• CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Acquiring Greenland would move the USA up 2 places in the list of largest countries (past Canada and China). That’s probably why he wants it.

        • Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          He wants to embed himself in the history as some kind of victor. It’s his sick phantasy to be presented in history books as a hero. That’s why he is doing everything he can to irreversibly leave his legacy wherever he can. That’s why he’s building the Epstein ballroom. That’s why he renames buildings and places after himself. That’s why he wants to create new colonies. He’s a narcissist.

      • tomiant@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        It is quick becoming a very important strategic hub in the Arctic due to shipping lanes opening up due to global heating. Greenland is also continuously opening up to natural resource extraction as ice disappears, and they have vast quantities of a lot of very valuable shit under the ground that keeps getting easier to access for the same reason, like rare earth elements, oil, natural gas, copper, gold, zinc, uranium, lithium, tungsten, the list goes on…

        Controlling and exploiting that land is a major strategic interest for all the big (and small) powers. That’s why he wants it, and everyone else too. Fuck his fat fucking ass though.

        • foo@feddit.uk
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          19 hours ago

          The dissonance with Trump is astonishing. The Arctic is recently becoming more important strategically due to ice disappearing, and yet he’s one of the biggest and most stubborn climate change deniers.

  • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Interesting how much closer kazakhstan (and by extension, china) is to europe when you see it like this. Like if the red outlines were all smooshed back closely together.

    • huppakee@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Crossing the globe north to south is the same distance as east to west, but since it is folded open on 2d maps it looks as if the earth is wider then it is higher. In this projection that means the map is stretched more horizontally than vertically, if i understand correctly.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        1 day ago

        Crossing the globe north to south is the same distance as east to west

        Not true, the earth isn’t a perfect sphere. Though I guess I’m just being nitpicky because I looked it up and it’s only ~27mi/43km longer along the equator.

      • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        In this projection that means the map is stretched more horizontally than vertically, if i understand correctly

        You’re right! And yes, north to south is roughly the same distance as east to west. Subconsciously I’ve always felt like north to south is a quicker journey, but that was just Mercator playing a trick upon me

        • huppakee@piefed.social
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          12 hours ago

          but that was just Mercator playing a trick upon me

          Nearly every projection that show the entire globe on a 2d canvas will show you a map where the horizontal distance is almost double the vertical distance, so it is very correct that a journey from the top to the bottom is much shorter than from the most left to the most right.

  • observes_depths@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    I’ll add that we use the mercator projection because it preserves shapes but not scale. There’s other projections that preserve scale but not shapes.

  • crank0271@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Hmm, so the Mercator projection makes things look larger than they are? I think I’ve got an idea for another use for it… 😏

  • ZpbkPEcaHhIveqdR@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    I don’t think that’s the true size. You’ll find all those countries are actually a lot bigger than presented on that map and scaled down to fit on a screen

  • Denixen@feddit.nu
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    18 hours ago

    Africa is fucking vast! I always knew that,but looking at mercator maps puts it in perspective. You could comfortably fit Russia into it, the worlds largest country by are 😳

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.

    And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.

    The reason it’s Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn’t stray too far East or West will be very accurate.

    Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.