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Yeah 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 th
by gedy 4y ago
Yeah 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.
- epgui 4y agoHe literally defaced a public good, and this cost the intervention of more sensible adults. A small cost, but still.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom Try to buy a world map for a classroom. Search things like "world map for classroom", "large world map", "world map poster" in Amazon. Probably 95% of the maps returned for these search terms are Mercator, but there are a few that aren't. American elementary school teachers are generalists, they teach geography without having specialized knowledge of geography, much less map projections. If such a teacher is buying a world map for their classroom, they're very likely to pick a Mercator map simply because that's what most classroom sized maps use. (Despite this, American children are not raised to think that Canada is powerful...)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]