This is like that one American Dallas county commissioner, William Price, getting offended it’s called Black Hole.
The notion that projections perpetuate some racial agenda is exactly the pseudo-intellectual victimhood that takes away oxygen in the room for actual issues to be addressed.
This is truly the concern of our time.
Me when someone calls my pp smol
I’m going to be honest, this just looks utterly useless for any country that isn’t south africa, and ESPECIALLY useless for any country in the northern hemisphere.
Like, yes, sure, you’ve made all the country’s areas roughly equal, but also every single country that isn’t south africa is a distorted, warped mess that looks nothing like its actual shape.
Look at parts of europe- every country is a COMPLETELY USELESS shape. Three quarters of them have been turned into diagonal lines. How the fuck is that useful? Europe is the worst area in that regard, but by no means the only one.
It makes it literally useless as a map.
Every country looks distorted and warped based on your lifetime of experience looking at mercator projection. Every country looks warped and distorted when compared to globes. We learn geography on a flat surface which is inherently distorted because we live on a round surface
Actually, fun fact, the entire point of the Mercator projection is that it DOES maintain shapes/angles, just not scale. It’s a nautical map, it’s for sailing. That’s why when you look at a mercator map and a globe, the countries look about the same, just potentially different sizes- because that’s literally the point of it.
Not exactly it distorts shapes a lot. However if you pick point A on a coast and point B on a different coast the angle of the line is the heading you should sail to go from point A to point B.
So yeah very useful as a nautical map if you want to navigate from place to place. Not accurate in shape though.
Who actually uses it as a map though? It’s usually only seen briefly in apps, or in various symbols, or on a classroom wall. As a symbol, having the rights sizes would be a significant improvement. In an app, people will zoom in anyway, so at least they’d passively see the correct proportions when zooming out, instead of getting a false impression. In a classroom, it would seem all that more importantly to not give false impressions to kids.
The problem with that is that it gives a completely incorrect idea of what an individual country looks like, in a way that gives a false impression to kids about what the countries even look like. Suddenly they have to look at one map, and recognize a country, and then look at a zoomed in, more accurate map, and recognize it in a completely different shape. To be frank, most people’s geography knowledge is already bad enough- doubling the amount of shapes they need to learn is basically a non-starter.
For classroom instruction, a globe should be being used anyway- that’s the gold standard. Why go through all the work and effort of introducing a worse solution, that doubles the amount of studying, and is made completely useless when it can be replaced by a $10 globe?
Is learning the shapes of countries really all that important? I would have thought by the time the shape matters, you’re looking at/learning the details of the country, at which point you’re not looking at a map of the entire world anymore anyway.
Yes? The shapes of countries- and their relation to other countries around them- is literally the most important part of learning geography in some respects, because of how much that shape is influenced by- and has been influenced by- the surroundings, the socioeconomic and sociopolitical history, etc etc.
That’s why I use the dymaxian projection
Gall-Peters 4EVA!
Gerrymappering.
We should encourage the use of more globes to represent world maps.
Like, seriously. Almost all maps are viewed on a computer screen, all computers easily have the ability to display a sphere and rotate it
Kinda hard to fit a globe inside a school book, or any book
It’s kinda easy to have globes in school though. Doesn’t need one per student.
can’t hang a globe on the wall
Just use a string and two thumbtacks, it’s not rocket surgery.
a globe?
String attach to globe, string attach to thumbtacks, globe now hanging.
Reminds me of the West Wing episode with the Petersen (?) projection map. Although I seem to remember that map format was under copyright and would have required a fee for every use. An intended consequence?
The simple fact is no map projection will be perfect or do anyone “justice”.
You’re flattening out a sphere to a flat rectangle. A lot of compromises have to be made. So go with the one that functions best for navigation.
Some projections are better than others. The Mercator projection at least has a use case that justifies its creation. This map has no purpose other than a political one.
Everyone with a cursory knowledge of maps knows there are inherent issues protecting a 3d object into a 2d surface. That’s fine because some projections are useful
Globes.
Well a rectangle gives you easy direction, true north is always up. But you can map very accurate maps that are not rectangle. They just make navigation a bitch
16th century? Huh I would have expected a far more accurate version would have been made and accepted long ago.
Especially since during all the centuries since then accurate navigation was needed, even around Afrika, and not make journeys last far longer by keeping an incorrect map.
Nautical navigation is where the Mercator map is actually the most useful. Any straight line drawn in it stays true and any angles are preserved. That’s why every nautical chart is done using a Mercator projection. It’s just not so great when blown up to the size of the world, but that was never really it’s intention.
It was intentional as propaganda. During the Cold War, it made the U.S.S.R. look bigger and more of an imposing threat to the west.
It was intentional as propaganda. During the Cold War,
Nope. It is hundreds of years older that that.
Yes it is older than that.
That doesn’t discount the fact that it was selected for that purpose.
That doesn’t discount the fact that it was selected for that purpose.
WTF of course it discounts the fact that it was “selected for that purpose”.
Ok come up with something that’s better and just as practical.
They did. They are specifically advocating for the Equal Earth projection.
I mean everything is approximately to scale i guess, but the further east or west you get from Europe/Africa the more bent things get. Including the area that 75% of the worlds population live.
Well yeah, every map projection has to mis-represent something. In this case they’re arguing that presenting area is more important than presenting angles. Outside of long-distance travel on ships and planes, which are not using general-purpose world maps, nobody is navigating with a world map, so I think that they’re probably right here. It seems more important to me to understand the relative size of Africa to other landmasses than it is to know that the Korean peninsula is actually a few degrees off of being straight north of Borneo
It was very much a real discussion back then as well. The writers didn’t invent this argument.
People have been complaining about maps in general since we first started making them. The Gall-Peters projection that they mentioned traces its origins back to 1855 when James Gall first introduced the concept.
In the 1970’s, Arno Peters made this projection well known. He specifically argued the point the show makes: other maps distort our perception of the world and it fosters problems with how we treat some countries.
I was honestly not aware. Learn something new every day!
You’re welcome, enjoy your odd new fact :D
Stuff like this is why I really enjoy The West Wing. It often has interesting real world arguments that it plays out smartly. A bit too optimistic in our current political climate, but still fun to watch.
Beat me to it. Except it’s more like 25 years. Now get off my lawn.
Such a beautiful scene.
“But you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re freaking me out!”
Like completely, or just as a default?
It’s uniquely the best option if you like using compass bearings.
Which, at a global scale, is important in your life when exactly? The only time I move at a global scale I’m flying, and then the projection makes it look like my pilot doesn’t know how to fly in a straight line.
Since the advent of widespread GPS, a lot less. It’s historically interesting, and is still used as a backup by some ships, but it’s not really necessary the way it was in the age of sail when it became the projection.
Again, if they just want to switch to something more balanced as a default when you just want to point at things on a map, that’s entirely reasonable.
I always that that countries made their own maps and always centered themselves on it.
Damn the Goode called me tf out
I feel like it’s missing a style I don’t know the name of but can describe. Basically a map made up of 4-6 parts depending on it they want the north and south poles wherein it shows the earth at 4 different point roughly broken up by continents, Europe and Africa, Asia and parts of Oceania, Oceania, and North and South America.
No credit for Mollweide projection ;(
Shoes with toes wtf
I’ve heard they’re very comfortable but they do look weird
Dymaxion.
Waterman is nice and all, but I don’t like the way it splits Australia and New Zealand, or how it puts Antarctica in a separate bit like Alaska in USA maps.
Dymaxion offers a nice continuous view of all the continents, and can still be folded into a sufficiently spherical globe-like thingy.
It’d be nice to have an alternative version that made the oceans continuous, though, for people who like ships and stuff.
As a Dvorak user, why not dymaxion
Dvorak users, assemble!
Robinson always looked the best to me
What brand are your running shoes?
Brooks…the most basic of basic bitch running shoes……
