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Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.
by jsherer 2mo ago
Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.
- gus_massa 2mo agoBorders are a nightmare because many countries have contested areas and ask everyone inside the country to use the official one, specialy at schools.
- gus_massa 2mo agoToo late to edit: As a sibling comment says, in the top of the site they offer an option to make a version with only the borders. I don't see an option to combine satellite photos and borders anyway.
- jameshart 2mo agoI do find it interesting that while modern map apps do a great job of replacing road atlases, and we can get satellite and photogrammetry overlays that give us immense insight into how maps relate to the context on the ground, and we do have pretty good topographic mapping apps (though sadly not built in to the big map apps like Google or Apple), but one kind of map that we used to get in paper atlases but can’t explore so easily online are political maps. Google Maps is also not great as a physical map in that it is bad at labelling and naming geographic features - Apple Maps does a better job at this. But neither offers a good way to hide all the roads and just look at borders.
- fy20 2mo agoIt's great for learning historical geography. At my school in the late 90s, our atlases still had the USSR.
- dylan604 2mo ago"or with your own pinned places via the custom globe builder." Right there at the top of the page with a link even: https://foldingglobes.com/ https://foldingglobes.com/ In fact, it looks like the default landing page for the site. TFA looks to be a quick link to the free options
- andrewl 2mo agoThe site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.
- mc32 2mo agoAnother thing I miss in common digital maps is the use of typeface sizes and weight to approximate city populations. There are many other ones, like toll road, multi-lane, two lane, paved, unpaved, under construction/washed out, as well as better communication of biome characteristics like forest, marsh, swamp, desert, farmland, lava flow, (plus the usual parks, preserves, wilderness, etc.) Paper maps communicated a lot of different information, not only things about roadways. It's like roadmaps are the only maps the common online digital maps cared to build digitally. Their keys and icons were so much better.