titled
| "It's OK to be White". There's about 35k people who follow
| it. Their mission is to "uplift White cultures and oppose
| anti-White racism".
|
| Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn't
| need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people
| often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other
| people from that group come out of the woodworks to
| complain. These memes aren't even posted in that group. And
| I wish I could say that it's just these weirdos on Quora
| that act like this. But no. I've seen it on Instagram. On
| Facebook. I've heard it in real life. It's a thing that
| bothers a certain demographic of people. While it's not a
| "major" thing and shouldn't matter, it's still a thing that
| I tend to see often.
|
| I see there's miscommunication here though. I do agree with
| you that most people "don't care". That's the phrase we
| have been using. What you are saying and what I also
| believe is that most people are "map agnostic" for lack of
| a better phrase. They don't care in that sense. Like life
| is too short. It's just a map.
|
| But when I used the phrase "don't care" and added
| underscores around it and the words "at all" in my comments
| yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and
| _negative_ opinions about not caring.
|
| For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And
| the other language he used evoked that he was
| "flabbergasted" that people care about map distortions. (Do
| you see how this is a different definition of "don't
| care"?)
|
| The language he was using and the emotions involved
| "mirrored" the language and emotions that I see on Quora
| and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
|
| You're right. I don't have any concrete data or surveys or
| experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those
| groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for
| 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain,
| etc.
|
| (Also, there's nothing wrong with calling someone a moron
| and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I
| did it again!)
| triyambakam wrote:
| Mercator just has an embedded momentum, it isn't somehow
| superior to other projections. Why do some people still use
| tech X when tech Y exists? Momentum, resistance to change, etc.
| [deleted]
| samtho wrote:
| I doubt people are actively giving less value or worth to
| places that appear smaller on the map. Additionally, the
| majority of people just don't have a concrete frame of
| reference of distances beyond how far we can see. As such, the
| only real exposure to vast distances at the scale of continents
| is going to be via maps, unless you have the privilege of being
| in LEO. It's pretty rare that flat projection is useful for
| anything except trivial, surface information paired with the
| sort of infantilizing teaching that prompts students into
| pointing to their home country. If this is your only exposure
| to the world, it's easy to see how you will begin to assign
| some value at a subconscious level. Any indirect representation
| of something larger is going to be a compromise based on the
| needs of the application, but we can do better than the flat
| projection just from a UX level.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If size is your thing, use some other projection!_
|
| They're not complaining about what they can use for themselves.
|
| They are complaining about what is in mainstream use (in
| schools, websites, books, documentaries, and so on) and thus
| what kinds of perception people get.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent
| size of countries.
|
| Something that jumps out at me with the size is that the arctic
| regions are often viewed as huge and massive. However, when
| viewed with their true size, it greatly highlights just how
| fragile they are.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Also 80% of the population lives in the northern hemisphere.
| It's not an evil scheme to cheat the 20% who live down there.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Also 80% of the population lives in the northern
| hemisphere. It's not an evil scheme to cheat the 20% who live
| down there.
|
| Actually 90%!
| awongh wrote:
| I feel like you actually stated the problem but then glossed
| over it.
|
| Mercator is UX optimized for _naval navigation_. Besides street
| navigation (where projection is irrelevant) I would posit that
| most people use maps for human geography reasons- what
| countries are next to Senegal, what kind of border does
| Thailand have with Malaysia, etc.
|
| In the use case of understanding geopolitical borders Mercator
| isn't optimized for that.
|
| Asking why people are dissatisfied with mercator is like asking
| why my grandma is dissatisfied with the command line interface
| on the Linux laptop I got her. Doesn't she know it's the best
| for programmers??
|
| Why are we trading off the accuracy of political borders for
| navigating by rhumb lines?
|
| I personally feel like a better projection would be one that
| basically ignored or distorted the oceans. On google maps
| there's no reasons why the proportions of the Atlantic or
| Pacific would be relevant.
| adammarples wrote:
| Well, what do you mean, the "accuracy" of political borders?
| Again, they're all inaccurate, just in different ways. Are
| you optimizing for length of border, or curvature, or
| orientation? Better nearer or further from the pole? Arguably
| there are far more borders nearer the equator than far from
| it, Africa has hundreds. And the Mercator projection does
| pretty much the best job at representing political borders
| length and orientation within Africa than any other.
| awongh wrote:
| I'm thinking about accuracy when looking at google maps.
|
| So do you mean that the length and orientation of the
| borders is the least distorted with the Mercator
| projection?
|
| I'm actually not sure how a different projection would
| distort a country's border. But for example I'm not putting
| a ruler against my screen and I don't know if I need to
| know if a border is oriented North or not.
|
| Mostly my point is, are we rendering maps for real users'
| use cases or backwards rationalizing the status quo?
| Besides the level of effort that would be involved in
| changing it, can't think of any real defense of the use
| Mercator projection itself in its current context.
|
| Some other comments references street maps that are grids,
| so a non-mercator projection would bend a grid of streets-
| this makes sense- but again, the main critique is around
| the relative size of countries- i.e. the look of the map
| tiles only when zoomed out sufficiently far. Maybe this is
| the main UX hurdle- in google maps to change the projection
| above some level of zoom.
| ksec wrote:
| I wonder if Projection of Earth is the wrong way to do a map
| for average person. Where we dont use it for navigation.
|
| I want relative size of everything to be mostly correct. But I
| could take Africa being 5-10% smaller simply because of its
| relative size.
|
| All while the East and West of Cities to be accurate. i.e ALL
| of continental South America lies east of the state of
| Michigan.
| shard wrote:
| Every chance I get I try to promote the Cahill-Keys projection.
| Not only does it better preserve area and reminds you that the
| earth is a sphere, it is also one of the more esthetically
| pleasing projections out there.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_project...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The worst argument. These days how many people navigate by
| compass headings vs how many people base personal and policy
| decisions due to distorted view of the planet which downsizes
| planet's oceans and puts the great pacific garbage patch at the
| far edge of the map, out of sight out of mind?
|
| _Just_ use another projection? Mercator is everywhere, nothing
| else.
|
| And yes, size of countries is important too (eg. how people
| fear Russia because it seems large and discount the importance
| of Africa because it's next to the equator).
| bentley wrote:
| > _Just_ use another projection? Mercator is everywhere,
| nothing else.
|
| What an exaggeration. Mercator may be the most common, but
| Winkel and Alders are both commonly encountered in the United
| States.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > Every flat map projection distorts something, so every
| projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other
| utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on
| apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some
| other projection!
|
| That's the point of the post. The trade-offs between different
| projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned
| outside very small cohorts because there is a specific shape of
| the world map that most people who are not map-heads or
| spherical projection experts take for guaranteed. Get a non-
| Mercator projection map and put it in your dinner room, and
| then see how many of your guests will comment about "so.. why
| is this map weird? It doesn't look right?" then tell them
| "every flat map projection distorts [...]"
|
| > Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local
| angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to
| navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps
| people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the
| most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is
| largely unusable past about +- 70o latitude. Every map is a
| compromise.
|
| Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids
| with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps used
| in data visualization charts etc., non of those are using the
| map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator projection
| simply because "that's the right shape of the world" regardless
| of what "right" means. Not because they evaluated the
| compromises of the different projections and figures "oh maybe
| someone will be lost at sea and only have access to our GDP per
| capita world map visualization, better use Mercator projection
| to preserve local angles and line up with compass headings"
| gsich wrote:
| I think most people know what a globe is. And that a globe is
| not a 2D map, even though they might not be able to
| articulate that.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Get a non-Mercator projection map and put it in your
| dinner room, and then see how many of your guests will
| comment about "so.. why is this map weird? It doesn't look
| right?" then tell them "every flat map projection distorts
| [...]"_
|
| This is actually a pretty cool conversation topic during
| dinner. I would take the opportunity to show off. It doesn't
| have to be a downside. "Hey, did you know that [interesting
| stuff]...?".
|
| If your guests are the kind of people who get irritated
| instead of awed by cool explanations about the world, I admit
| _then_ you have a problem.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| yeah, I think it would be an interesting discussion topic.
| Especially if you could show the 6th figure from that post
| (the one showing the 7,500km distortion). It just depends
| on how you put it. OPs remarks were condescending as if the
| only reason to bring this up is "because of size hang ups"
| as oppose to "bring this up to question your own basic
| wrong assumptions about the world"
|
| It's far from common knowledge or a well known fact that
| the only reason the World Map looks the way it looks is
| just an arbitrary projection type that's picked for equally
| arbitrary reasons. Because as I mentioned, compass
| navigation is hardly the only map use-case. It may have
| originally started that way in the 1,200s or whatever, but
| today we use maps for all sorts of visualizations and other
| things. And the assumption that "Mercator projection" is
| the "right" shape of the world is held by most not because
| they have "size hang ups" but because it's just the way it
| is. Just like any assumption you hold that you never
| question because there is no reason to question it really.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Is it that surprising/arbitrary though?
|
| 1. It's very useful for sailing
|
| 2. European nations who were good at sailing created the
| age of empires (yes this was a bad thing)
|
| 3. These empires persisted until the end of WW2 (1945) or
| arguably even the Suez crisis (1956) at which point the
| American/Soviet world order began
|
| Changing a map is changing everyone's internal worldview,
| and for obvious reason empires were not about to allow
| such a massive change unless they had a good reason[0] so
| It's really only been about 80 years and most of them we
| were at war with the Soviets, so when we thought about
| maps, we thought about if they were red or star spangled,
| not which projection.
|
| I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just not at all
| surprised we have the "original" one.
|
| 0 - I could easily see an alternate history where e.g.
| the Spanish and/or Portugese use a different one if it
| makes them look "better" than the English, or vice versa.
| Now i'm curious of what projection could be 'anglo/iberi-
| maximal'
| thrashh wrote:
| People have a problem with this post and these kind of posts
| because they imply it was deliberately done for evil reasons.
|
| The point of any article isn't just its factual content; it's
| the hidden message from the way it's said. I don't know if
| you intended to say it the way you did when you started off
| with the comment about poverty in the first two sentences,
| but by doing so, you set the tone for the rest of your
| article. (You also didn't expand on that tidbit so it kind of
| leaves your audience wondering why you mentioned it.)
|
| I like the rest of the article though.
| nilmask wrote:
| > People have a problem
|
| Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the
| same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of
| generalization from the subjective inferences made from
| your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others,
| presumptuous?
|
| I'm getting tired of the progressive tendency to read
| offence, bigotry, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. into
| every little word & minutiae of nuance uttered by others.
| It's on the verge of induced pareidolia for outrage &
| victimhood.
|
| Do you reside or hail from one of the aforementioned
| countries, or are you merely "signal boosting" and getting
| outraged on their behalf?
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Did you read the post? I didn't think it was too subtle.
| Especially because it was so out of place.
| watwut wrote:
| [flagged]
| nilmask wrote:
| Maybe we are using different maps of this literary
| territory.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the
| same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of
| generalization from the subjective inferences made from
| your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others,
| presumptuous?
|
| No, you're just being stupid.
|
| This isn't a new issue. There's an episode of _The West
| Wing_ about the evils of the Mercator projection. It
| aired 22 years ago.
|
| When you write an essay doing nothing more than repeating
| a several-decades-old cliche, people are going to assume
| you don't have anything to say other than the content of
| the cliche they heard decades ago. And they will be
| right.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Probably eddythompson80 is not Tomas Pueyo.
|
| The comment about poverty was compatible with believing it
| was deliberate and evil, careless, or excusable but
| unfortunate.
| nerdbert wrote:
| It's unlikely that it was deliberately done for evil
| reasons.
|
| However it contributes to a misunderstanding that may in
| some way favor richer countries, and that could be a reason
| why nobody's trying very hard to focus kids' exposure on
| more accurate maps.
|
| The mechanism I'm alluding to is a sense that "this place
| is very big, and so it's reasonable that it controls more
| than other places." It's not a highly-developed
| intellectual analysis, but more of a gut-level conception
| that informs casual interpretation of news and events.
| prepend wrote:
| > That's the point of the post.
|
| I lost it in the post. Whenever I hear the "crisis" part
| presented without the perfectly rational explanation I get
| frustrated and spend more time trying to figure out if this
| is a problem.
|
| Saying "maps distort the way we see the world" is a problem
| unless you immediately follow it with "and that's ok
| because..."
|
| Otherwise we waste time on stuff like "eyeballs distort the
| way we see the world" when it's true but not an issue at all.
|
| Especially since the first paragraph mentions how countries
| closer to the equator tend to be poorer. As if that's somehow
| relevant.
| thfuran wrote:
| I don't understand what you're saying. The article doesn't
| present this as a crisis. It doesn't really make sense to
| say it's okay or not okay, except insofar as anything that
| isn't an existential threat is okay, I suppose.
| p0pcult wrote:
| The second sentence of the article strongly implies some
| nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the
| globally powerful countries is at the root of the
| popularity of mercator projections.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, they is a "nefarious concentration of power and
| wealth among the globally powerful countries". And the
| Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows
| their countries bigger than they are, so...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| So...?
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > And the Mercator projection does suit them practically,
| and shows their countries bigger than they are, so...
|
| So what?
|
| Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have
| more resources than others because they are represented
| bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just
| hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican
| Coalition are benign emperors :D
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or
| have more resources than others because they are
| represented bigger on a common map projection?_
|
| No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's
| resources. Then the map projections that are convenient
| for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
|
| This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit
| for them of presenting said countries as larger than they
| are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer
| onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > They become so by colonizing and stealing other's
| resources.
|
| Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent
| nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.
|
| > Then the map projections that are convenient for them,
| are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
|
| Excuse me? Who is imposing what on whom now, and how?
|
| Last time I checked, everyone is free to use whatever map
| projection they want, centered on whatever point of the
| globe they want. Or they can use an actual globe.
|
| > has the side-benefit for them of presenting said
| countries as larger than they are, and thus being one
| more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their
| superiority at that level too...
|
| Yeah, pretty sure I don't perceive Antarctica as some
| kind of superior super-nation. Or greenland, although I
| gotta say, it's a really cool place, especially during
| summer.
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| watwut wrote:
| That is entirely on you tho. Becasuse that sentence does
| not imply anything about concentration of power nor about
| globally powerful countries and even nothing about origin
| of popularity of mercator projections.
|
| It does imply that poor countries around equator are
| bigger then they look like. That is it.
| aydyn wrote:
| It literally does. Dont play ignorant.
| cebsoto wrote:
| I read it as the post is simply pointing out something that
| a large percentage of the population was not even aware
| about. I don't think it goes any deeper than that.
| prepend wrote:
| Why is it important that poor people live near the
| equator? I expect that a large part of the population is
| aware of this fact.
|
| So bringing it up doesn't contribute to the article and
| is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the
| days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or
| they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many
| other true but irrelevant facts.
| XorNot wrote:
| Because the equator in the Mercator projection is the
| closest to "true size"...which means that the wealthier
| nations, well above that, are in fact exacerbated in
| apparent land mass.
|
| I like this site[1] for showing the true size of
| countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the
| US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude
| even a little.
|
| Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is
| linked to apparent size - Africa _looks_ smaller then it
| is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then
| they are. When we talk about a problem affecting
| somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is
| experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if
| only subconsciously.
|
| [1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.
| NTAzNDg...
| kortilla wrote:
| Nobody looks at a map before saying "most of the world is
| experiencing X". This is a fantasy straw man.
| InSteady wrote:
| No one claimed people do this. You have created a straw
| man-ception. Our awareness of the world is informed by
| distorted maps, even if it only impacts us
| subconsciously.
| kortilla wrote:
| No it's not. Nobody cares about Greenland despite it
| being larger than all of Europe on the projection.
| darkwater wrote:
| Well I actually used to think - before being educated
| about map constraints and the Mercator projection - that
| "Wow Greenland is HUGE".
| kortilla wrote:
| How old were you when you learned that though? I thought
| the same thing until we were shown why it's misleading in
| like the 4th grade.
| fifafifi wrote:
| Greenland is not Africa. But you don't sound like you are
| interested in civil, fair discussion so I won't bother
| wasting more time than this. Look up Critical Cartography
| if you want to learn.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Greenland is not Africa.
|
| I don't think you are getting what I'm saying. Greenland
| is larger than countries we spend far more time obsessing
| over with history lessons.
|
| Importance in education and subsequently people's mental
| models is not at all driven by size on the projection.
| It's a dumb theory not backed by any real research.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > if you want to learn.
|
| Consider saying "If you want to learn more about it".
|
| Saying only "if you want to learn" is condescending and
| patronizing and is a thing those imperialists living in
| the northern hemisphere do.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Obviously not. And nobody said that. Talk about straw
| men.
|
| People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of
| different countries, and that internal representation is
| what they refer to.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that
| it's somehow connected.
|
| Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like
| Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.
|
| Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are
| _caused by_ different apparent size.
|
| With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as
| imposed by force, the later seems more likely.
|
| .
|
| ... And since the date on the post is a couple months
| ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days
| later but mostly paywalled:
| https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-
| decei...
|
| The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring
| that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and
| conclusion isn't public.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| The poor countries claim has a footnote and a promise to
| explore it in another article. It doesn't say anything
| further about this.
|
| The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are
| intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination
| of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article,
| unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay
| for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled:
| https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-
| decei...)
| melagonster wrote:
| this almost like we should use another map in school. but I
| sure this is contained in geology of high school.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Map projection trade-offs are discussed a lot. I studied it
| at school, I can't count the number of "do you realize how
| big country X compared to country Y" articles, (the one
| linked here is a good one btw) and it often pops up in trivia
| questions. Everyone has seen a globe, and non-Mercator maps
| are everywhere. Famously on National Geographics.
|
| Also, using a (truncated) Mercator projection for a GDP per
| capita map (or any political map that isn't about land mass)
| is not a bad idea as its most notorious flaw becomes an
| advantage because coincidently, it tends to enlarge small
| countries and shrink large countries, which makes for a more
| readable map.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > it tends to enlarge small countries and shrink large
| countries, which makes for a more readable map.
|
| It enlarges the two biggest countries in the World (Russian
| and Canada) while shrinking central American and central
| African countries that aren't particularly big to say the
| least...
| kortilla wrote:
| The faux outrage is hard to take. I grew up with the chopped
| up non Mercator maps and nobody cared looking at one or
| another.
|
| It was called out multiple times in my geography glasses in
| the 80s that the flat contiguous map was wrong and we spent
| lots of time looking at globes and North or South Pole
| centered maps.
|
| Nobody is being oppressed or underrepresented by this
| projection. This isn't an episode of the west wing.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > The trade-offs between different projections are rarely
| discussed
|
| And?
|
| The trade-offs between longpolling and websockets are rarely
| discussed outside of very small cohorts. The tradeoff between
| wankel-engines and piston-based motors are rarely discussed.
| The tradeoffs between oak and pearwood are rarely discussed.
|
| That's why our society has division of labor and people
| becoming experts in their topics.
|
| And I am pretty sure experts on cartography have discussed
| the different merits and tradeoffs and converged on Mercator
| for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't
| care. It works, I can use it, and as long as no one can point
| out a tangible problem with it, I see no reason to worry
| about it. Same as the cartographer doesn't need to know or
| care why I decided that the chatapp he installed uses
| longpolling to communicate with the backend instead of a
| websocket. Same as I don't need to know or care why the
| carpenter who made my desk used oak instead of pear or
| rosewood.
|
| And seeing countries as smaller or bigger than they are isn't
| a problem in my eyes. I can reasonably expect an educated
| person to know that maps are 3D->2D projections and are thus
| distorted. If I want to know the exact size, I can always
| look it up. I don't have a more or less favourable view of a
| country or its people based on the countries apparent size on
| a map.
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| The issue isn't possible bias on the part of educated
| cartographers and differential geometers. It's the bias of
| the majority, i.e. everyone else, that matters. A vast
| majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their
| countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a
| primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their
| perception of "their peoples" being more important than the
| peoples of other areas.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further
| inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more
| important than the peoples of other areas.
|
| And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed
| study, or similarly supported source for this statement.
|
| Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland
| or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the
| world.
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| Nearly no one inhabits Greenland and Antarctica, which
| might help explain why the only visible _relative_
| increase in Arctic /Antarctic nationalism comes from
| enthusiastic polar bears and mildly racist penguins.
|
| I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly
| satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft"
| sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any
| effects, much less design a viable study that
| demonstrates causation.
|
| I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support
| this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related
| studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly
| convincing unless we lived in a universe where people
| told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked
| with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced
| by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding
| people in other countries?"
| bentley wrote:
| > A vast majority of people in the "Western world"
| perceive their countries as being bigger than they are.
| Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further
| inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more
| important than the peoples of other areas.
|
| That's a fun hypothesis, but is there actually data
| supporting (1) that "a vast majority" of westerners
| misperceive country size in this way, and (2) that
| specifically such a perception causes them to consider
| foreigners to be unimportant?
|
| Although implicit bias exists, studies show its impact on
| the real world is much smaller than commonly believed.
| mc32 wrote:
| You know whose problem this is. The map buyer/owner. They can
| buy whatever projection fits their fancy. I happen to have
| Robinson projections at home because I don't prefer the
| cylindrical projection. I used to have homolosine projections
| but they were funky in other ways. Preferably people would
| have a Globe and also have some flat projections.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The problem with these kind of posts is that they also ignore
| the existence of globes. No one should be surprised by the
| "size" of any country because globes already exist which are
| a pretty close to true representation.
| [deleted]
| kadoban wrote:
| Globes are a lot more rare than maps.
| JackFr wrote:
| > The trade-offs between different projections are rarely
| discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small
| cohorts
|
| Not true. They're honestly discussed all the time to the
| point of becoming tiresome.
| Nursie wrote:
| This is certainly not the first time I've seen the topic on
| HN...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532282
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787
|
| And it was something we covered in school on the 80s.
|
| It's an interesting post but not really revelatory.
| snoman wrote:
| Right? Is there a person above 25 that hasn't seen the
| episode (or clip) from The West Wing about map projections
| at this point?
| [deleted]
| DirkH wrote:
| As an adult I was shocked to find out how the projection
| I grew up with altered my perception of my poverty-
| stricken country. I had no idea for my entire life that
| it was so much larger than other countries on the map I
| thought were larger. I doubt I am rare here at all.
|
| And I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. And I doubt I
| am rare here at all also.
| fragmede wrote:
| It is a TV show from 1999 that centered on the literal
| office of the same name that the US President holds court
| in.
| Agentlien wrote:
| I'm in my thirties and I've never even heard of that
| show. I'm from Sweden, by the way.
| resolutebat wrote:
| I'd like to think you're being ironic here, but I suspect
| you're not, so no: the vast majority of the world is
| outside the US and has not, in fact, seen an obscure
| episode of a TV drama about American politics.
|
| For others who haven't, here it is: https://youtu.be/vVX-
| PrBRtTY
|
| Although the projection it proclaims as superior, Gall-
| Peters, has grievous flaws of its own.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_project
| ion
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I just learned about the equal earth projection, which
| was apparently invented very recently in 2023. It's the
| best looking equal area projection I've seen.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Ah, oops, that should say 2018, not 2023.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| I've seen this type of post/thread many times, and yet I
| still learn something new every time.
|
| For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much of
| Scotland is actually west of England because Great Britain
| doesn't actually go straight-up north to south but is
| rather "tilted".
|
| I also didn't know that Papua was so big, before today I
| wondered how could there be so much linguistic diversity in
| what I though was a medium sized island.
|
| So I don't mind the geography trivia from time to time.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much
| of Scotland is actually west of England because Great
| Britain doesn't actually go straight-up north to south
| but is rather "tilted".
|
| Even as a Brit this sometimes catches me out. I live near
| Bournemouth which is approx in the middle of the south
| coast of England. If I draw a straight line due North,
| it's only just inside Scotland. ALL of Scotland is west
| of London.
|
| Unrelatedly, the other amusing fact is that when the ISS
| goes overhead (256 miles high at perigee), it is much
| closer to me than Glasgow (450 miles away).
| zokier wrote:
| > Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids
| with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps
| used in data visualization charts etc., non of those are
| using the map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator
| projection simply because "that's the right shape of the
| world" regardless of what "right" means
|
| I question what percentage of those maps in reality are
| actually Mercator? I feel this is one of those strawman memes
| that mercator is everywhere, when in practice it feels
| relatively rare to actually encounter it.
| watwut wrote:
| The kiddy maps my kids had were using mercator projection.
| And I am pretty solid that it was because that is "the
| right shape of the world". The map was not meant for
| navigation, it was meant to display funny pictures about
| countries and maybe teach the kid countries exists if kid
| bothers. It was made by an artist after all, not by
| cartographer.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| Agree. Most of the general-public wall maps I see out there
| use equal-area projs.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Really? In my entire lifetime I've seen maybe five?
| Including the one hanging up in my childhood home. Even
| Google Maps uses Mercator by default.
| [deleted]
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| I wonder how much location bias affects this. I also grew
| up with basically only seeing equal-area projections and
| globes -- that's just what my school district used. It
| was weird seeing all the online memes about Mercator when
| I grew up never seeing it, heh.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| I had mostly seen this projection, until i grew up.
|
| https://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Political-World-
| Map-3360....
| DirkH wrote:
| What country do you live in? If I visit there I'll look
| out for them because I see equal-area projs like never.
| Even the decorative one in my room right now clearly has
| Greenland look more than half the size of all of Africa.
| mc32 wrote:
| The biggest miss on maps (and no fault of cartography, as there
| is no way to represent this well) is height and depth. The
| heights of mountains and the depths of water --it's hard to
| understand how shallow bodies of water are when compares to
| linear distances: the deepest part of the ocean is less
| distance linearly than the width of the city of SF.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| And also Mercator remains popular because everyone is used to
| it and nobody actually cares that Greenland isn't really half
| the size of africa
| graypegg wrote:
| Exactly! This article mostly avoids it but the usual popsci
| refrain of "the map you know is WRONG" is a pet peeve of mine!
| It's not like one projection is any worse than another, as long
| as they are useful for the context it's designed for. Maps are
| diagrams!
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| and all maps are WRONG
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I think that obsession you are referring to is part of a far
| larger mental illness that is coursing through European minds
| and cultures; the constant, compulsive obsession with trying to
| find the most obscure and ridiculous reasons, causes, and
| excuses for how brown people are Noble Savage victims and
| Europeans must hate themselves.
|
| This time the reason why Europeans must hate and destroy
| themselves is ... _spins the wheel_ ... that maps are flat and
| the planet is not.
|
| European people and culture all over that planet is very
| mentally sick and self-destructive. Any individual person that
| exhibited even slightly as mentally ill mentalities as
| Europeans, we would immediately seek help for them.
| fifafifi wrote:
| It's dangerous to be alone, take this:
| https://findtreatment.gov/
|
| Maybe also https://www.apa.org/topics/racism-bias-
| discrimination
| m463 wrote:
| Even those plastic vacuformed relief maps distorts things...
| otherwise you probably wouldn't notice the mountains.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| "Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for
| navigation." Most maps people are exposed to aren't being used
| for navigation, but for education (at least where the question
| of the Mercator projection is concerned).
|
| People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection
| which is useful for navigation in a _world history class_ or as
| a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the
| wall?
|
| "If size is your thing, use some other projection!" This is
| basically exactly what the people "hung up" on the Mercator
| projection are saying! We should be using other projections! It
| seems a totally reasonable thing to point out to me.
| bentley wrote:
| > People are naturally hung up on it because why use a
| projection which is useful for navigation in a _world history
| class_ or as a background image in a news cast or as a
| decoration on the wall?
|
| _Are_ world history classes favoring Mercator? _Are_
| newscasts using Mercator in background images? _Are_ wall
| maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing
| answers!)
|
| As a kid I often encountered oval-shaped world maps which
| obviously weren't Mercator (most likely Robinson or Winkel
| tripel). And road maps of the United States had curved
| borders, not straight borders, so those obviously weren't
| Mercator either (possibly Alders). And I had globes both at
| home and at school. So while Mercator is certainly common,
| and it's worth explaining tradeoffs in map projection
| especially in an educational context, I question whether it's
| actually as universal as people here are saying.
|
| > We should be using other projections!
|
| Are we not?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| If you ask an american to imagine a world map, they are
| imagining the mercator projection if they can imagine
| anything at all.
| bentley wrote:
| Your "nuh-uh" is a weak response to an American anecdote.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Can't argue with that.
| eevilspock wrote:
| Feels like you're pretending that Amero-Eurocentrism is not a
| thing, that there is no agenda or bias to be examined or
| criticized.
|
| If you've ever played Risk, the Amero-Eurocentrism is extreme.
|
| https://cdn.matthewhaeck.com/content/images/2015/02/risk.jpg
|
| https://freeprintableaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/risk-...
|
| North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa. Europe: 7
| territories, as large as Africa. USA: 3 territories, Canada: 5,
| Australia: 2 China, India, Brazil which are all very large: 1
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| trallnag wrote:
| I'd love maps where Europe is smaller to become the norm in
| schools and daily use oberall. Maybe it would make people
| migrating here from huge and vast countries reconsider.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| The fact that you had to pick an example from a casual board
| game from 1957 kind-of shows how much of a non-issue this is.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric
| conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most
| civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map.
|
| There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most
| planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to
| use "home" as a starting point and you'll go "out" from there.
|
| But it's still a fun observation.
|
| I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at
| the gym:
|
| https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| That reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map:
| https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536...
|
| It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the
| centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are
| approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the
| edge of the world.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I saw a Japanese map recently and it took me a full minute to
| understand what I was looking at. Japan was at the center,
| and North America was on the right.
| yorwba wrote:
| If you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in
| the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't
| mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go
| overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this
| map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-
| differential polyconic projection
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-
| differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the
| poles that appears in commonly-used maps.
| [deleted]
| thanatos519 wrote:
| That's why I put this map on my kid's wall:
| https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-classic-pacific-centered
|
| We live in Europe where the default map is Atlantic-centric so
| I wanted to make sure he got a different perspective.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Give him a globe! I remember playing with a globe as kid and
| trying to position it so I could see only water. But that is
| just one option.
| jlawson wrote:
| The 'geocentric conceit' thing is just a moralized
| overinterpretation of people trying to be practical.
|
| Obviously if you're traveling out from and back to one place
| over and over, the most sensible thing to do is to put that
| place near map center. It makes it easy to see all the other
| places in relation to your home, because how they relate to
| your home is what's relevant to you. Those are the distances
| and routes you want to be the most clear. When taking a sphere
| and mapping it to a rectangle there is no way to not do this -
| somewhere has to be the middle so you might as well choose
| somewhere practical.
|
| Sagan like many others often sells morality porn - the feeling
| of "I know better than those ignorant less moral ones". A lot
| of entertainment is like this these days.
| Kye wrote:
| He doesn't often do anything. He died in 1996. I've read a
| few of his books and I don't get this impression at all.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| The geocentric model does not put humans in the center though.
|
| At best you could argue it puts humans relatively close to the
| center, but the geocentric model also operates with a smaller
| solar system.
|
| And the implied "closer to the center is better" is not
| justified. E.g. Dante literally puts the devil in the middle of
| the universe.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| This is why I'm glad Google maps is available in a 3d globe! Even
| at relatively close zoom levels the subtle differences in scale
| are really noticeable.
|
| Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to
| _always_ start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox
| it just reverts back to a flat map.
| netsharc wrote:
| It'd be pretty cool if they can show the map in the Mercator
| projection with a center the user can choose, as well as which
| way is up...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser does this. It
| displays meteorological (and related) data, not political or
| geological features, but is still pretty interesting. There
| are also numerous alternative projections available
|
| <https://earth.nullschool.net/>
|
| (There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the
| projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Try https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/en/
| stephenboyd wrote:
| It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North
| being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like
| Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side.
| But that's just a convention.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...
| trhfhxggf wrote:
| Well, if you define up and down as the axis perpendicular to
| the ecliptic, there is an up and down in the solar system.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Kinda? It's still arbitrary which one we think of as "up" and
| which we think of as "down," though, right?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Fun thing is that USSR (and Russia as its descendant) was
| actually never using Mercator anywhere near education, since the
| distortion was too great in places where it was important. You
| would imagine it would be good for ego, but pragmatic reasons
| prevailed.
|
| Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its
| backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that
| variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common.
|
| On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying
| Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs _that_?
| dahwolf wrote:
| I'm from the Netherlands and just saw our tiny land shrink even
| further. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this swampy
| river delta actual land.
|
| Anyway, I've personally experienced the shock of the true size of
| Africa. Younger me only had a few flights to Spain under my belt
| and then went on an adventurous trip to South Africa. I figured
| it would just be a few hours more. How wrong I was.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I remember one particular trip I had on LSD. I spent some of the
| time inspecting my childhood neighbourhood in Belfast on Google
| Maps with the 3D view, and looking at it from angles other than
| North -> Top.
|
| It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the
| city but also the socio-political history of it. I would
| definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas
| they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to
| realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you
| know.
| acconrad wrote:
| Is there a phenomenon that describes why I feel a sense of unease
| when I see the other maps? Seeing the various projections and
| changes of those maps left me _very_ uncomfortable and I'm not
| sure why.
| bfung wrote:
| Use a globe.
|
| It's 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a
| virtual globe.
|
| Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you're not likely
| going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.
| bit_flipper wrote:
| This article doesn't touch on the actual reasons why Mercator is
| still in widespread use:
|
| * It was the first widespread projection because of its practical
| use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best
| projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for
| non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became
| available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something
| considered somewhat inconsequential.
|
| * Mercator and its cousin Web Mercator are extremely simple and
| fast to calculate relative to other projections. Compare the
| formula for Web Mercator
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formul...)
| to Equal Earth, an excellent compromise projection for general
| use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formula
| ...). Web Mercator is very easy to generate and serve tiled maps
| out of, Equal Earth and the like require somewhat non-trivial
| engineering to make serving those maps at scale to users in a web
| browser economical and quick.
|
| * Preserving angles is legitimately important still for large
| scale (very zoomed in) road maps. Projections which preserve size
| can cause things like 90 degree road intersections to render at
| very strange angles which confuses drivers. Mercator and Web
| Mercator are therefore excellent choices of projection for local
| road navigation, which is by far the most common use of maps
| today for most people.
|
| I strongly recommend folks interested in map projections to read
| this from Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-
| projections. Google Maps now has similar features, but both
| companies relied on Mercator for many years with good reasons
| before technology caught up and better solutions became
| available.
| user070223 wrote:
| Navigation concerns these days may include getting as fast as
| possbile(i.e traveling on the geodesic), avoiding bad weather
| areas(forecasts), using the least fuel as possible etc..
|
| Stereographic projection(of the half sphere where the origin
| and destination lies on) solves the geodesic issue, and it's
| different from the Meractor
| rocqua wrote:
| No map shown to a driver at the detail level of navigating
| intersections should have to care about projections much. At
| that small a scale earth is approximately flat, and any half
| decent projection should have minimal distortions of any kind.
| bentley wrote:
| In the 90s, my family (inveterate roadtrippers) always kept a
| Rand McNally road atlas in the car. Each page had a map
| covering (usually) a whole state. I don't know what
| projection it used--Albers, perhaps?--but I remember as a
| child wondering why some straight-looking state borders were
| actually subtly curved.
| bit_flipper wrote:
| You can read about why projections still very much matter for
| large scale (which is what I think you meant; small scale
| would be something that shows you whole countries and not
| used for road navigation) maps in the article I linked.
| Google Maps tried out an alternative projection back when it
| was still Keyhole and ran into problems with angular
| distortion when zoomed in. The original post is sadly lost to
| Google shutting down their product forums, but here's a quote
| from a Google Maps engineer on their use of Mercator and why
| it matters:
|
| The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and
| streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet
| at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While
| [Mercator] distorts a "zoomed-out view" of the map, it allows
| close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The
| majority of our users are looking down at the street level
| for businesses, directions, etc... so we're sticking with
| this projection for now.
|
| Sourced from https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/map-and-
| reality-distort..., but there are other citations of the same
| quote as well.
| expensive_news wrote:
| Why does Apple have the only map (that I know of) that
| projects Earth as a ball, as it is? It seems like a very
| obvious solution.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Maps distort how we see the world_
|
| maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine
| what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did
| in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator
| projection is problematic, I got news for you.
| waiseristy wrote:
| Had this same thought. Our own eyeballs distort how we see the
| world.
| aio2 wrote:
| I'm not doing the math, but assuming it's correct, that's really
| impressive. It's all on perspective!
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Probably 99% of the time I look at, or use, a map, it's at a
| scale where the Mercator projection is entirely fair, and highly
| useful. For probably half of the uses I have for maps, whatever
| distortion relative to an actual globe it introduces isn't even
| noticable. Then there are the rare times I look at a map at
| something approaching hemispheric scale. But come on, people,
| I've been told since 4th grade about the distortions of a world
| map at that scale. I literally can remember Ms. Kraft in 4th
| grade explaining how the map made Greenland look nearly as big as
| Africa, when in fact it was more like the size the larger
| countries in Africa.
|
| And, anyone who has traveled internationally much at all is well
| aware that, say, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than it looks
| on a world map - because we fly, for the most part, great circle
| routes, and flight times give you a very good measure of how far
| things are. First time you look at a flight to Sydney, the size
| of the Pacific Ocean, relative to the North Atlantic, pretty much
| hits you over the head.
|
| So, while I find articles like this kinda fun for a couple of
| minutes (what strange comparison will this author pull out of
| their hat to make the point that flat maps distort world
| persectives?), it's mostly for entertainment value. There really
| isn't much to see.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| The claim that "when you look at the Pacific Ocean on a globe,
| you only see water" is incorrect.
|
| I've seen a few attepts to make this claim appear as if it were
| real. Like the image in the article, it's just a perspective
| projection from a low altitude.
|
| If you actually grab a globe, you'll see there is no way to cut
| it in half with only water on one side. If there were a way to do
| that, we could save a lot of money on globes by just not making
| that half.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| You mostly see water.
| bagacrap wrote:
| This is a very Hawaii phobic point of view
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, but when you look at a globe, you're actually seeing
| less than half of it, unless it is small enough or you are far
| enough.
|
| If you're closer, you can definitely see less land. The
| "perspective projection" is correct.
| [deleted]
| ukmac wrote:
| Wow. Mind blown
| mejutoco wrote:
| "The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Every kid should have a globe to understand countries and
| distortion better.
| Animats wrote:
| They all do.[1]
|
| [1] https://earth.google.com/
| interroboink wrote:
| Aside from the humor of that page failing to load for me
| (Firefox), I also smirk at the fact that it would still be
| projecting the globe onto a _flat_ screen to view it (:
|
| Something different about having an actual ball in your
| hands.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Hm. Page loads fine for me in Firefox. Has for years
| (unlike google maps itself where oddly I get blocked for
| their 3d mode, even when that same mode works fine on
| earth.google.com)
|
| If you're on Linux, maybe check your drivers, or do
| webgl.force-enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled ?
| jefftk wrote:
| _> that page failing to load for me (Firefox)_
|
| Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine.
|
| Anything interesting in the console?
| interroboink wrote:
| I tried again in a 'blank' profile, and it worked there.
|
| On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from
| "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an
| infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those
| requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no
| dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-
| in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really.
|
| But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the
| other profile.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Are you using "resist fingerprinting" in Firefox? I've
| noticed that causes mystery total blocks or additional
| "click and hold to show you are not a bot" challenges on
| many sites (Fedex, Kickstarter, Walmart, Lowes) and at
| random. Often it seems in some backend XHR that the app
| writer didn't think to handle bot blocks on, so the page
| half loads.
| interroboink wrote:
| Just the defaults, with regard to that; so I think not? I
| see in about:config:
| "privacy.resistFingerprinting=false".
|
| Same on the other profile.
|
| Good to know about, though (:
| luxuryballs wrote:
| now I wonder if it's easier to have a globe or internet
| access
| shusaku wrote:
| Every adult should have a globe which secretly can be opened to
| find a bottle of whiskey!
| earthboundkid wrote:
| This is dumb. Every elementary school classroom has a globe. We
| see how big the countries are on globes routinely.
| Freebytes wrote:
| Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many
| more maps online.
| midasuni wrote:
| Especially the southern hemisphere, as their head is normally
| above the globe
| sltkr wrote:
| Have you ever seen a globe? They are always tilted so you
| can easily view countries below the equator.
|
| Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the
| equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the
| northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely
| justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in
| India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Kids are short. Australians turn maps so they are south
| side up anyway.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I bought a couple globes in the last year and am glad I did.
|
| I bought this small one for my desk (16$):
| https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique - every so
| often I rotate it slightly so that I'm staring at a different
| part of the globe when I look below my monitor.
|
| I bought this one for the dining room (50$):
| https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe -
| the kids can spin it around whenever we talk about a country.
| keiferski wrote:
| This article misses what I think is actually the bigger
| "distortion"[1]: the idea that an externalized, _view of Earth as
| an object in space_ should be the default way of visualizing our
| place in the universe. This is itself a distortion based on a
| long, long lineage of philosophical-religious ideas on how the
| world is constructed and how human beings fit into it. It seems
| to me that we could construct any number of other maps that are
| either more truthful, more useful, or more in-line with human
| thriving (eudaimonia) [2].
|
| In other words, if all maps are distortions, is the one we're
| using actually the one we should be using?
|
| 1. I don't really like this word, as it implies that there is a
| _real_ shape of the world and that every other perspective is
| somehow wrong.
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
| zokier wrote:
| Somehow I'm reminded of these "How Big Africa[/Texas] Really Is"
| memes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-
| sizes-h...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| See also: "Long Chile"
|
| https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _We should be wary of flattening balls!_
|
| I agree.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I studied geography in undergrad and grad school. At the
| beginning a friend and I decided upon a challenge to use as many
| different projections as possible for labs and reports.
|
| I got to 53, I think. Only once did a TA say it was an
| inappropriate choice and, yeah, it was. I used an arctic planar
| projection to map a part of southern Ontario. It was so comically
| skewed.
|
| By the end I had actually learned something: my perception of
| what was "correct" was largely biased from growing up with
| Mercator and Albers maps. While some options are more ideal than
| others given the context, there's a _lot_ of useful alternatives
| than what we all picture in our heads.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| I have a globe. But even that doesn't show the true distortion,
| which is that the Earth is wrinkled. For example, Korea is
| mountainous and so its actual surface area is much greater than
| its apparent surface area when looking at either a map or a
| globe.
| adammarples wrote:
| I really hate these mercator articles. This one is particularly
| egregious because it takes a potentially interesting subject and
| just ignores every detail. No mention that they are talking only
| about one specific map projection. No mention of it by name even.
| No mention of what trade offs projections must make. No
| exploration of other projections. No mention of historically why
| we commonly use this one, or what others could be appropriate.
| Obsession with area above all else as if what area a country
| occupies on a map is important. No support for this view either,
| map area is implied to be all important. General implication that
| it's some kind of colonialist sneer at Africa. One could just as
| easily write an article about how unfair it is that Africa gets
| to be at the centre of the map, again without explaining why on
| earth that matters.
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