7 ms·
Mercator: Extreme
- pvg 2y agoA Show HN thread in 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840059
- NotAnOtter 2y agoDamn, still getting reposted a decade later lmao
- pvg 2y agoYou ain't seen nothin' yet! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982493 Some HN evergreens are about to hit voting age.
- patternMachine 2y agoEssentially the plot of The Inverted World.
- bangaladore 2y agoNot the same idea, but the same category. You can Drag countries to different places on the Mercator projection to see how they warp and change size. Classic example is moving Greenland onto the US. Or Russia. Russia isn't talked about much in this case, but its dramatic how it changes. https://www.thetruesize.com/ https://www.thetruesize.com/
- jvanderbot 2y agoOh so the whole UK would fit in Texas, USA a couple times. And Greenland is like CA, OR, WA, NV combined. Good to know.
- cluckindan 2y ago”We and our 727 technology partners ask you to consent…” I would bet the billionaires in Trump’s good boys club are in it for the pardons they need after justice realizes what is being done with everyone’s personal data.
- aylmao 2y agoSome very impressive ones to look at here: - Colombia is about as tall as the USA's West Coast. - Brazil is comparable to Canada. - Indonesia is wider than Europe.
- OccamsMirror 2y agoAustralia is also one that blows people's minds. Larger than Western and Central Europe combined.
- KineticLensman 2y agoAnd the distance from Oslo to the top of Norway is similar to the distance from Oslo to Rome
- saghm 2y agoAn example I saw in school is that (if I remember correctly) you can fit the continental US, Europe, and China all inside Africa with some room to spare (and maybe a couple other large things I'm forgetting!)
- rufus_foreman 2y agoOne example: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/.
- saghm 2y agoThanks for this! It's possible I'm misremembering and this was the map I saw in school, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are others like it out there that maybe are a bit closer to what I thought I recalled
- mkehrt 2y agoIs this really a Mercator projection? It doesn't appear to maintain the invariant that lines of constant bearing are straight lines. If I pick a point somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, the top point of Manhattan is somewhere near the top of the light colored area and the bottom point of Manhattan nearish the bottom of the light colored area. This means that if I draw straight lines on the the map from San Francisco to these two points, the angle between them is something like 30 degrees. They pass through very roughly the top and bottom of Nevada. But there's no line of constant bearing that passes from SF through the top of Nevada to the top of Manhattan while at the same time one that passes through the bottom of Nevada to the bottom of Manhattan. This is all very wishy-washy, but it doesn't look right to me.
- mbrubeck 2y ago"Lines of constant bearing" (or "rhumb lines") depend on the choice of poles. A rhumb line relative to true north looks straight on a standard Mercator projection, but can look like a spiral on another Mercator-style projection where the pole and center-point have been swapped.
- mkehrt 2y agoOh, that's an interesting point. Maybe that's what's going on. It's hard to picture such a line with a different pole.
- sureIy 2y agoI think it's just a play on the fact that mercator distorts distances significantly, rather than actually being accurate. It's a 3-second website you open, exhale in hilarity and close.
- fmajid 2y agoRemember that "The West Wing" episode where geographers petition the White House chief of staff to replace the Mercator projection with the more accurate and less Euro/US-centric Peters one? This one looks designed to stroke the Yuge ego of one Donald J Trump...
- bschne 2y agooh my god, today I learned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
- fmajid 2y agoYes, a great and educational episode, which is exactly why it's fiction. Although I would expect anyone working at the White House to have seen an actual globe. Well, perhaps not this White House.
- defrost 2y ago> Well, perhaps not this White House. Unbeliever! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abdel_Fattah_el-Sisi,_King_Salman_of_Saudi_Arabia,_Melania_Trump,_and_Donald_Trump,_May_2017.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abdel_Fattah_el-Sisi,_K... Okay, well, perhaps he has averted his gaze.
- bruce511 2y agoI remember that episode well, and had cause recently (size of Greenland in the news) to show someone else the same thing. In the Peter's projection the size of the US and especially Europe, become "smaller" relative to say the size of Africa. It can be quite disconcerting to a person when their "place in the world" is challenged at such a fundamental level.
- jumperabg 2y agoThis is information that a specific Earth community must not access, it will cause flat out chaos!
- michalc 2y agoI made something along these lines a while back too: https://projections.charemza.name/ https://projections.charemza.name/
- aylmao 2y agoI like the simplicity of yours!
- bmenrigh 2y agoIf you search for "90,0" and then use the change orientation button to put the south pole on the bottom of the screen you can recover the more familiar distorted map. Other choices really do put into perspective how distorted this projection is.
- somishere 2y agoThis is basically how my mind works. Mind projection.
- nelblu 2y agoIncidentally a friend just shared this with me earlier today : https://www.thetruesize.com/ https://www.thetruesize.com/
- Ajedi32 2y agoReminds me of bad map projection #45: Exterior Kansas[1]. [1]: https://xkcd.com/2951/ https://xkcd.com/2951/
- elil17 2y agoThis reminds me of "The View of the World from 9th Avenue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
- pmayrgundter 2y agoYou can see it on his map.. it's one of the pre-configured waypoints (top right map symbol)
- Theodores 2y agoBrilliant fun. Do change the layers and orientation, to play with the suggested locations!
- frostyel 2y ago[dead]
- kzrdude 2y agoI honestly wonder why I find this so skin-crawling and unsettling. Something about the distortion of a familiar shape.
- trane_project 2y agoMexico City is great for this because it points you to the central square. You can see the avenues spiraling out of the square, some of which follow the same routes as the avenues that lead to the city-island of prehispanic times (Calzada de Tlalpan, for example).
- zeeed 2y agoFinally! I’m a kid of the 80s and I’ve been waiting for this for so long! Thank you!
- amai 2y agoA globe is always the best projection. Unfortunately it fell out of fashion to have one on your desk.
- zokier 2y agoTry plotting a course with a straightedge on a globe. Or seeing two regions that are on different hemispheres.
- panki27 2y ago1. Use a string 2. Get a second globe
- psychoslave 2y agoFor 2, a small mirror can do the trick too.
- asadotzler 2y agoIn a former life and trade, I used straight edged rulers to measure effectively on convex surfaces by simply tilting the edge forward rounding the convex surface, riding it along until I hit my mark and reading the value.
- sparsely 2y agoWould be interesting to see comparisons between this and very old historical maps, I bet some are not far off.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt looks especially cool if you switch the overlay to "Google Satellite". You can see the different scale levels a bit better. https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/#a473b325@55.86116,-4.25017 https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/#a473b325@55.86116,... EDIT: you can also click the "folded map icon" button and you see the coordinates transformed back into normal ones and shown on a map with X and Y corresponding to radius and azimuth from the centre. Extremely cool!
- maxlin 2y agomy head hurts
- CapmCrackaWaka 2y agoAnyone know how I could convert this to an HD image? Interested in seeing if I can frame it centered on my house.
- HPsquared 2y agoThey're missing a trick here. The best view angle is to have "here" along the bottom edge so it looks like you're looking outward from above the centre point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 2y ago(too late to edit)... Turns out it can indeed be flipped! The "left-right arrows" button beside the coordinates.