24 ms·

Maps distort how we see the world

685 points by yarapavan 3y ago

scrumlord 3y ago
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cafard 3y ago
May I suggest a term for this sort of article: "mapsplaining". I have known about the distortions of the Mercator projection since LBJ was president, and about ever ten or fifteen years someone feels compelled to announce it as news.
PaulLeiby 3y ago
Maps distort how we see the world: This is the world of perception and representation - it's all "distorted." But most useful representations, like the Mercator, are "lies that make us realize the truth" [or some facet thereof].
theallseeingeye 3y ago
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theallseeingeye 3y ago
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aio2 3y ago
I'm not doing the math, but assuming it's correct, that's really impressive. It's all on perspective!
slibhb 3y ago
> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer1—seem smaller than they are. Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy. One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centered.
- nwallin 3y ago
  > The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy. It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection. Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.
- oakashes 3y ago
  > One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe. I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom out enough.
  - slibhb 3y ago
    Using a perspective projection works because our brains automatically understand the distortions caused by that sort of projection and account for them. Reprojecting on-the-fly is a way around it. Yes, you're still projecting to two dimensions but it drives home the point that the area of a landmass is relative depending on what the user is looking at. Something like: https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d
efsavage 3y ago
A good collection, I especially like the Mediterranean-in-Australia one. Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We See the World" you should see what not having a map does!
nntwozz 3y ago
“The map is not the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski
- j_m_b 3y ago
  Shame I had to get this far to see this quote. It should be in the original article!
omoikane 3y ago
Obligatory xkcd, with on-topic alt-text: https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/ For a more distorted way to see the world, try: http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/ http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/
- jezzamon 3y ago
  It's actually less distorted in some ways :)
- shagie 3y ago
  I'm fond of the Dymaxion (and either the land connected or the ocean connected forms - as applicable) because it has some neat applications showing migratory routes. My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when looking at other projections. Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehistoric_human_migrations.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...
Jun8 3y ago
Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!) Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is-the-north-considered-as-up-and-south-as-down https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current country). This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps. See these interesting answers to get more information about the terms Upper/Lower Egypt: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egyptian-civilization-start-from-north-to-south-or-vice-versa https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...
- idlewords 3y ago
  There's a similar phenomenon of terminology creep with language terms like 'High German' and 'Low German'. This nomenclature has been adopted into fantasy literature to suggest a more noble vs. fallen version of some ancient dialect, but all it meant originally is that 'high' speakers were upstream (and therefore uphill) from the 'low' speakers.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    Great example. And the Alemannisch dialect is "hoch hoch Deutsch," or extra-high German, being from way up in the German-speaking Swiss Alps.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    This is one of those 'common misconceptions' where I hear about its refutation more often than I encounter people who believe the supposed misconception. Much like anything talking about map projections, in fact.
    - idlewords 3y ago
      You may need to read more crappy fantasy books. To cite a completely representative example, consider 'High Valyrian' from Game of Thrones https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian, a liturgical language that of course is contrasted with Low (or Bastard) Valyrian, a degenerate family of dialects.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> We should be wary of flattening balls! I agree.
cryptoegorophy 3y ago
Every kid should have a globe to understand countries and distortion better.
- Animats 3y ago
  They all do.[1] [1] https://earth.google.com/ https://earth.google.com/
  - interroboink 3y ago
    Aside from the humor of that page failing to load for me (Firefox), I also smirk at the fact that it would still be projecting the globe onto a _flat_ screen to view it (: Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      > that page failing to load for me (Firefox) Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine. Anything interesting in the console?
      - interroboink 3y ago
        I tried again in a 'blank' profile, and it worked there. On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really. But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the other profile.
        capitainenemo 3y ago
        Are you using "resist fingerprinting" in Firefox? I've noticed that causes mystery total blocks or additional "click and hold to show you are not a bot" challenges on many sites (Fedex, Kickstarter, Walmart, Lowes) and at random. Often it seems in some backend XHR that the app writer didn't think to handle bot blocks on, so the page half loads.
asylteltine 3y ago
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randcraw 3y ago
There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI
- chippiewill 3y ago
  Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a two-ton block of cheese. It was there, for any and all who were hungry, it was there for the voiceless.
  - kevdev 3y ago
    And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sublinear 3y ago
    So... government cheese?
- js2 3y ago
  Probably seen that clip a dozen times and this was the first time I noticed Whitford manspreading in the middle of the clip and Janney batting his leg back. By the look on his face, it seems improvised to get a laugh out of her.
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    it’s a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top. Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How about maps with north and south swapped?
    - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
HPsquared 3y ago
https://earth.nullschool.net https://earth.nullschool.net has a range of different projections available (on top of the main functionality of the site, which is itself a pretty cool map of wind/weather/atmospheric patterns). The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be static images.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  Pretty cool to think about the amount of work going on behind the covers to alter these projections on the fly. And how costly it was to build them originally by hand.
  - tony_cannistra 3y ago
    work, sure, but not _that_ much. It's affine transformations / some fast linear algebra, for the most part. Your second point is for sure true, though.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      I wonder if anyone ever came up with an elaborate mechanism connected to a pen.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map. There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there. But it’s still a fun observation. I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym: https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html
- retrac 3y ago
  That reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map: https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_5360.jpg https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536... It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    If you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differential_polyconic_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the poles that appears in commonly-used maps.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    I saw a Japanese map recently and it took me a full minute to understand what I was looking at. Japan was at the center, and North America was on the right.
Fauntleroy 3y ago
This is why I'm glad Google maps is available in a 3d globe! Even at relatively close zoom levels the subtle differences in scale are really noticeable. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to always start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox it just reverts back to a flat map.
- netsharc 3y ago
  It'd be pretty cool if they can show the map in the Mercator projection with a center the user can choose, as well as which way is up...
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Try https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/en/ https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/en/
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser does this. It displays meteorological (and related) data, not political or geological features, but is still pretty interesting. There are also numerous alternative projections available <https://earth.nullschool.net/ https://earth.nullschool.net/> (There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)
ukmac 3y ago
Wow. Mind blown
earthboundkid 3y ago
This is dumb. Every elementary school classroom has a globe. We see how big the countries are on globes routinely.
- Freebytes 3y ago
  Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many more maps online.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Especially the southern hemisphere, as their head is normally above the globe
    - sltkr 3y ago
      Have you ever seen a globe? They are always tilted so you can easily view countries below the equator. Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      Kids are short. Australians turn maps so they are south side up anyway.
deleted 3y ago
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kibwen 3y ago
Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymaxion_with_Tissot's_Indicatrices_of_Distortion.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax... Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
- simonbw 3y ago
  I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
  - kibwen 3y ago
    XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it into being a data interchange format were ill-advised relative to just making it a good text-based markup language, but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and XPath that XML had from the start!
- zokier 3y ago
  Of discontinuous projections, I prefer Waterman over Dymaxion, it feels more regular and is more intuitive to see how it wraps around a sphere (or geoid). While Waterman might have more distortion in some absolute sense, the regularity of the distortions makes it still more pleasing (subjective, I know). One weird thing about Dymaxion is how the 70° parallels around both north and south poles are distinctly lumpy. But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.
jgeada 3y ago
Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection! Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
- graypegg 3y ago
  Exactly! This article mostly avoids it but the usual popsci refrain of “the map you know is WRONG” is a pet peeve of mine! It’s not like one projection is any worse than another, as long as they are useful for the context it’s designed for. Maps are diagrams!
  - tony_cannistra 3y ago
    and all maps are WRONG
- bluepod4 3y ago
  > I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection! Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes. It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.” It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.” FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection. Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this). I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)
placesalt 3y ago
I agree with many other comments here that this is more an effect of the practical purpose that maps are created for than any presumed nefarious motivation. Look at the list of supported projections in the PROJ database - it's a very long list, and they're all there to solve some particular problem. Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps. Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred around Antarctica: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocean_circulation_on_a_spilhaus_projection/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...
interroboink 3y ago
I have a poster of a South-up map[1], which is fun to look at and wiggle those expectations in my mind from time to time. Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection. [1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-world-wall-map.html https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others) [2] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348 https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348
- idatum 3y ago
  Makes me wonder why South isn't intuitively "up" for folks in the Southern Hemisphere.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    I imagine having your maps rotated compared to most of the world (90% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere) would probably be a pain to deal with.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    Save reason they observe Yule at midsummer.
stephenboyd 3y ago
It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-at-the-top-but-it-couldve-been-different https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...
- trhfhxggf 3y ago
  Well, if you define up and down as the axis perpendicular to the ecliptic, there is an up and down in the solar system.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    Kinda? It's still arbitrary which one we think of as "up" and which we think of as "down," though, right?
fsckboy 3y ago
> Maps distort how we see the world maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator projection is problematic, I got news for you.
- waiseristy 3y ago
  Had this same thought. Our own eyeballs distort how we see the world.
luxurytent 3y ago
The overlay of Canada on Europe is always a fun one. We moan so much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of public transit and reasonable infrastructure to get around, but we're also comparing a population of (just recently hit!) 40,000 and ~700,000. Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area. This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
- mhb 3y ago
  > This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  > Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area. You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass. That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
  - fknorangesite 3y ago
    Seriously. Half the population is in southern Ontario. There's no reason we can't have a serious high speed rail line Toronto<->Quebec City that would serve - without exaggeration - most Canadians. I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in this corridor is a policy failure.
- jtakkala 3y ago
  The size of Canada really isn’t a valid excuse for Canada’s poor public transit, nor is Canada’s population. Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
- MalcolmDwyer 3y ago
  90% of Canadians live in a "small" strip of land that is comparable in size to Europe. That area (along with several regions and city pairs in the US) could have excellent inter-city and intra-city transit. But we just don't. Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build for people. Almost everything about our built environment is optimized for cars and the result is sprawl. The cause is our public policies, building regulations, and zoning. It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because people don't try to commute across the country, just like people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin every day. The vast majority of travel is local and occasionally regional.
thriftwy 3y ago
Fun thing is that USSR (and Russia as its descendant) was actually never using Mercator anywhere near education, since the distortion was too great in places where it was important. You would imagine it would be good for ego, but pragmatic reasons prevailed. Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common. On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs that?
AlecSchueler 3y ago
I remember one particular trip I had on LSD. I spent some of the time inspecting my childhood neighbourhood in Belfast on Google Maps with the 3D view, and looking at it from angles other than North -> Top. It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the city but also the socio-political history of it. I would definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you know.
zokier 3y ago
Somehow I'm reminded of these "How Big Africa[/Texas] Really Is" memes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-sizes-how-big-africa-really-is https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-sizes-h...
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  See also: "Long Chile" https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-snack-rack/ https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
AlbertCory 3y ago
When I was in Google Maps, a popular interview question was "what's your favorite projection? (don't say Mercator)" I didn't get asked that one, fortunately. Whenever I see one of those "the Earth from space" photos, I always think, "Wow, Africa is really big."
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
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bit_flipper 3y ago
This article doesn't touch on the actual reasons why Mercator is still in widespread use: * It was the first widespread projection because of its practical use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something considered somewhat inconsequential. * Mercator and its cousin Web Mercator are extremely simple and fast to calculate relative to other projections. Compare the formula for Web Mercator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formulas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formul...) to Equal Earth, an excellent compromise projection for general use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formula...). Web Mercator is very easy to generate and serve tiled maps out of, Equal Earth and the like require somewhat non-trivial engineering to make serving those maps at scale to users in a web browser economical and quick. * Preserving angles is legitimately important still for large scale (very zoomed in) road maps. Projections which preserve size can cause things like 90 degree road intersections to render at very strange angles which confuses drivers. Mercator and Web Mercator are therefore excellent choices of projection for local road navigation, which is by far the most common use of maps today for most people. I strongly recommend folks interested in map projections to read this from Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections. Google Maps now has similar features, but both companies relied on Mercator for many years with good reasons before technology caught up and better solutions became available.
- rocqua 3y ago
  No map shown to a driver at the detail level of navigating intersections should have to care about projections much. At that small a scale earth is approximately flat, and any half decent projection should have minimal distortions of any kind.
  - bentley 3y ago
    In the 90s, my family (inveterate roadtrippers) always kept a Rand McNally road atlas in the car. Each page had a map covering (usually) a whole state. I don’t know what projection it used—Albers, perhaps?—but I remember as a child wondering why some straight‐looking state borders were actually subtly curved.
TehShrike 3y ago
I bought a couple globes in the last year and am glad I did. I bought this small one for my desk (16$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique – every so often I rotate it slightly so that I'm staring at a different part of the globe when I look below my monitor. I bought this one for the dining room (50$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe – the kids can spin it around whenever we talk about a country.
drno123 3y ago
Is this the same Pueyo who shaped Covid response through “the hammer and the dance”? People still consider this guy relevant?!?
ximus 3y ago
Fun article. Surprised it doesn't mention the Peters projection map. You cannot have both area fidelity and shape fidelity to represent countries on a map. If you want area fidelity, the Gall-Peters [1] projection and the Peters world map [2] (1952) by Arno Peters are the way to visualize countries, whereas common maps focus on shape-fidelity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector [2] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-projection https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-p...
- gjm11 3y ago
  There are plenty of other equal-area map projections. Several of them are less shape-distorting than the Peters projection. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection. Peters did a great job of publicity, as witness the common but completely false idea that the Peters projection is "the way" to make an equal-area plane map, but there's nothing particularly great about the projection itself.
renewiltord 3y ago
Dude, that is wild! I mean, I know about the distortion but still watching Indonesia span that width is crazy. Or the bits about Brazil's Northernmost and Easternmost, or China's Westernmost. Great collection of illustrations.
ubermonkey 3y ago
If you think only in Mercator (e.g.), it's easy to fall into erroneous concepts. A great example of this came when, years ago, I had a business trip from Texas where I live to Dubai. A friend asked, cleverly aware of the distance involved, if the flight went east or west -- because if you have Flat Map Brain, that's what you default to, right? The answer is "neither." The route went mostly north from Houston, crossed Canada and began trending south (without turning!) over / around Iceland; we approached Dubai from the north, more or less. I remember the flight back home going over Iran, but it was at least a decade ago and regional tensions may have made them change that. This site https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211 https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211 shows them avoiding Iranian airspace now, but the flight path seems otherwise about the same.
- netsharc 3y ago
  This site shows the shortest path between 2 airports: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB I'd imagine your flight would've avoided Russia, afaik even before the war they were obnoxious about who can fly over them/how much it would cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    I've no recollection about flying in Russian airspace, but I definitely did snap a phonecam pic of the seatback map showing us flying between the Elburz mountains and Tehran. This was in 2012, so 11 years ago (per the date of the pic I found). The path suggested by that position absolutely implies flight over Russian territory, but obviously I have no data beyond that. It seems unlikely that an airliner would, like, zigzag around; n.b. that I was on Emirates, not a US carrier, and Russia (and other countries) probably doesn't treat them like they would an airline run out of a NATO country. Or, at least, probably didn't in 2012. No idea what the rules are now. EDIT: I found this article which notes that, at least as of a year ago, Emirates was flying TO Russia, so presumably flights through Russian airspace en route to other places were okay as well before the war. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-airlines-will-continue-fly-russia-until-told-not-by-owners-president-2022-03-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-...
TiredGuy 3y ago
The gif at the top was very interesting. The shrinking of the North America and Russia were really surprising to me, as I had always looked at them as much more significant land masses. A little off-topic from projections, but I just returned from a trip to Seoul a few days ago, and I found a simplified subway map to be so much easier to use than Google Maps' more realistic-but-less-relevant map. Subway map design has always intrigued me in that it ignores so much in terms of position and proportion, but at the same time can relay the needed information so much more clearly.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I studied geography in undergrad and grad school. At the beginning a friend and I decided upon a challenge to use as many different projections as possible for labs and reports. I got to 53, I think. Only once did a TA say it was an inappropriate choice and, yeah, it was. I used an arctic planar projection to map a part of southern Ontario. It was so comically skewed. By the end I had actually learned something: my perception of what was “correct” was largely biased from growing up with Mercator and Albers maps. While some options are more ideal than others given the context, there’s a _lot_ of useful alternatives than what we all picture in our heads.
cubefox 3y ago
With the advent of the paperless office, the increasing ubiquity of screens, and the steady progress in 3D rendering performance – there will soon be little need for 2D map projections. We just render the Earth as a sphere and do some perspective projection.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  Screens are still flat, so it would still be a 2d projection.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Yes, but 3D perspective projection is what our eyes do anyway, so there are no unnatural distortions. Paintings and video games use it to create realistic images of 3D space.
walnutclosefarm 3y ago
Probably 99% of the time I look at, or use, a map, it's at a scale where the Mercator projection is entirely fair, and highly useful. For probably half of the uses I have for maps, whatever distortion relative to an actual globe it introduces isn't even noticable. Then there are the rare times I look at a map at something approaching hemispheric scale. But come on, people, I've been told since 4th grade about the distortions of a world map at that scale. I literally can remember Ms. Kraft in 4th grade explaining how the map made Greenland look nearly as big as Africa, when in fact it was more like the size the larger countries in Africa. And, anyone who has traveled internationally much at all is well aware that, say, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than it looks on a world map - because we fly, for the most part, great circle routes, and flight times give you a very good measure of how far things are. First time you look at a flight to Sydney, the size of the Pacific Ocean, relative to the North Atlantic, pretty much hits you over the head. So, while I find articles like this kinda fun for a couple of minutes (what strange comparison will this author pull out of their hat to make the point that flat maps distort world persectives?), it's mostly for entertainment value. There really isn't much to see.
profsummergig 3y ago
Extremely well put-together article. Contains many examples I've seen in disparate sources before. I will use it as an example of how data visualization can distort. I often wonder if similar things happen with tabular data, but we just can't "see" it so clearly.
meindnoch 3y ago
Yeah, it must be the Mercator projection why the global south is poor. Never mind New Zealand and Australia... Never mind that the whole post-USSR Asia is on the same level as some African countries... It must be those damn maps.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Actually the claim was that the global poor are close to the equator. Given how little motivation I have to even move when it's very hot, and how moving is required to generate wealth, and how recently A/C was invented, it's probably not totally a coincidence. But yea Mercator isn't the problem.
  - anikan_vader 3y ago
    I mean it’s pretty easily explained by the Industrial Revolution starting in Europe, which is very far north. The explanation that heat induces laziness is a bit suspect given that in older eras many of the most prosperous civilizations were near the equator. (Egypt, Sumeria, the Persians, Indus River Valley Civilizations, etc.)
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      I don't really know how to compare the prosperity of ancient Sumeria and Denmark, but ancient Rome did conquer ancient Egypt and the reverse never happened. The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get more data unfortunately. After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global superpower. Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to have done better at progress and wealth as compared to Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done well lately, but maybe because of a/c - https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
meitham 3y ago
The true size is excellent way to views these and is a major source for this article https://www.thetruesize.com/ https://www.thetruesize.com/
dahwolf 3y ago
I'm from the Netherlands and just saw our tiny land shrink even further. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this swampy river delta actual land. Anyway, I've personally experienced the shock of the true size of Africa. Younger me only had a few flights to Spain under my belt and then went on an adventurous trip to South Africa. I figured it would just be a few hours more. How wrong I was.
crtified 3y ago
All maps are created with selective purpose. The only thing that can possibly represent all purposes simultaneously is the world itself. Accordingly, every map is also a compromise.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  More generally: All models are wrong, but some are useful. -- George E. P. Box, in "Science and Statistics" (1976) <https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writi...> (PDF) See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong> Box apparently expanded on the notion in Box, G. E. P. (1979), "Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building", in Launer, R. L.; Wilkinson, G. N. (eds.), Robustness in Statistics, Academic Press, pp. 201–236, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-438150-6.50018-2, ISBN 9781483263366. Full text online at <https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps.pdf https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps....> (PDF)
082349872349872 3y ago
My current favourite alternative projection is Spilhaus, eg https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-Passages-with-Shipping-Routes-Spilhaus-1.pdf https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-P... (Edit: now I see TFA mentioned it, just not by name)
dontupvoteme 3y ago
A hot take perhaps but now I'm curious -- Is this an American/New World/Big-Ass-Country (I could see Russia/China caring) phenomenon? A lot of British people, especially when being smug and nationalist online, speak about how their tiny island took over so many other big places. I never asked a Frenchman and obviously it's in bad form to ask the Germans... The Scandis ""benefit"" the most from the distortion but never really had empire apart from in the neighboring areas, so I don't know if they ever think about it.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov... Everybody tried to take over the world in that era. Hell, the Scots had Panama at one point.
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
So, just use an orthographic projection and concede that projecting a globe onto a flat surface with boundaries is a futile affair. Google Maps on the Web defaults to this; so does Apple Maps.
imgabe 3y ago
This seems to come up a lot lately. I don't see why this matters. If you're doing something like charting a flight path where it actually matters what the real sizes are, I'm sure you have access to the correct information. If you're just going about your normal life as a dental hygienist or something, what difference does it make if Russia is not as big as you assume? > Are these maps chosen for good reasons and these distortions are a side-effect, or are they purposefully deceitful? Are there better maps we could choose? I’ll explore this in the premium article this week. Subscribe to read it! Ah, I see. It's just bait to drive subscriptions. You can read for free on Wikipedia about why the Mercator projection is useful for navigation. What is wrong with people that they assume there is some evil cabal of mustache-twisting villains who deliberately make misleading maps?
raldi 3y ago
A nice addition to this page would be the fact that Maine is the US state closest to Africa.
gmiller123456 3y ago
The claim that "when you look at the Pacific Ocean on a globe, you only see water" is incorrect. I've seen a few attepts to make this claim appear as if it were real. Like the image in the article, it's just a perspective projection from a low altitude. If you actually grab a globe, you'll see there is no way to cut it in half with only water on one side. If there were a way to do that, we could save a lot of money on globes by just not making that half.
- TheBigSalad 3y ago
  You mostly see water.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    This is a very Hawaii phobic point of view
- SamBam 3y ago
  Right, but when you look at a globe, you're actually seeing less than half of it, unless it is small enough or you are far enough. If you're closer, you can definitely see less land. The "perspective projection" is correct.
29athrowaway 3y ago
Good luck using a compass and using a projection other than mercator.
andsoitis 3y ago
To me a more interesting thing is that we always show “north” as “up” or at the “top”. Even recognizing that it is “natural” given our use of compasses, one would think we can be more playful showing earth with different “up” orientation.
jeffchien 3y ago
Unrelated but I love that "The True Size of Africa" diagram lists area in "m km^2", also known as "Mm^2". It's interesting that there are some SI prefix and unit combinations that are just not used.
Guthur 3y ago
Distorts nothing, it gives a particular view of the world. All our views of the world are highly localised by the very nature of our existence. We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.
Xen9 3y ago
The only distortion is your idea that there's something that is not only an approximation.
acconrad 3y ago
Is there a phenomenon that describes why I feel a sense of unease when I see the other maps? Seeing the various projections and changes of those maps left me _very_ uncomfortable and I'm not sure why.
keiferski 3y ago
This article misses what I think is actually the bigger "distortion"[1]: the idea that an externalized, view of Earth as an object in space should be the default way of visualizing our place in the universe. This is itself a distortion based on a long, long lineage of philosophical-religious ideas on how the world is constructed and how human beings fit into it. It seems to me that we could construct any number of other maps that are either more truthful, more useful, or more in-line with human thriving (eudaimonia) [2]. In other words, if all maps are distortions, is the one we're using actually the one we should be using? 1. I don't really like this word, as it implies that there is a real shape of the world and that every other perspective is somehow wrong. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
ddmma 3y ago
The closer to Ecuador the less higher entropy so not having focus on productive work but maybe just enjoy the sun. Also because of heat people tend to be more violent.
ggm 3y ago
To hijack discussion, here's another quirk of mapping: Border disputes can be uplifted into state law. Google adjusts how it renders maps into IN economy IPs because its illegal to show maps about Kashmir which imply Pakistan's claims over the territory are legitimate. I've had to adjust slide-ware for use in the Indian subcontinent. A different kind of "distortion" but very real. Projections can be complicated. I value mapping tools which let you re-center a global map off 0° Longitude. I also value maps which manage to fit all of the Pac-rim island economies into some kind of view: No way is land mass or distance to scale, to usefully show this region. If you believe maps, Hawaii is almost as big as Alaska and just offshore of the Catalina Islands. It also seems to have a very squared-off moat, maybe its a border wall...
pete1302 3y ago
my brain in hurting!
bfung 3y ago
Use a globe. It’s 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a virtual globe. Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you’re not likely going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.
yolkedgeek 3y ago
this is such an important point that rich countries don't want to spread that much.
mejutoco 3y ago
"The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski
Wildgoose 3y ago
I have a globe. But even that doesn't show the true distortion, which is that the Earth is wrinkled. For example, Korea is mountainous and so its actual surface area is much greater than its apparent surface area when looking at either a map or a globe.
IndySun 3y ago
It's a comprehensive telling of something that's becoming more commonly known. There's little sinister intent, more a giving readers information to conclude themselves. Some countries, Japan and USA come to mind, put themselves at the centre of 'their' world maps. Also, the distorted headshot is incredibly demonstrative. And seeing how much different sizes appear if you alter the orientation.
adammarples 3y ago
I really hate these mercator articles. This one is particularly egregious because it takes a potentially interesting subject and just ignores every detail. No mention that they are talking only about one specific map projection. No mention of it by name even. No mention of what trade offs projections must make. No exploration of other projections. No mention of historically why we commonly use this one, or what others could be appropriate. Obsession with area above all else as if what area a country occupies on a map is important. No support for this view either, map area is implied to be all important. General implication that it's some kind of colonialist sneer at Africa. One could just as easily write an article about how unfair it is that Africa gets to be at the centre of the map, again without explaining why on earth that matters.
AntiRemote 3y ago
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mcv 3y ago
Great article, with one big problem: it's guilty of the exact issue it tries to address: assuming specific map projections as the default. It starts: > Maps twist our perception of the world. > Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer—seem smaller than they are. This is obviously not true for all map projections. It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. It's probably true for some other map projections, but definitely not for all. The article doesn't even mention the name Mercator until its second half.
- defrost 3y ago
  > It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. The Mercator family is "the best" map family for those who navigate by rhumb lines. I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given the vast numbers of GPS enabled devices. I stressed family, of course, as there is a continuum of Mercator projection maps .. The (specific) Mercator Projection that wall hangs and everbody discusses whenever this comes up is just one of many and whose parameters were chosen to weight the Northern Hemisphere for the benefit of US-Euro traders.
  - mcv 3y ago
    We don't navigate by rhumb lines, we navigate by directions and local shapes, and those are the important things that stay the same in Mercator. If some angles on the map are smaller than they should be while others are larger, that's confusing. Mercator keeps this consistent. Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty terrible. Of course today with computerised navigation, we don't really have to use a flat projection at all; it would be even more accurate to calculate every view directly from a globe. Have your own custom projection based on where you are. But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it. Or something Mercatory, at least; centering on Greenwich and having north up is less relevant, although deviating from the latter would probably confuse a lot of people. And outside of navigation, we really shouldn't ever be using Mercator. I'm not sure if that happens. When I was in school, I remember we had a Goode-Homolosine map on the wall, which is an excellent choice for that. Every map projection has its purposes that it's good at, and those it's not. But especially with the ubiquity of Google Maps, it's not surprising that people get more exposure to Mercator.
lucb1e 3y ago
Regarding "How would fish draw a map?" (image: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a9905cb-3e9c-4f09-bd5a-6f4f71fd6eae_1035x539.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... since there's no heading to link to) Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article described how genes are transmitted globally despite having separate continents (iirc the waters are shallow enough near the north pole and around oceania to form one long line along all shores), but I can't remember it well enough to find it again. Tried checking it elsewhere but all the relevant-sounding Wikipedia articles don't seem to talk about the ratio of deep sea animals to near-shore animals. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?
- messe 3y ago
  You've linked the wrong image (off by one); that one is the sarcastic depiction of the “international community”.
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    Oh crap, thanks for letting me know. Didn't see it in time for the edit window though :( if only HN had notifications or just lets you edit, y'know, your own posts
deleted 3y ago
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OOPMan 3y ago
Mildly interesting then I got to then end and saw the "come back next week for my premium on article on WHY" and couldn't help feeling this was basically just a content mill article full of factoids trying to get you to give some random guy on the internet money. Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD

685 points by yarapavan 3y ago

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May I suggest a term for this sort of article: "mapsplaining". I have known about the distortions of the Mercator projection since LBJ was president, and about ever ten or fifteen years someone feels compelled to announce it as news.

PaulLeiby 3y ago

Maps distort how we see the world: This is the world of perception and representation - it's all "distorted." But most useful representations, like the Mercator, are "lies that make us realize the truth" [or some facet thereof].

theallseeingeye 3y ago

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theallseeingeye 3y ago

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aio2 3y ago

I'm not doing the math, but assuming it's correct, that's really impressive. It's all on perspective!

slibhb 3y ago

> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer1—seem smaller than they are. Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy. One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centered.

nwallin 3y ago
> The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy. It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection. Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.
oakashes 3y ago
> One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe. I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom out enough.
- slibhb 3y ago
  Using a perspective projection works because our brains automatically understand the distortions caused by that sort of projection and account for them. Reprojecting on-the-fly is a way around it. Yes, you're still projecting to two dimensions but it drives home the point that the area of a landmass is relative depending on what the user is looking at. Something like: https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d

efsavage 3y ago

A good collection, I especially like the Mediterranean-in-Australia one. Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We See the World" you should see what not having a map does!

nntwozz 3y ago

“The map is not the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski

j_m_b 3y ago
Shame I had to get this far to see this quote. It should be in the original article!

omoikane 3y ago

Obligatory xkcd, with on-topic alt-text: https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/ For a more distorted way to see the world, try: http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/ http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/

jezzamon 3y ago
It's actually less distorted in some ways :)
shagie 3y ago
I'm fond of the Dymaxion (and either the land connected or the ocean connected forms - as applicable) because it has some neat applications showing migratory routes. My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when looking at other projections. Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehistoric_human_migrations.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...

Jun8 3y ago

Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!) Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is-the-north-considered-as-up-and-south-as-down https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current country). This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps. See these interesting answers to get more information about the terms Upper/Lower Egypt: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egyptian-civilization-start-from-north-to-south-or-vice-versa https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...

idlewords 3y ago
There's a similar phenomenon of terminology creep with language terms like 'High German' and 'Low German'. This nomenclature has been adopted into fantasy literature to suggest a more noble vs. fallen version of some ancient dialect, but all it meant originally is that 'high' speakers were upstream (and therefore uphill) from the 'low' speakers.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  Great example. And the Alemannisch dialect is "hoch hoch Deutsch," or extra-high German, being from way up in the German-speaking Swiss Alps.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  This is one of those 'common misconceptions' where I hear about its refutation more often than I encounter people who believe the supposed misconception. Much like anything talking about map projections, in fact.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    You may need to read more crappy fantasy books. To cite a completely representative example, consider 'High Valyrian' from Game of Thrones https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian, a liturgical language that of course is contrasted with Low (or Bastard) Valyrian, a degenerate family of dialects.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

> We should be wary of flattening balls! I agree.

cryptoegorophy 3y ago

Every kid should have a globe to understand countries and distortion better.

Animats 3y ago
They all do.[1] [1] https://earth.google.com/ https://earth.google.com/
- interroboink 3y ago
  Aside from the humor of that page failing to load for me (Firefox), I also smirk at the fact that it would still be projecting the globe onto a _flat_ screen to view it (: Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    > that page failing to load for me (Firefox) Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine. Anything interesting in the console?
    - interroboink 3y ago
      I tried again in a 'blank' profile, and it worked there. On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really. But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the other profile.
      - capitainenemo 3y ago
        Are you using "resist fingerprinting" in Firefox? I've noticed that causes mystery total blocks or additional "click and hold to show you are not a bot" challenges on many sites (Fedex, Kickstarter, Walmart, Lowes) and at random. Often it seems in some backend XHR that the app writer didn't think to handle bot blocks on, so the page half loads.

asylteltine 3y ago

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randcraw 3y ago

There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI

chippiewill 3y ago
Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a two-ton block of cheese. It was there, for any and all who were hungry, it was there for the voiceless.
- kevdev 3y ago
  And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sublinear 3y ago
  So... government cheese?
js2 3y ago
Probably seen that clip a dozen times and this was the first time I noticed Whitford manspreading in the middle of the clip and Janney batting his leg back. By the look on his face, it seems improvised to get a laugh out of her.
- eldaisfish 3y ago
  it’s a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top. Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How about maps with north and south swapped?
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

https://earth.nullschool.net https://earth.nullschool.net has a range of different projections available (on top of the main functionality of the site, which is itself a pretty cool map of wind/weather/atmospheric patterns). The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be static images.

grogenaut 3y ago
Pretty cool to think about the amount of work going on behind the covers to alter these projections on the fly. And how costly it was to build them originally by hand.
- tony_cannistra 3y ago
  work, sure, but not _that_ much. It's affine transformations / some fast linear algebra, for the most part. Your second point is for sure true, though.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    I wonder if anyone ever came up with an elaborate mechanism connected to a pen.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map. There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there. But it’s still a fun observation. I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym: https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html

retrac 3y ago
That reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map: https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_5360.jpg https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536... It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
- yorwba 3y ago
  If you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differential_polyconic_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the poles that appears in commonly-used maps.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  I saw a Japanese map recently and it took me a full minute to understand what I was looking at. Japan was at the center, and North America was on the right.

Fauntleroy 3y ago

This is why I'm glad Google maps is available in a 3d globe! Even at relatively close zoom levels the subtle differences in scale are really noticeable. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to always start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox it just reverts back to a flat map.

netsharc 3y ago
It'd be pretty cool if they can show the map in the Mercator projection with a center the user can choose, as well as which way is up...
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Try https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/en/ https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/en/
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser does this. It displays meteorological (and related) data, not political or geological features, but is still pretty interesting. There are also numerous alternative projections available <https://earth.nullschool.net/ https://earth.nullschool.net/> (There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)

ukmac 3y ago

Wow. Mind blown

earthboundkid 3y ago

This is dumb. Every elementary school classroom has a globe. We see how big the countries are on globes routinely.

Freebytes 3y ago
Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many more maps online.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Especially the southern hemisphere, as their head is normally above the globe
  - sltkr 3y ago
    Have you ever seen a globe? They are always tilted so you can easily view countries below the equator. Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Kids are short. Australians turn maps so they are south side up anyway.

deleted 3y ago

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kibwen 3y ago

Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymaxion_with_Tissot's_Indicatrices_of_Distortion.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax... Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection

simonbw 3y ago
I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
- kibwen 3y ago
  XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it into being a data interchange format were ill-advised relative to just making it a good text-based markup language, but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and XPath that XML had from the start!
zokier 3y ago
Of discontinuous projections, I prefer Waterman over Dymaxion, it feels more regular and is more intuitive to see how it wraps around a sphere (or geoid). While Waterman might have more distortion in some absolute sense, the regularity of the distortions makes it still more pleasing (subjective, I know). One weird thing about Dymaxion is how the 70° parallels around both north and south poles are distinctly lumpy. But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.

jgeada 3y ago

Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection! Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.

graypegg 3y ago
Exactly! This article mostly avoids it but the usual popsci refrain of “the map you know is WRONG” is a pet peeve of mine! It’s not like one projection is any worse than another, as long as they are useful for the context it’s designed for. Maps are diagrams!
- tony_cannistra 3y ago
  and all maps are WRONG
bluepod4 3y ago
> I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection! Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes. It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.” It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.” FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection. Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this). I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)

placesalt 3y ago

I agree with many other comments here that this is more an effect of the practical purpose that maps are created for than any presumed nefarious motivation. Look at the list of supported projections in the PROJ database - it's a very long list, and they're all there to solve some particular problem. Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps. Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred around Antarctica: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocean_circulation_on_a_spilhaus_projection/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...

interroboink 3y ago

I have a poster of a South-up map[1], which is fun to look at and wiggle those expectations in my mind from time to time. Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection. [1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-world-wall-map.html https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others) [2] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348 https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348

idatum 3y ago
Makes me wonder why South isn't intuitively "up" for folks in the Southern Hemisphere.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I imagine having your maps rotated compared to most of the world (90% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere) would probably be a pain to deal with.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  Save reason they observe Yule at midsummer.

stephenboyd 3y ago

It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-at-the-top-but-it-couldve-been-different https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...

trhfhxggf 3y ago
Well, if you define up and down as the axis perpendicular to the ecliptic, there is an up and down in the solar system.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  Kinda? It's still arbitrary which one we think of as "up" and which we think of as "down," though, right?

fsckboy 3y ago

> Maps distort how we see the world maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator projection is problematic, I got news for you.

waiseristy 3y ago
Had this same thought. Our own eyeballs distort how we see the world.

luxurytent 3y ago

The overlay of Canada on Europe is always a fun one. We moan so much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of public transit and reasonable infrastructure to get around, but we're also comparing a population of (just recently hit!) 40,000 and ~700,000. Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area. This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)

mhb 3y ago
> This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
NoRelToEmber 3y ago
> Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area. You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass. That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
- fknorangesite 3y ago
  Seriously. Half the population is in southern Ontario. There's no reason we can't have a serious high speed rail line Toronto<->Quebec City that would serve - without exaggeration - most Canadians. I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in this corridor is a policy failure.
jtakkala 3y ago
The size of Canada really isn’t a valid excuse for Canada’s poor public transit, nor is Canada’s population. Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
MalcolmDwyer 3y ago
90% of Canadians live in a "small" strip of land that is comparable in size to Europe. That area (along with several regions and city pairs in the US) could have excellent inter-city and intra-city transit. But we just don't. Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build for people. Almost everything about our built environment is optimized for cars and the result is sprawl. The cause is our public policies, building regulations, and zoning. It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because people don't try to commute across the country, just like people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin every day. The vast majority of travel is local and occasionally regional.

thriftwy 3y ago

Fun thing is that USSR (and Russia as its descendant) was actually never using Mercator anywhere near education, since the distortion was too great in places where it was important. You would imagine it would be good for ego, but pragmatic reasons prevailed. Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common. On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs that?

AlecSchueler 3y ago

I remember one particular trip I had on LSD. I spent some of the time inspecting my childhood neighbourhood in Belfast on Google Maps with the 3D view, and looking at it from angles other than North -> Top. It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the city but also the socio-political history of it. I would definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you know.

zokier 3y ago

Somehow I'm reminded of these "How Big Africa[/Texas] Really Is" memes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-sizes-how-big-africa-really-is https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-sizes-h...

ubermonkey 3y ago
See also: "Long Chile" https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-snack-rack/ https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...

AlbertCory 3y ago

When I was in Google Maps, a popular interview question was "what's your favorite projection? (don't say Mercator)" I didn't get asked that one, fortunately. Whenever I see one of those "the Earth from space" photos, I always think, "Wow, Africa is really big."

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago

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bit_flipper 3y ago

This article doesn't touch on the actual reasons why Mercator is still in widespread use: * It was the first widespread projection because of its practical use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something considered somewhat inconsequential. * Mercator and its cousin Web Mercator are extremely simple and fast to calculate relative to other projections. Compare the formula for Web Mercator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formulas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formul...) to Equal Earth, an excellent compromise projection for general use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formula...). Web Mercator is very easy to generate and serve tiled maps out of, Equal Earth and the like require somewhat non-trivial engineering to make serving those maps at scale to users in a web browser economical and quick. * Preserving angles is legitimately important still for large scale (very zoomed in) road maps. Projections which preserve size can cause things like 90 degree road intersections to render at very strange angles which confuses drivers. Mercator and Web Mercator are therefore excellent choices of projection for local road navigation, which is by far the most common use of maps today for most people. I strongly recommend folks interested in map projections to read this from Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections. Google Maps now has similar features, but both companies relied on Mercator for many years with good reasons before technology caught up and better solutions became available.

rocqua 3y ago
No map shown to a driver at the detail level of navigating intersections should have to care about projections much. At that small a scale earth is approximately flat, and any half decent projection should have minimal distortions of any kind.
- bentley 3y ago
  In the 90s, my family (inveterate roadtrippers) always kept a Rand McNally road atlas in the car. Each page had a map covering (usually) a whole state. I don’t know what projection it used—Albers, perhaps?—but I remember as a child wondering why some straight‐looking state borders were actually subtly curved.

TehShrike 3y ago

I bought a couple globes in the last year and am glad I did. I bought this small one for my desk (16$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique – every so often I rotate it slightly so that I'm staring at a different part of the globe when I look below my monitor. I bought this one for the dining room (50$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe – the kids can spin it around whenever we talk about a country.

drno123 3y ago

Is this the same Pueyo who shaped Covid response through “the hammer and the dance”? People still consider this guy relevant?!?

ximus 3y ago

Fun article. Surprised it doesn't mention the Peters projection map. You cannot have both area fidelity and shape fidelity to represent countries on a map. If you want area fidelity, the Gall-Peters [1] projection and the Peters world map [2] (1952) by Arno Peters are the way to visualize countries, whereas common maps focus on shape-fidelity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector [2] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-projection https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-p...

gjm11 3y ago
There are plenty of other equal-area map projections. Several of them are less shape-distorting than the Peters projection. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection. Peters did a great job of publicity, as witness the common but completely false idea that the Peters projection is "the way" to make an equal-area plane map, but there's nothing particularly great about the projection itself.

renewiltord 3y ago

Dude, that is wild! I mean, I know about the distortion but still watching Indonesia span that width is crazy. Or the bits about Brazil's Northernmost and Easternmost, or China's Westernmost. Great collection of illustrations.

ubermonkey 3y ago

If you think only in Mercator (e.g.), it's easy to fall into erroneous concepts. A great example of this came when, years ago, I had a business trip from Texas where I live to Dubai. A friend asked, cleverly aware of the distance involved, if the flight went east or west -- because if you have Flat Map Brain, that's what you default to, right? The answer is "neither." The route went mostly north from Houston, crossed Canada and began trending south (without turning!) over / around Iceland; we approached Dubai from the north, more or less. I remember the flight back home going over Iran, but it was at least a decade ago and regional tensions may have made them change that. This site https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211 https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211 shows them avoiding Iranian airspace now, but the flight path seems otherwise about the same.

netsharc 3y ago
This site shows the shortest path between 2 airports: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB I'd imagine your flight would've avoided Russia, afaik even before the war they were obnoxious about who can fly over them/how much it would cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  I've no recollection about flying in Russian airspace, but I definitely did snap a phonecam pic of the seatback map showing us flying between the Elburz mountains and Tehran. This was in 2012, so 11 years ago (per the date of the pic I found). The path suggested by that position absolutely implies flight over Russian territory, but obviously I have no data beyond that. It seems unlikely that an airliner would, like, zigzag around; n.b. that I was on Emirates, not a US carrier, and Russia (and other countries) probably doesn't treat them like they would an airline run out of a NATO country. Or, at least, probably didn't in 2012. No idea what the rules are now. EDIT: I found this article which notes that, at least as of a year ago, Emirates was flying TO Russia, so presumably flights through Russian airspace en route to other places were okay as well before the war. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-airlines-will-continue-fly-russia-until-told-not-by-owners-president-2022-03-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-...

TiredGuy 3y ago

The gif at the top was very interesting. The shrinking of the North America and Russia were really surprising to me, as I had always looked at them as much more significant land masses. A little off-topic from projections, but I just returned from a trip to Seoul a few days ago, and I found a simplified subway map to be so much easier to use than Google Maps' more realistic-but-less-relevant map. Subway map design has always intrigued me in that it ignores so much in terms of position and proportion, but at the same time can relay the needed information so much more clearly.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I studied geography in undergrad and grad school. At the beginning a friend and I decided upon a challenge to use as many different projections as possible for labs and reports. I got to 53, I think. Only once did a TA say it was an inappropriate choice and, yeah, it was. I used an arctic planar projection to map a part of southern Ontario. It was so comically skewed. By the end I had actually learned something: my perception of what was “correct” was largely biased from growing up with Mercator and Albers maps. While some options are more ideal than others given the context, there’s a _lot_ of useful alternatives than what we all picture in our heads.

cubefox 3y ago

With the advent of the paperless office, the increasing ubiquity of screens, and the steady progress in 3D rendering performance – there will soon be little need for 2D map projections. We just render the Earth as a sphere and do some perspective projection.

bazoom42 3y ago
Screens are still flat, so it would still be a 2d projection.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Yes, but 3D perspective projection is what our eyes do anyway, so there are no unnatural distortions. Paintings and video games use it to create realistic images of 3D space.

walnutclosefarm 3y ago

Probably 99% of the time I look at, or use, a map, it's at a scale where the Mercator projection is entirely fair, and highly useful. For probably half of the uses I have for maps, whatever distortion relative to an actual globe it introduces isn't even noticable. Then there are the rare times I look at a map at something approaching hemispheric scale. But come on, people, I've been told since 4th grade about the distortions of a world map at that scale. I literally can remember Ms. Kraft in 4th grade explaining how the map made Greenland look nearly as big as Africa, when in fact it was more like the size the larger countries in Africa. And, anyone who has traveled internationally much at all is well aware that, say, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than it looks on a world map - because we fly, for the most part, great circle routes, and flight times give you a very good measure of how far things are. First time you look at a flight to Sydney, the size of the Pacific Ocean, relative to the North Atlantic, pretty much hits you over the head. So, while I find articles like this kinda fun for a couple of minutes (what strange comparison will this author pull out of their hat to make the point that flat maps distort world persectives?), it's mostly for entertainment value. There really isn't much to see.

profsummergig 3y ago

Extremely well put-together article. Contains many examples I've seen in disparate sources before. I will use it as an example of how data visualization can distort. I often wonder if similar things happen with tabular data, but we just can't "see" it so clearly.

meindnoch 3y ago

Yeah, it must be the Mercator projection why the global south is poor. Never mind New Zealand and Australia... Never mind that the whole post-USSR Asia is on the same level as some African countries... It must be those damn maps.

bagacrap 3y ago
Actually the claim was that the global poor are close to the equator. Given how little motivation I have to even move when it's very hot, and how moving is required to generate wealth, and how recently A/C was invented, it's probably not totally a coincidence. But yea Mercator isn't the problem.
- anikan_vader 3y ago
  I mean it’s pretty easily explained by the Industrial Revolution starting in Europe, which is very far north. The explanation that heat induces laziness is a bit suspect given that in older eras many of the most prosperous civilizations were near the equator. (Egypt, Sumeria, the Persians, Indus River Valley Civilizations, etc.)
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    I don't really know how to compare the prosperity of ancient Sumeria and Denmark, but ancient Rome did conquer ancient Egypt and the reverse never happened. The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get more data unfortunately. After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global superpower. Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to have done better at progress and wealth as compared to Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done well lately, but maybe because of a/c - https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

meitham 3y ago

The true size is excellent way to views these and is a major source for this article https://www.thetruesize.com/ https://www.thetruesize.com/

dahwolf 3y ago

I'm from the Netherlands and just saw our tiny land shrink even further. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this swampy river delta actual land. Anyway, I've personally experienced the shock of the true size of Africa. Younger me only had a few flights to Spain under my belt and then went on an adventurous trip to South Africa. I figured it would just be a few hours more. How wrong I was.

crtified 3y ago

All maps are created with selective purpose. The only thing that can possibly represent all purposes simultaneously is the world itself. Accordingly, every map is also a compromise.

dredmorbius 3y ago
More generally: All models are wrong, but some are useful. -- George E. P. Box, in "Science and Statistics" (1976) <https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writi...> (PDF) See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong> Box apparently expanded on the notion in Box, G. E. P. (1979), "Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building", in Launer, R. L.; Wilkinson, G. N. (eds.), Robustness in Statistics, Academic Press, pp. 201–236, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-438150-6.50018-2, ISBN 9781483263366. Full text online at <https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps.pdf https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps....> (PDF)

082349872349872 3y ago

My current favourite alternative projection is Spilhaus, eg https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-Passages-with-Shipping-Routes-Spilhaus-1.pdf https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-P... (Edit: now I see TFA mentioned it, just not by name)

dontupvoteme 3y ago

A hot take perhaps but now I'm curious -- Is this an American/New World/Big-Ass-Country (I could see Russia/China caring) phenomenon? A lot of British people, especially when being smug and nationalist online, speak about how their tiny island took over so many other big places. I never asked a Frenchman and obviously it's in bad form to ask the Germans... The Scandis ""benefit"" the most from the distortion but never really had empire apart from in the neighboring areas, so I don't know if they ever think about it.

Exoristos 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov... Everybody tried to take over the world in that era. Hell, the Scots had Panama at one point.

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

So, just use an orthographic projection and concede that projecting a globe onto a flat surface with boundaries is a futile affair. Google Maps on the Web defaults to this; so does Apple Maps.

imgabe 3y ago

This seems to come up a lot lately. I don't see why this matters. If you're doing something like charting a flight path where it actually matters what the real sizes are, I'm sure you have access to the correct information. If you're just going about your normal life as a dental hygienist or something, what difference does it make if Russia is not as big as you assume? > Are these maps chosen for good reasons and these distortions are a side-effect, or are they purposefully deceitful? Are there better maps we could choose? I’ll explore this in the premium article this week. Subscribe to read it! Ah, I see. It's just bait to drive subscriptions. You can read for free on Wikipedia about why the Mercator projection is useful for navigation. What is wrong with people that they assume there is some evil cabal of mustache-twisting villains who deliberately make misleading maps?

raldi 3y ago

A nice addition to this page would be the fact that Maine is the US state closest to Africa.

gmiller123456 3y ago

The claim that "when you look at the Pacific Ocean on a globe, you only see water" is incorrect. I've seen a few attepts to make this claim appear as if it were real. Like the image in the article, it's just a perspective projection from a low altitude. If you actually grab a globe, you'll see there is no way to cut it in half with only water on one side. If there were a way to do that, we could save a lot of money on globes by just not making that half.

TheBigSalad 3y ago
You mostly see water.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  This is a very Hawaii phobic point of view
SamBam 3y ago
Right, but when you look at a globe, you're actually seeing less than half of it, unless it is small enough or you are far enough. If you're closer, you can definitely see less land. The "perspective projection" is correct.

29athrowaway 3y ago

Good luck using a compass and using a projection other than mercator.

andsoitis 3y ago

To me a more interesting thing is that we always show “north” as “up” or at the “top”. Even recognizing that it is “natural” given our use of compasses, one would think we can be more playful showing earth with different “up” orientation.

jeffchien 3y ago

Unrelated but I love that "The True Size of Africa" diagram lists area in "m km^2", also known as "Mm^2". It's interesting that there are some SI prefix and unit combinations that are just not used.

Guthur 3y ago

Distorts nothing, it gives a particular view of the world. All our views of the world are highly localised by the very nature of our existence. We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.

Xen9 3y ago

The only distortion is your idea that there's something that is not only an approximation.

acconrad 3y ago

Is there a phenomenon that describes why I feel a sense of unease when I see the other maps? Seeing the various projections and changes of those maps left me _very_ uncomfortable and I'm not sure why.

keiferski 3y ago

This article misses what I think is actually the bigger "distortion"[1]: the idea that an externalized, view of Earth as an object in space should be the default way of visualizing our place in the universe. This is itself a distortion based on a long, long lineage of philosophical-religious ideas on how the world is constructed and how human beings fit into it. It seems to me that we could construct any number of other maps that are either more truthful, more useful, or more in-line with human thriving (eudaimonia) [2]. In other words, if all maps are distortions, is the one we're using actually the one we should be using? 1. I don't really like this word, as it implies that there is a real shape of the world and that every other perspective is somehow wrong. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

ddmma 3y ago

The closer to Ecuador the less higher entropy so not having focus on productive work but maybe just enjoy the sun. Also because of heat people tend to be more violent.

ggm 3y ago

To hijack discussion, here's another quirk of mapping: Border disputes can be uplifted into state law. Google adjusts how it renders maps into IN economy IPs because its illegal to show maps about Kashmir which imply Pakistan's claims over the territory are legitimate. I've had to adjust slide-ware for use in the Indian subcontinent. A different kind of "distortion" but very real. Projections can be complicated. I value mapping tools which let you re-center a global map off 0° Longitude. I also value maps which manage to fit all of the Pac-rim island economies into some kind of view: No way is land mass or distance to scale, to usefully show this region. If you believe maps, Hawaii is almost as big as Alaska and just offshore of the Catalina Islands. It also seems to have a very squared-off moat, maybe its a border wall...

pete1302 3y ago

my brain in hurting!

bfung 3y ago

Use a globe. It’s 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a virtual globe. Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you’re not likely going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.

yolkedgeek 3y ago

this is such an important point that rich countries don't want to spread that much.

mejutoco 3y ago

"The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski

Wildgoose 3y ago

I have a globe. But even that doesn't show the true distortion, which is that the Earth is wrinkled. For example, Korea is mountainous and so its actual surface area is much greater than its apparent surface area when looking at either a map or a globe.

IndySun 3y ago

It's a comprehensive telling of something that's becoming more commonly known. There's little sinister intent, more a giving readers information to conclude themselves. Some countries, Japan and USA come to mind, put themselves at the centre of 'their' world maps. Also, the distorted headshot is incredibly demonstrative. And seeing how much different sizes appear if you alter the orientation.

adammarples 3y ago

I really hate these mercator articles. This one is particularly egregious because it takes a potentially interesting subject and just ignores every detail. No mention that they are talking only about one specific map projection. No mention of it by name even. No mention of what trade offs projections must make. No exploration of other projections. No mention of historically why we commonly use this one, or what others could be appropriate. Obsession with area above all else as if what area a country occupies on a map is important. No support for this view either, map area is implied to be all important. General implication that it's some kind of colonialist sneer at Africa. One could just as easily write an article about how unfair it is that Africa gets to be at the centre of the map, again without explaining why on earth that matters.

AntiRemote 3y ago

[dead]

mcv 3y ago

Great article, with one big problem: it's guilty of the exact issue it tries to address: assuming specific map projections as the default. It starts: > Maps twist our perception of the world. > Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer—seem smaller than they are. This is obviously not true for all map projections. It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. It's probably true for some other map projections, but definitely not for all. The article doesn't even mention the name Mercator until its second half.

defrost 3y ago
> It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. The Mercator family is "the best" map family for those who navigate by rhumb lines. I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given the vast numbers of GPS enabled devices. I stressed family, of course, as there is a continuum of Mercator projection maps .. The (specific) Mercator Projection that wall hangs and everbody discusses whenever this comes up is just one of many and whose parameters were chosen to weight the Northern Hemisphere for the benefit of US-Euro traders.
- mcv 3y ago
  We don't navigate by rhumb lines, we navigate by directions and local shapes, and those are the important things that stay the same in Mercator. If some angles on the map are smaller than they should be while others are larger, that's confusing. Mercator keeps this consistent. Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty terrible. Of course today with computerised navigation, we don't really have to use a flat projection at all; it would be even more accurate to calculate every view directly from a globe. Have your own custom projection based on where you are. But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it. Or something Mercatory, at least; centering on Greenwich and having north up is less relevant, although deviating from the latter would probably confuse a lot of people. And outside of navigation, we really shouldn't ever be using Mercator. I'm not sure if that happens. When I was in school, I remember we had a Goode-Homolosine map on the wall, which is an excellent choice for that. Every map projection has its purposes that it's good at, and those it's not. But especially with the ubiquity of Google Maps, it's not surprising that people get more exposure to Mercator.

lucb1e 3y ago

Regarding "How would fish draw a map?" (image: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a9905cb-3e9c-4f09-bd5a-6f4f71fd6eae_1035x539.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... since there's no heading to link to) Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article described how genes are transmitted globally despite having separate continents (iirc the waters are shallow enough near the north pole and around oceania to form one long line along all shores), but I can't remember it well enough to find it again. Tried checking it elsewhere but all the relevant-sounding Wikipedia articles don't seem to talk about the ratio of deep sea animals to near-shore animals. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?

messe 3y ago
You've linked the wrong image (off by one); that one is the sarcastic depiction of the “international community”.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  Oh crap, thanks for letting me know. Didn't see it in time for the edit window though :( if only HN had notifications or just lets you edit, y'know, your own posts

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

OOPMan 3y ago

Mildly interesting then I got to then end and saw the "come back next week for my premium on article on WHY" and couldn't help feeling this was basically just a content mill article full of factoids trying to get you to give some random guy on the internet money. Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD