7 ms·
Five world map styles
- gpvos 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/ has better ones.
- fraqed 10y agoI was surprised some of these weren't included in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
- Robotbeat 10y agoYeah. Frakking "Peters" (sic) projection. It's Gall-Peters, and it's still terrible. By the way, most online maps (such as Google Maps) use a variant of Mercator, because otherwise shapes and north-south vs east-west distances (when you're zoomed in) are highly distorted. I think Mercator and Gall-Peters type projections are both just about equally as bad for global views. Africa and other equatorial areas are heavily distorted whereas mid-latitude areas are fairly accurate, so it's just as US/Eurocentric as Mercator. The projections which compromise shape distortion and size distortion are pretty good, like Winkel-Tripel. I think I prefer the projections that preserve both shape and size while ripping the map along oceans. Like Dymaxion.
- apexalpha 10y agotl;dr: buy a globe.
- gnodar 10y agoIs there a globe I can buy that allows me to rotate on any axis? So if I want to put south on top, I can, and vice versa.
- b3lvedere 10y agoSure: http://tiny.cc/j7l5jy http://tiny.cc/j7l5jy
- privong 10y agoOr for something a bit more fancy see some of these models: http://www.bellerbyandco.com/index.php/globes.html http://www.bellerbyandco.com/index.php/globes.html
- weavie 10y agoI have one of these. They are great for just leaving lying around the living room always to hand. No need to worry about it breaking. Easy to quickly grap when the topic of other countries come up with my daughter. Useful when we need a kick about too!
- mynewtb 10y agoUnobfuscated link: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Inflatable-inch-Globe/dp/B0009K3116/ https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Inflatable-inch-Gl...
- atomwaffel 10y agoYes, you're very clever. https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
- ekianjo 10y agothis is old.
- niftich 10y agoAzimuthal equidistant projections are really something else, especially in this globalized age of air travel. For example, did you know Sydney, Seattle, and Rio de Janeiro are all about 12000 km from Dubai in three different, but beautifully evenly spaced directions [1]? And that plotting the different combinations of these city pairs from Seattle [2], Sydney [3], and Rio [4] gets almost the same result, except that the shortest distance between Australia and South America is about 1500 km longer and crosses over Antarctica? [1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DXB-SYD%0D%0ADXB-SEA%0D%0ADXB-GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DXB-SYD%0D%0ADXB-SEA%0D%0ADXB-G... [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-SYD%0D%0ASEA-DXB%0D%0ASEA-GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-SYD%0D%0ASEA-DXB%0D%0ASEA-G... [3] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-SEA%0D%0ASYD-DXB%0D%0ASYD-GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-SEA%0D%0ASYD-DXB%0D%0ASYD-G... [4] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GIG-SEA%0D%0AGIG-DXB%0D%0AGIG-SYD&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GIG-SEA%0D%0AGIG-DXB%0D%0AGIG-S...
- madcaptenor 10y agoIn other words, Dubai, Seattle, Sydney, and Rio are approximately the vertices of a regular tetrahedron on the surface of the earth (with the Rio to Sydney edge being a bit longer than the others). It would be interesting (although entirely useless) to know if there are other quartets of cities like that. It seems like it would be hard enough to find four equidistant points on the surface of the earth that are all on land...
- niftich 10y agoMichigan artist David Barr (1940-2015) created the 'Four Corners Project' [1] exhibited at the Smithsonian, where he inscribed a regular tetrahedron into a transparent globe. In choosing his points, he used his personal criteria: 1: Each of the 4 areas needed to be untouched by western technology 2: One of the points had to be on Easter Island 3: Each of the 4 positions needed to be on land His effort was written about in a 1982 issue of InfoWorld magazine [2], and the mathematical background is fascinatingly detailed in the paper 'Mathematical Geography and Global Art: The Mathematics of David Barr's "Four Corners Project"' by Sandra L. Arlinghaus and John D. Nystuen [3]. On a different website, Sandra Arlinghaus further details [4] David Barr and John D. Nystuen's math and even includes a link to a still-working .kml generator for Google Earth [5] that can be used to help with this task. [1] http://boingboing.net/2016/03/29/the-amazing-4-corners-project.html http://boingboing.net/2016/03/29/the-amazing-4-corners-proje... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=DjAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12 https://books.google.com/books?id=DjAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=P... [3] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/monog01/fulltext.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/monog01/fullte... [4] http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.html http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.ht... [5] http://montalk.net/coordinates.htm http://montalk.net/coordinates.htm
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pitt1980 10y agowhy is China so large in the voter turnout map? I realize I actually know very little about the political process in China are there regular elections there? what are they voting on? I perceive that you're not voting for any politicians from opposition parties to the official communist party, am I wrong? are you voting on who gets to control the party apparatus within the communist party? who is that vote actually open to?
- jbob2000 10y agoThey elect congress members, but there's only one party. There's more than a billion people in China. If 10% of them turn out to vote, then that's already more than the turnout for the 2016 presidential election.
- slurry 10y agoLocal people's congresses are directly elected. Higher levels up to the National People's Congress, are indirectly elected by the level below. So imagine you vote for town council. The town councils in your county elect a county council, the county councils elect a state legislature, and the state legislatures elect Congress. Elections for local people's congress are - for China - fairly open. There are 50-100% more candidates than seats. But candidates are in practice only nominated by the CP and related organizations. But the point is, you can choose between a couple of alternative CP picks, rather than having a single CP pick imposed upon you. A little bit like elections in Iran, I guess. That's not wide open elections like in the West, but it's not nothing. Elections are more centrally controlled the higher up in the hierarchy you go, but there is always some wiggle room.
- 0wl3x 10y agoany title with the word 'change' in it suggesting that after reading the article is going to have a marked impact on my life usually has the direct opposite effect. I thought a clickbait wasn't really a thing on HN?
- hectorr 10y agoSouth up is fine. This article lost me when they suggested east up, west up, or "any compass bearing". That's not how planets work. Anyways, VR/AR globes will solve these problems pretty quickly.
- mkj 10y agoWhy do you imagine a solar system is horizontal not vertical? I think West or East could probably work - looking at a rising or setting sun direction.
- Coincoin 10y agoBecause as ground based bipedal animals, we move and live along a horizontal plane.
- bharath28 10y agoThat would still hold true in an east-up map.. We are projecting out of the plane of the map when we stand up/walk.. Separate note - while i get that north-up is just a convention and a mental construct, the south-up map really threw me off. As i was staring into the map, I felt the urge to turn my monitor around and had the same visceral need to set things right as i would upside down on a roller-coaster. This caught me completely by surprise because i was expecting to just make a mental note that this was a new convention i could get used to. Instead i "felt" uncomfortable - did this happen to anyone else?
- 10y ago
- Yizahi 10y agoAll of these articles imply that Mercator projection is widely used at least somewhere. Is it true though? In Ex-USSR majority of maps are(were) proportional, probably Robinson projection, in schools and in daily life.
- jackcarter 10y agoMercator is the default projection for most schools in the USA.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- atomwaffel 10y agoIt's used in what's arguably the most used map of our time, Google Maps (as well as most other interactive maps).
- Robotbeat 10y agoAnd using something like Gall-Peters for an online map would be absolutely terrible except for mid-latitude countries (like North America). On a zoomable map, it's important to keep relative north-south and east-west distances very close to the same when zoomed in.
- mikeash 10y agoSeems to me that online maps should render the Earth as a sphere (or, heck, a properly shaped spheroid) centered on the viewport, where scrolling around rotates the sphere. This will look flat when zoomed in, will look accurate when zoomed out, and won't have any weird distortions of area or direction. I'm sure Google Maps didn't do it this way originally because it wasn't feasible when your minimum target was IE5 running on Windows 98, or whatever, but it surely could be done now.
- jackcarter 10y agoGoogle Maps does do this in "Earth" mode (formerly "Satellite").
- m1el 10y agoNo mention of Dymaxion map? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_projection_rotated.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Map-of-human-migrations.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Map-of-h...
- andrepd 10y agoEh, too much talk about how map projections are the tools of the evil colonialists/developed nations. The Mercator projection became widespread because "of its ability to represent lines of constant course as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians", not because it exaggerates areas towards the poles for political European supremacy reasons. North is consistently depicted as up (not only in European maps but around the world) probably because the stars including the north star Polaris are "up" from our point of view. Maps are centered in the GMT meridian because the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on earth and thus the most logical point for the break. No need to make everything a struggle about "race". Make scientific arguments or credible social arguments, but don't just assume off the bat everything is "problematic" and make even patently scientific decisions attributable to malice and oppression. It doesn't help.
- bharath28 10y agoI concur. Of the maps proposed, other than maybe the Peter's projection version, i don't see any practical value for wide option of any of the other maps. Peter's projection is interesting because it correctly depicts the relative sizes of nations and gives better perspective to things most people think about (for example, how large Africa really is). Reading too much into things like the grand meridian was chosen because of colonial supremacy is pointless. Yes sure it was, but it works and the cost to switch is too high. Any other arbitrary place we choose as reference will have the same problems in the future.
- fdupoo 10y agoBoston public schools recently announced that they will shift to using world maps based on the Peters projection, Why not teach them both maps, or, rather, teach them that it's hard to represent the world in 2D space. O.o get them looking at maps from all angles and configurations.
- nippples 10y agoI'm starting to develop an instinctive "roll eyes up" reaction to whenever I see the expression "problematic" written unironically. I'm all for better map projections, but there's zero need for the author's moral grandstanding in the article.