4 ms·
Can 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 dist
by ipnon 4y ago
Can 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.
- labster 4y ago2D maps all have different features and drawbacks. It’s like you’re saying that because our databases don’t offer all of consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, that it’s a reflection on how the technology sector as a whole doesn’t care about data. But it’s not that. Someone has to make a trade-off somewhere, because of math. 2D maps are inherently distortions.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI can't tell if you're intentionally missing my point. If all the people making the trade-off, and all the people who pay the people making the trade-off and all the people who pay the ... etc. are one type of person, then you're going to make trade-offs that hurt other types of people. Here's a list of examples for women: > The US government did not adequately test the impact of a crash on a belt-restrained female dummy until 2012. Dummies for decades had been based on the average, 50th percentile male body. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47725946 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47725946 Basically, if you flip it and it seems ridiculous, then it is ridiculous. How long do you think crash testing with only a female 50th percentile dummy would have lasted before someone, recognizing that they themselves weren't represented would have said "wait a minute, we're ignoring half the population". If you need a purely technical example: websites that require JS work fine for most people, but might fail catastrophically for people using screenreaders or privacy protecting addons. That trade-off might make sense if you forget about those people, and it's harder to forget about them if you, your team, your industry and your main audience mostly consists of those people.