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I still remember the first time I learned about this. I was watching the West Wing (Season 2 Episode 16[1] which explains the problem pretty quickly) for the fi
by ZeroCool2u 6y ago
I still remember the first time I learned about this. I was watching the West Wing (Season 2 Episode 16[1] which explains the problem pretty quickly) for the first time in the early 2010's and was absolutely blown away that we'd never been taught about this in public school (U.S.A.). Having graduated High School and a couple of years through undergrad, and just then realizing that my entire perception of the relative size, and in some cases position(!), of the continents is basically just wrong. It was actually a generally useful thought exercise though, because it really forced me to confront the fact that I need to consistently reflect on whether my previous assumptions on even basic topics hold true.
I'm not sure it would be worthwhile to advocate for changing the default projection at this point due to the logistics, but at least teaching kids about the issue, which can be covered in no more than a few minutes and is obviously not super complex, just so they're aware of it seems totally worth it!
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
- secondcoming 6y agoYou could have just looked at a globe!
- jmartrican 6y agoI have a globe and it does not do as good a job as this site or other visual tools that the OP was referring to. These new tools are way better at showing the difference in actual sizes.
- tempestn 6y agoTools like this one might be better at highlighting the flaws of map projections, but I don't see how anything could be better than a globe at showing the true relative sizes and shapes of countries, since it shows them as they actually are. In what way do you feel the globe doesn't show the differences between countries well?
- aetherson 6y agoIn what way does a globe not do a good job showing the true size of countries?
- saalweachter 6y agoThe biggest problem with a globe is that it is round. In this case, that means you can’t see all of it at once, which means you’re relying on your visual memory unless you actually pull out calipers.
- dev_tty01 6y agoSeems like this could be easily fixed. Make the countries on the globe removable (magnetic?). Then they could be moved over other countries to get a direct relative comparison in the same field of view. Similar to what the OP web site is enabling.
- Wistar 6y agoOr have a conventional printed globe but that has a clear "shell" with an engraved map that can be freely positioned to overlay any part of the "shell map" atop any part of the conventional globe surface. I have no idea how the mechanism allowing this globe within a globe would work. As flexible screens get better maybe a globe whose entire surface is a touch-sensitive display that allows gesture control of the map content?
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoyes, you're very clever ;). https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
- andi999 6y agoI am wondering, are globes rare where you live? They do not suffer from any distortion. Changing maps does not help, there is a theorem that no faithful planar map of a sphere exists, the video is a bit short on this.
- scoot 6y agoFor kids (and adults!) the LaapFrog interactive globe is superb. Not sure how much they've retained, but when they were younger, my kids could pinpoint every country on the globe, and knew the capital of every country. Edit: The model we had was much less sophisticated than that currently available (no screen or videos). It had, for example, fun speed games where it would name countries and you had to find them on the globe and tap them with the stylus, competing for who could find the most countries in a set time.
- TehShrike 6y agoI was excited to buy one for my kids, but apparently they may not have improved since then :-( https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RJ4ZQ1SDMKLNU/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RJ4ZQ1SDMKLNU/
- scoot 6y agoI'm guessing there's a term for products that get worse by virtue of being "enhanced". They really should reintroduce the old model, just with updated political geography.
- scythe 6y agoYou can't generally see two countries next to each other on a globe. The globe itself is accurate, but a human looking at a globe sees an orthographic projection up to binocular perspective, which is only accurate near the center. So you can't compare India to Brazil for example.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
- scythe 6y agoNo projection is accurate. Cartographers generally recommend against rectangular map projections. The Mercator is better at local shapes, because it's conformal, which is a not-often-mentioned advantage. Conformal maps have the property that accuracy consistently improves as you zoom in at every point. The tradeoff is that the discrepancy between regions separated by large distances can be much worse. Because the Mercator both works locally and supports loxodromic navigation it has remained popular. One alternative I like is using a conformal projection divided into hemispheres. You can get much less distortion at the cost of a single interruption. Eg: https://postimg.cc/N5nZ18CF https://postimg.cc/N5nZ18CF
- Swizec 6y agoIf it makes you feel any better, I remember both explicitly learning about this in middle school and being blown away when I first saw a visualization of the effect 10 years later. At school it was just something you know and regurgitate as fact. After a visualization like this, you understand what you learned.
- heymijo 6y agoI taught this in 6th grade social studies in Ohio (a state in the USA) two years ago. A reasonable interpretation of the standards should see this being taught in all 6th grade social studies classes across Ohio. SPATIAL THINKING AND SKILLS Content Statements: 3. Geographic tools can be used to gather, process and report information about people, places and environments. Cartographers decide which information to include and how it is displayed[0] There were a number of videos explaining this concept. I remember this one from Vox [1] in particular resonating with the students. So while we might have been short changed (I grew up in Ohio), the curriculum is improving. [0] http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Learning-in-Ohio/Social-Studies/Ohio-s-Learning-Standards-for-Social-Studies/SSFinalStandards01019.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Learning-in-O... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ
- jcranmer 6y agoIn our case (VA), it was the 5th grade curriculum where we discussed map projection shortcomings, as part of world history. (For timing, this would have been about 2000).
- ineedasername 6y ago5th grade for me too, with lots of memorizing features, drawing our own maps, learning different map projections... This was the early 90s, NJ
- JackFr 6y agoOne thing that could be done is for schools to actually teach geography. It’s extraordinarily relevant to history and current affairs. It gets a bad reputation because there is of necessity a significant amount of memorization. Knowing rivers, cities, mountain ranges, climates, the relative size and population of cities and countries really enhances your understanding of both historic and current events. And I really hate to be one of those the-US-is-really-terrible-at-this guys, but it’s been my experience that the US is really terrible at this.
- grawprog 6y agoI never learned much about mapping or map projections until university, I still think it's one of the most valuable things I learned there and one of the things I learned actually worth the money. We had a couple courses on manual mapping, surveying, geography, compass reading triangulation, all that stuff. How to draw a map by hand based on compass and survey data. By far some of the most awesome stuff i've learned. I agree, more stuff like this should be touched on in high school. Mapping is such a large yet underappreciated part of society.
- hvdfhbj 6y agoWhen I went through high school (in Australia) the memorisation parts of geography had long since gone out of fashion, and what had replaced them was a series of "case studies" where you learned about the lifestyles of some obscure group of people elsewhere on the planet for a few months before forgetting about them entirely. At least memorising the capital cities of every country on Earth gives you some kind of big picture knowledge that you can build on in later life.
- jennyyang 6y agoI'm almost 50, and we did a geography project in grade 5 on Brazil. I still remember a lot about that project, despite a lot of that information being completely out of date now (My instinct is to still say cruziero as the currency of Brazil even though it's wrong). I've never been to the country and probably never will just out of lack of interest, but it's funny how some things stick with you.
- jcranmer 6y agoOh great, the Gall-Peters projection. The Gall-Peters projection is just as problematic as the Mercator projection. Actually, it is arguably more problematic because it doesn't have any compelling features that it does better than other world-scale maps. The best world-scale maps are going to be along the lines of the Robinson projection, where you give up on trying to pretend that the world atlas is a rectangle. You're going to be screwed any way you go about it. Cylindrical map projections suck at large scales, because one of the directions is being stretched way too much. Conic map projections are good at intermediate scales (state-to-continent size), but when you expand the map to large sizes, the distortions at the edges become too great to bear. The Gall-Peters projection is an equal-area map, but it goes about this in an especially annoying way. The areas near the equator are made excessively tall and skinny, and near the poles, they are excessively short and wide. And it turns out that human beings are really not good at comparing sizes of rectangles that have drastic aspect ratios in different orientations. The spaghettification of countries doesn't lend itself to a visually pleasing map, and it really obfuscates useful tidbits such as "Maine is closer to Africa than any other US state", which is pretty clear in virtually every other world map. To top it off, it was presented to a cartographic conference as the map that's better than Mercator at a time when all cartographers were already using non-Mercator maps and complaining about lay people relying on Mercator maps for world projections.
- dehrmann 6y agoI think the Waterman butterfly projection is my favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection
- kibwen 6y agoMine is Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map Great for showing the relative sizes of continents (and also visualizing how all the continents are nearly one contiguous landmass), at the cost of chopping up the oceans. Second favorite is the Peirce quincuncial map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection , which tiles the plane.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoHad a mid-sized globe at home growing up. It wasn't attached to anything so you could pick it up and rotate it any direction. This gave me a pretty could sense of how big any o the continents and countries were, more than anything.
- JPKab 6y agoAmerican here. My underfunded school taught us this in 6th grade. We even cut orange peels to learn the different projections. That was the 90s. Public schools have really gotten shitty.
- bcantrill 6y agoTotally with you -- and I have a rant on this that expresses your same indignation![1] Sadly, the alternatives are also bad, albeit for different reasons; damn this cursed sphere! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5jCXdTYJYc#t=30m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5jCXdTYJYc#t=30m35s
- ineedasername 6y agoYou know if we could all just agree on the flat earth thing it would be quit a bit easier. Gravity wouldn't make a whole lot of sense though.
- girvo 6y agoBah easy, the flat earth is accelerating through space at 9.8m/s/s ;)
- ineedasername 6y agoThat's much too fast, the turtles underneath can't walk that fast, and there's a whole lot of them
- boraoztunc 6y agoThis is very good, explaining much better than I could possible do. Thank you. Also, I remember reading about AuthaGraph World Map[1] from the architect Hajime Narukawa[2] which won The Good Design Grand Award[3] back then, creating a new world map displayin each contry, including Antarctica and the North Pole shown in its entirety.[4] [1] https://totravelistolive.co/authagraph-world-map/ https://totravelistolive.co/authagraph-world-map/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajime_Narukawa/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajime_Narukawa/ [3] https://www.g-mark.org/ https://www.g-mark.org/ [4] http://www.authagraph.com/top/?lang=en http://www.authagraph.com/top/?lang=en
- oars 6y agoThank you for sharing this. I'm ashamed that in all my years on this planet I thought that Greenland was nearly as big as the whole of Africa.
- TomWhitwell 6y agoI think I'd over compensated - I was surprised to find that Greenland is nearly as big as India.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoIn Europe everyone has a word atlas for geography class, and the various projections are explained literally on the first page.
- Tagbert 6y agoOddly, in my US elementary education we spent a lot of time in 4th and 5th grade learning about different kinds of maps and their trade offs. Perhaps my classes were anomalous?