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The world map that reboots your brain
- swayvil 4y agoClickbait much? It's a realistic portrayal of scales in geography, not psilocybin mushrooms
- steanne 4y agothere's also a nice subset of maps that have south at the top. http://gisweb.massey.ac.nz/topic/webreferencesites/TheUpsideDownMapPage.htm http://gisweb.massey.ac.nz/topic/webreferencesites/TheUpside...
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoIt's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThe general concept that the post is trying to talk about (and has got slightly lost in the anti-anti-racism discussion) is: "the map is not the territory" aka "all models are wrong (but some are useful)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation A hopefully less polarising map is the "walk the tube map": https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/11/9712376/london-walk-tube-underground-map https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/11/9712376/london-walk-tube...
- amelius 4y agoI don't know about others, but when I saw a 3d globe model as a child with all the countries in their proper relative sizes, my brain didn't reboot.
- glitchc 4y ago
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIf only there was a way to apply paint directly to a curved surface.
- kspacewalk2 4y agoOr to cut paper in something other than straight lines
- zaik 4y agoNo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RWcWSN4HhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RWcWSN4HhI
- glitchc 4y ago
- Double_a_92 4y agoMULTIPLE thin strips of paper. Any distortion will be minimal, compared to a big flat piece of paper.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghostpepper 4y agoA flat sheet of paper can’t wrap a globe seamlessly - that’s why projections are created in the first place. An actual globe doesn’t have that problem.
- glitchc 4y agosee posted video. An actual globe is created from flat sheets of paper cut into strips and stuck on. Printing a curved surface on a flat plane is by definition a projection.
- labrador 4y agoBuckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map, which is pretty good and similar to this post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map My brain wasn't rebooted by a map until I saw an "upside down" map with the North pole and South pole vertically flipped. People from the Southern hemisphere seem to think it puts them in a better perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-up_map_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-up_map_orientation
- emptyparadise 4y agoI wonder if the Dymaxion map bits can be rearranged to create a more familiar map shape with the distortions mostly getting confined to oceans and unpopulated areas?
- Rediscover 4y agoYes, that was one of the concepts of it. The two most used arrangements are one interconnected body of water at the center, and the other one land mass at the center. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_map_ocean.png https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_map_ocean... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File%3ADymaxion_projection.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File%3AD...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tagbert 4y agoI remember our 4th grade class (US 1960's) doing a project where we too a printout of that Dymaxion map and constructed a "globe" with it. It was part of a series of geography lessons on different map projections. I guess my brain rebooted a lot then.
- undersuit 4y agoI've wanted to get a mercator map with a 90 degree rotation instead. An "equator-up" orientation?
- belinder 4y agoI'm a big fan of maps and have seen a lot of different projections but this is my first time seeing authagraph. I think not only does it do a good job of showing relative size, it also looks good - but I'm used to looking at 'unconventional' projections. The only issue with it is that it's a bit hard to gauge what is 'up' and what is 'down'. If you were showing me this projection for Mars then I would probably get lost. I'm having trouble finding a nice large resolution image. Anyone found one?
- JasonCEC 4y agoShades of Snowcrash in the title, needed to read the comments to make sure it was safe before clicking.
- soared 4y agoIt has always seemed more valid me to distort water rather than land.
- zimpenfish 4y agoProbably makes sense these days but back in the 1500s when they were doing all the sailing, distorting the water might well have caused problems of a terminal nature, I think.
- mistrial9 4y agolooking at a globe, the size of the "Pacific Ocean" is what changes my brain
- michalc 4y agoI’ve posted this on HN before, but my own “brain reboot” came from making http://projections.charemza.name/ http://projections.charemza.name/ that allows you to rotate the world before applying the Mercator projection. The “crazy looking” distortions make me realise just how distorted the usual projection itself is
- wodenokoto 4y agoIt would be nice if there was a globe, with the center of the projection facing the user. Once you start rotating the map, it is really difficult to make sense of what is going on. Other than that, it is really cool, and quite trippy to play with.
- michalc 4y agoAh for me the lack of sense of what’s going on is sort of the point of it. The rotated projections are just as right as the regular Mercator projection in an objective way, but it really doesn’t feel that way.
- zwkrt 4y agoThat was exactly what I thought too. I kept trying to make the map seem “normal” but no matter when I tried some thing was always blown so far out of perspective it was unrecognizable. Every projection is so far off that it just becomes comical. At that point it clicked that the Mercator projection is just as bad, I’ve just seen it before.
- JackFr 4y ago> Every projection is so far off that it just becomes comical. Except Lambert and Albers. They become conical.
- ThrustVectoring 4y agohttps://ibb.co/BVfgYj2 https://ibb.co/BVfgYj2 This is the best I could do, and it's pretty much just putting the vast empty expanses of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in the higher-distortion areas near the top and bottom.
- dividefuel 4y agoThe article seems to imply that people are primarily exposed to Mercator in school without discussing its shortcomings. However in my experience growing up in the 90s/00s, we discussed lots of different projections and their respective tradeoffs. It was drilled in pretty deep that the Mercator reflected shapes accurately, but not relative sizes. I also remember seeing Robinson projection far more than Mercator, though again we were reminded that it's not perfect either, and that any 2D projection will have its pros/cons.
- gedy 4y agoYeah this is some old baby boomer trope about how bad the Mercator projection is, but it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom. Globes are a thing and the internet makes much of this discussion moot.
- LightG 4y agoOnly if you think the history of now is moot.
- rob_c 4y agoUntil the "joke" of the flat earth got way out of hand and you realise that the internet is great at everything aside from context and this is something that isn't taught. Although I remember a professor screwing with us and changing a proof on Wikipedia to catch people out one term...
- epgui 4y agoThat’s a shameful act of vandalism on the part of the professor… :(
- rob_c 4y agoNot sure I'd agree. It was very public, very much reverted and very much a demonstration of the context of the internet. Not to mention a very easily verifiable proof, if people picked up the textbooks and noticed the subtle mistake.
- yboris 4y agoMust watch: Why are we changing maps? from The West Wing https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI?t=44 https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI?t=44
- devnull255 4y agoI really loved this episode. Especially when someone pointed out the fallacy of believing north = up and south = down, which is that way only because we live in a world where most map projections on a wall show north as up and south as down. It doesn't look like that at all from outer space.
- jeroenhd 4y agoNorth being up hasn't always been the case; for quite some time, east was commonly up and west down; it's where the "orient" in "orientation" comes from. Which side is up really depends on how you imagine the earth going around the sun. If you look at the earth from its side as it revolves around the sun and you choose to depict the earth moving counter clockwise, the north is up. If you consider the earth revolving around the sun clockwise, south is up. The earth is at an angle, of course, but that angle isn't enough to really change the definitions of up and down. North being up makes logical sense when you consider that around 87% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere. We generally read top to bottom and the populated parts of the earth are often what we're really interested in. There's also the choice of "north" that matters. There are many definitions for what constitutes as the north since the magnetic poles don't stay in a single place on the surface and the top/bottom of the spinning planet isn't anywhere near the magnetic poles. Then there's the north star moving as we move through the galaxy, making any north determined by celestial navigation questionable over time; currently Polaris is commonly used as the pole star, but on humanity's time scale that's a relatively recent (±1300 years) development.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYour argument for North being at the top because most people live there works better for East: https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/ https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/ (click the buttons under the map to aggregate by latitude or longitude)
- ddhhyy 4y agoTwo of my favorite sources for thinking about map projections come from (where else?) the USGS: Map Projections: https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/70047422/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/70047422/report.pdf and the more comprehensive Map Projections: A Working Manual: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395 https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395
- noasaservice 4y agoFor any 2d representation of a sphere, you must give up at least 1 accurate dimension. Sometimes more. So that means no matter what 2d map used, will have a geo-mathematic shortcoming.
- ipnon 4y agoCan the stickiness of the Mercator projection in the West be attributed to the fact that most of the West is in the regions of the projection that are most distorted, which allows Westerners to examine their own geography in more detail? A projection that made America and Europe comparatively hard to read would seem to have little staying power on school walls there.
- labster 4y agoNo. The stickiness of the Mercator projection is due to navigational charts wanting to preserve true bearings.
- JackFr 4y agoAnd while a globe is obviously better, the orthogonal representation of North-South and East-West also allow for some easier instruction of some earth science topics - basically that the Earth rotates along the horizontal axis.
- kingofpandora 4y agoNo one is doing navigation in grade school or using their geography textbook.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI believe this is what people actually mean when they talk about this. Most of the other replies seem to be massively overreacting to a percieved overeaction, as if the message was "Gerardus Mercator was a Nazi!". People distort maps all the time, often for good reasons. People notice when maps distort something they care about (like maps without New Zealand to people in New Zealand, or the BBC weather map enlarging London at the expense of the North of England and Scotland). It's similar to early cameras not reproducing dark skin tones well until chocolate manufacturers complained about the way it made their product look, or the recent drama about automatic image cropping preferring the lighter skinned person in the photo. No, the camera/computer is not a racist. No, the programmer is not a racist. But, it still reflects a society where a large fraction of the human beings on earth aren't given as much consideration as others. And that's racist.
- mrweasel 4y agoWhen ever I feel the need to know the "actual" size of a country, I turn to https://www.thetruesize.com https://www.thetruesize.com which allows you to move countries around to better compare them. For instance, I have a pretty good idea of how big Sweden is, so moving Sweden around helps me visualize the size of something like Japan.
- antiquark 4y agoCritical Map Theory.
- rayiner 4y ago> Given that the people who claim ownership and ensure distribution of this map have historically been white and rich representatives of the countries in the northern hemisphere This sounds like post hoc race baiting. The Mercator projection was devised in 1569, when Mediterranean countries like Spain, Portugal, and Italy were immensely powerful and pioneers in exploration. Many of the explorers who drew the first world maps came from those countries. If they cared about the relative size of the countries, why would they adopt a projection that makes Scandinavia look so much larger than Spain and Portugal and their holdings in Latin America? In an effort to find a race angle, the article overlooks important history. The Mercator projection was adopted because it preserved bearing lines for marine navigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps. World maps were developed primarily by seafaring explorers, so this became the dominant projection, not just in Northern European countries, but pretty much everywhere.
- notahacker 4y agoThe idea that retaining a map which distorting the sizes of countries is a Eurocentric conspiracy against equatorial countries was originally made by Peters when pushing his equal area projection in the 1970s and 80s It's a pretty tendentious argument though, since in addition to it obviously not being the original intent, people don't draw the conclusion that Greenland is a mighty state, the US is subordinate to Canada and the Middle East is a small and inconsequential backwater from map projections, and if people did gauge power and wealth from map projections, the Mercator projection would actually understate the actual relative power and influence of Western Europe anyway (and Peters massively overstates arid underpopulated regions and is barely any better at putting India's sixth of the world population in context). Plus of course, the Mercator projection is still better for local navigation anyway.
- vinay_ys 4y agoThe maps I care about are Google Maps and Apple Maps and the maps used in school classrooms. If I were to zoom out all the way to world map view in Google/Apple Maps, clearly the intent isn't to do navigation but to get relative geographical position/size understanding of various land and water masses. For this, in this era, I would expect them to provide a different projections that are better suited for these purposes.
- flohofwoe 4y agoI never understood the obsession with Mercator projection in blog posts and the media. Is the US school system actually using world maps with Mercator projection, or what else is the reason that this topic is popping up again and again? The world maps I had been 'exposed to' during school (in the 80s!) used a projection which narrows towards the poles and looks a lot more 'realistic': Basically like this: https://www.mapsofindia.com/world-map/world-political-map-2020.jpg https://www.mapsofindia.com/world-map/world-political-map-20... ...still a lot of distortion of course, but much better than traditional Mercator (which is 500 years old, so give the guy some slack).
- thatjoeoverthr 4y agoGrowing up in American schools, I saw this as well. I remember even asking the teacher why the map had multiple cutaways, and her explaining the distortion. I could be convinced that Mercator prevalence is a thing, if someone dug into map sales.
- campbel 4y agoYep, this looks super familiar to me. We also just had globes in our classrooms. Today's students probably use Google maps (or equivalent) which wouldn't have this problem anyways.
- paleotrope 4y agoHave you ever zoomed all the way out on Google map
- tephra 4y agoI would have thought national geographic maps are common in U.S classrooms? And I don't think they've ever used the Mercator.
- guskel 4y agoIt’s just another example of modern virtue signaling. YT male evil. Got it. We know.
- rayiner 4y ago
- teddyh 4y agoI think nobody needs a word map projected to a plane anymore. Local maps do not suffer noticably from distortion, and a world map can be represented as an interactive globe.
- pessimizer 4y agoFor me, it only breaks Brazil, Europe and India. Brazil starts to seem underpopulated for its size, and Europe and India look very small.
- Tomte 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/ Peirce quincuncial looks cool.
- verisimi 4y agoI like the map, and article. It does challenge you to look at the world differently and realise how little you actually know. > The longer we use a tool without questioning it, the more of a truth it becomes no matter how wrong it is. Comments like this do irk me though. Truth is not subjective, you cannot have more or less of it, and whether you use a tool has nothing to do with the underlying reality. Using a tool, in this case a map of the terrain, does not make it more or less truthful. A map can be more accurate, a better representation, a genuine attempt, but it cannot contain more truth. The truth is the terrain itself.
- wikitopian 4y agoAt no point in the past thirty years has the Mercator Projection been discussed without a disclaimer that it's very distorted.
- kryptiskt 4y agoI had a globe as a kid, it had a topographical map when unlit and a political one when lit (with borders and country names). I have to say that it was a far superior teaching aid compared to any 2D map projection. For example, with a physical globe it's immediately apparent what's the deal with great circle routes.
- devnull255 4y agoThe Mercator projection map was the map I was most exposed to in school and was on my bedroom wall at home when I was going to Elementary school. Later on when I went to college, I saw the Peters Projection map (and had that on the wall above my desk in my apartment. This map rebooted my brain in that it showed a more truthful representation of how large an area was in relation to other areas. I do happen to think that the prevalence and persistence of the Mercator projection's use with its grossly distorted representations of northern hemisphere land regions encouraged distorted thinking about geopolitics. That the since the northern continents and their countries appear larger than southern countries, this also encouraged the mistaken belief that the north was more important than the south.
- andix 4y agoWhen I was a kid, globes were still a thing. The represent the world very exactly. And for the digital kids nowadays, there are apps which show a 3d globe. Google Maps can do that too.
- _ph_ 4y agoI still have my globe on my desk :) No better physical tool to really represent the earth. I love that google maps added the globe view, this is much better than just showing a mercator map. Also always loved xplanet.
- hnuser847 4y agoThis reminds of the dumb conspiracy stuff I used to see in my Facebook feed. Any 2D projection of a 3D surface is going to be distorted - there’s no way around it. If you want to see an accurate representation of the Earth, look at a globe.
- Yizahi 4y agoHere is another thought that may reboot OPs brain - not all schools in the world use Mercator projection for teaching. In my country we have used Robinson's projections if I remember correctly. Also students usually have no need for navigation precise projections, instead they need something that can be reasonably used for all countries of the globe and for the globe itself.
- joshe 4y agoEqual earth (https://equal-earth.com/ https://equal-earth.com/) is a good well designed map. I printed the pacific ocean centered version and have it on my wall. There is a lot of conspiratorial woo about this topic, but it is genuinely useful to get a sizes right at a starting point for thinking clearly about the world. For example (orthogonal to the usual conspiracy talk), it's commonly thought that Russia is super important and unbelievably vast. But a good equal area map shows it's only a 1/3 bigger than Canada + Alaska (and considerably poorer). Likewise we are much more likely to travel at the world scale by plane with great circle routes. The mercator map is actually a less accurate guide to that type of navigation. That said it is still useful to have north be directly up and south, east and west be straight lines too. Hence google maps using an mercator-ish projection, to make the zoom from local navigation to the world size continue to preserve straight lines and angles. Mercator is overused but is useful.
- arbirk 4y ago+ turn it upside down
- sbaiddn 4y agoAnother "Europeana are racist ergo Mercator". The Mercator projection is popular for one very important reason: ease of navigation [1]. If you know nothing but your location on Earth you can sail, walk, fly, paddle wherever you want with a Mercator map and a compass. Thats it. Before fancy navigation aids this was huge. Sure, trade winds and great circles were important consideration. But, at the end of the day, if poop hit the fan (think Shackleton expedition) and all you had was a row boat, a compass and a sextant with 800 mi of South Atlantic to cross, you could still make it home. But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves. Here I agree, as the author is clearly projecting his white savior complex [1] the author doesn't even get right the reason why the Mercator excels for navigation: constant rhumb lines. You set your course and you'll get to your destination without needing to correct (a great circle requires constant correction). "Small features are preserved" what croc!
- andrepd 4y ago> But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves. Obviously, what is being said is not that Gerardus Mercator designed, in the 1500s, a map with the express purpose of misrepresenting the relative size of places in order to further a 21st century geopolitical cause of eurocentrism. That would be a very stupid thing to say, and I'm sure you're not that stupid. It is perfectly possible, however, that a map projection originally conceived for navigation is (unintentionally) a misrepresentation of the world that does further such an agenda of eurocentrism and does misrepresent e.g. the size of Africa, in a way that is unsuited for educational purposes. I don't even understand the relevance of arguing "but it's so great for navigating if you're shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific", which is obviously a vanishingly small use-case of this map.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dgfitz 4y ago> The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves. I’d like to see the Venn diagram of insecure white men and insecure white men who feel better about themselves because of the Mercator project. What a strange flex.
- causality0 4y agoThe authagraph seems like a pretty garbage projection compared with something like the dymaxion.
- robertlagrant 4y agoI thought Mercator was instituted and maintained by the mighty Antarctica. Look how much bigger and better it is than every other landmass!
- thayne 4y ago> We are not taught to question it, even by our teachers Was I just unusually lucky? In grade school my teacher spent several weeks teaching us about different map projections, and how there are pros and cons, and none are perfect because the earth is round but maps are flat. And we even talked about how having north at the top is rather arbitrary, and having south at the top would work just as well.
- bombcar 4y agoOurs went into detail about how even a globe is inaccurate because the oblate spheroid.
- cplusplusfellow 4y agoThe entire purpose of the article is race baiting against so-called “insecure white men”, so substantiated claims aren’t needed.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoWe didn't learn about projections per-se, but more than one teacher brought a globe to class, just to show how arctic and antarctic areas are spread out on 2d maps, and to show the distorsion when trying to draw stuff on a sphere onto a 2d paper.
- robertlagrant 4y agoAlso, for an article that claims to change the world and reboot your brain, it should probably pick a topic that was covered in 2001 by The West Wing (which proposed a better alternative projection).
- pnathan 4y agoBack when I was working for a company that was heavily into GIS, I wandered one day into map rendering code, trying to render _something or other_, and man, it was an ed-u-cation. Not in "yeah Mercator is not literally true" (this I thought was common knowledge) but also there there are a ton of different projections and ways to deal with said projections. It's a fascinating niche of computer graphics.
- UweSchmidt 4y agoHaving grown up with a world map over my bed, I'd say the overall benefit from seeing all those political borders was generally low. I stared at Antarctica a lot and was able to name most African countries; without further context however their names remained rather abstract. More interesting concepts would be to emphasize population density, or other meaningful cultural and economic measurables that, short of a "brain reboot", would increase understanding of the world. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/3d-mapping-the-worlds-largest-population-densities/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/3d-mapping-the-worlds-large...
- hypertexthero 4y agoSee also the Waterman butterfly projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection
- chmod600 4y agoThis will all be resolved when smartphones have holographic screens, and just present the actual curvature at whatever zoom level you are at.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoTHe whole argument about the negative affects of widespread use of Mercator projection for world maps has always struck me as way overblown. It's true, to be sure, that most Americans (which I use as an example. because I know them), have a distorted notion of the size of Africa, and to a lesser extent, South America, but in my experience, they equally underestimate the size of Russian and China. I think it has more to do with their certainty that the US is "really big and important" as countries go, than with mental burn-in of a warped geography from grade-school maps.
- booleandilemma 4y agoHmm... uptime 20:49:05 up 15340 days, 32 min, 1 user, load average: 0.22, 0.41, 0.32 Guess not.
- feldrim 4y agoEvery once in a while, I see some posts based on maps and projections. And I cannot get it when adults still discuss these stuff. I had my first atlas when I was a 4th grader and the projections were depicted in detail in the first 15-20 pages. It is easy and foundational that I assumed everybody was aware of this information. Instead people rediscovered the Earth on each blog post mentioning the exact same thing. Amazing.
- smiddereens 4y ago
- yummypaint 4y agoGiven that almost all maps are now viewed on electronic devices, why bother using any projection? We can now show the entire earth with no distortion by letting users rotate a virtual globe. Zooming in and out has already solved the core problem of globes being bulky and undetailed relative to maps. I would argue that for laypeople use of projections is still largely a historical artifact that we haven't aged out of yet. There are only a relative handful of people who might actually navigate using the old ways, but in practice thats's just a failsafe for computer assisted planning which considers the true shape of the earth already.
- fabrika 4y agoWhat if you want to see Australia and Greenland at the same time? Globes have their limitations.
- jameshart 4y agoAs long as the screen you’re viewing it on is flat you’re going to need some kind of projection. If it’s a perspective or orthographic view of a centered sphere it will be some sort of polar projection.
- Double_a_92 4y agoYeah but you can dynamically recalculate that projection as you want. That's like saying that a physical globe is still a kind of projection because you can only look at it from one side with your eyes.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoYou cannot visualize a router between two countries on the opposite sides, without manually rotating the 3d globe (projected on a 2d screen).
- bambam24 4y ago
- zw123456 4y agoIs it just me or does it seem like this is a problem that is disappearing with the prevalence of computers? I mean, the only time I can remember seeing a Mercator projection is in yet another HN "here is how bad Mercator is" articles.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThe main projection used for online maps is called "Web Mercator". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection Online maps have started to switch to other things when you zoom out, for the reasons discussed in the article, but the default, easy option in most cases is still Mercator(-ish). https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=0/55/-3 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=0/55/-3
- zw123456 4y agoHuh, I did not know that. OK, legit to bitch for sure. Maybe it is me then because if I am looking at the Earth zoomed out, I always reach for google earth, and perhaps I just never notice it when zoomed in using it for directions. Thanks!
- JeremyNT 4y agoI understand the intention here but really, do people not see globes any more? All projections suffer from issues of some sort, and the globe is by far the best way to understand that. We were taught about this in grade school. Even on a computer display, you can use Google Earth to replicate the effect.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dimensionc132 4y agohttp://wsn.spaceflight.esa.int/iss/index_portal.php http://wsn.spaceflight.esa.int/iss/index_portal.php If Mercator is good enough for NASA, it's good enough for me
- beefman 4y agoThere is no better general-purpose 2-D map projection without interruptions than Kavrayskiy VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection The AuthaGraph has been mentioned several times before on HN. This post in particular is interesting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003670
- jdhzzz 4y agoReminds me of "All models are wrong, some are useful." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong