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These comparisons come up all the time, and the issue is the Mercator projection makes Europe looks much larger than other countries on most maps. Much of Euro
by andymcsherry 3y ago
These comparisons come up all the time, and the issue is the Mercator projection makes Europe looks much larger than other countries on most maps. Much of Europe lies at a more extreme latitude than to the rest of the world. Basically nothing is at the same latitude in the Southern hemisphere and the only comparisons in the Northern hemisphere are Russia, Canada and Greenland. Other than Greenland, those countries don't generally get compared because they are gigantic in their own right, despite being much smaller than the appear on normal map projections.
- kzrdude 3y agoI don't know why this discussion is never ending, but I'm fed up with the Mercator projection. I hope things move along. Google maps has done their part, when you zoom out you get a globe, but others need to follow even more.
- agos 3y agowhere should things "move along" towards? the mercator projector has some very important features, what would be the alternative?
- bagels 3y agoDymaxion.
- kzrdude 3y agoThe projection is used way more often than those features are needed, so use other alternatives like <favourite projection here> anytime you reasonably can.
- standardUser 3y agoNational Geographic maps use the Winkel tripel projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection
- flohofwoe 3y agoI already posted it somewhere above, but this is the world map we used in school in the 1980's, definitely much less 'radical' than Mercator: https://i.redd.it/xcydn8owtzj61.jpg https://i.redd.it/xcydn8owtzj61.jpg
- kzrdude 3y agoThat is or is very similar to Winkel tripel
- Tagbert 3y agoWhen I was a kid in grade school we had lots of different maps using different projections on the walls and in our text books. We learned about how Mercator is good for navigation and other maps are better at showing comparative size. It makes for a good topic in geography. Have we just given up on education?
- MadSudaca 3y agoAnother thing that’s interesting about Europe is that it’s approximately at the same latitude as Canada, with a climate that is substantially warmer. If it was as cold as northern North America, humanity would have taken a completely different course.
- melx 3y agoYyy not sure if Northern Europe where much of "development" happened on the Old Continent as a whole, is "substantially warmer" than NA.
- rendall 3y agoDefinitely is. New York is at the same latitude as Spain but tracks in winter temperature with Southern Finland. Scandinavia is way up in the same latitudes as the Canadian Northwestern Passages but is not nearly as cold.
- melx 3y agoSpain is classified as Southern Europe.
- dsfyu404ed 3y agoWould you rather wear a toga and sandals in Bangor, Maine or Bangor, Wales?
- MadSudaca 3y agoThe majority of people in Scandinavia live in the south, where the temperatures are much milder. However, I think that even in the north of these countries, temperatures are still not as bad as in much of Canada during winters.
- laurencerowe 3y agoThis seems to be a west coast of ocean vs east coast of ocean effect. Seattle and Vancouver have a similar climate to Paris and London.
- thraxil 3y agoEvery time this discussion about different projections comes up, I just want to ask: has no one ever seen a globe? When I was a kid, we had them in classrooms and I had one in my bedroom. I never got the impression that that was unusual or unique. Have globes just gone wildly out of fashion in recent years?
- agos 3y agoyeah, computers and smartphones have made globes wildly out of fashion
- mjevans 3y agoIt's too bad Maps doesn't behave more like 'Earth' does / did (?). I haven't even installed Google Earth in years, but now that I zoom a maps window all the way out I'm sad it doesn't become a sphere projection in 3D.
- markdown 3y agoYou don't have to install it anymore. https://earth.google.com/web/ https://earth.google.com/web/
- kzrdude 3y agoGoogle maps zooming out does become a globe for me (Firefox/Linux), why not for you? I see it has an on/off option for globe in the layers selection.. let's check in incognito.. aha, it's non-globe by default!
- mjevans 3y agoClick Layers > Click More > Lower left, check the Globe View. That's buried levels of undiscoverable.
- flohofwoe 3y agoWeird, when I zoom out on https://www.google.com/maps/ https://www.google.com/maps/ it becomes a globe, I thought that's the default behaviour, but maybe I changed a setting at some point?
- avgcorrection 3y ago> These comparisons come up all the time, and the issue is the Mercator projection makes Europe looks much larger than other countries on most maps. Daily reminder that Europe is a nanocontinent, not a country.
- likeclockwork 3y agoWestern Eurasia.
- flohofwoe 3y agoIs Mercator actually still used anywhere outside of clickbait blog posts? For reference: this is the world map I know from school in the 1980's which is much less distorted than 'plain old Mercator': https://i.redd.it/xcydn8owtzj61.jpg https://i.redd.it/xcydn8owtzj61.jpg
- inkcapmushroom 3y agoU.S.A. uses Mercator pretty much exclusively, from education all the way through TV, news, and movies.