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UN backs new map showing Africa's true relative size with US alone in opposition
- majormajor 28d ago> In a statement after the vote, Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, accused the United Nations of promoting an ideological agenda and distracting from more pressing issues. > "Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility," the statement read. I dunno, bro, "more accurate map" seems less "ideological" than "refuse to contemplate anything that could be perceived by the most fragile people alive as diminishing the US." Sometimes it gets harder and harder to understand why certain things trigger these children.
- beej71 28d agoThey can't hear you over their loud and non-ideological renaming of Lake America.
- hydropax 28d agoAlso, the great state of New America, located between Arizona and Texas. https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2096657477928448250 https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2096657477928448250 Might be a joke, might not. Who knows, with this crew
- MrMember 28d agoIs it a more accurate map? It more accurately represents the size of Africa but there are distortions in other places that aren't present in a Mercator projection.
- DemocracyFTW2 28d agoTo be fair you either produce a globe that faithfully reproduces the geoid (a sphere should do for most cases) or you'll always distort something on the map: angles, areas, distances. And then there's the question of the overall map shape: you can get away with less overall distortion at the price of partitioning the map into more pieces (as done e.g. by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map). The Mercator projection has the advantage, if indeed it is one, of being rectangular. To me, a shortcoming of the Equal Earth projection is that it makes places like Australia and Alaska look like they're somehow 'on the fringe'.
- xnx 28d agoI'm neutral on the map. If it makes somebody happy, great. Would've been a lot more interesting of they promoted a population map: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram
- someothherguyy 28d ago> Would've been a lot more interesting of they promoted a population map why?
- bell-cot 28d agoWatch the map animation at the top of the NPR article. Notice how most of 'em don't even bother to show the deep interior of Antarctica. If you aren't a geologist or similar - how much of the importance of a place is due to the people living there?
- xnx 28d agoThe UN represents the interests of people, not land.
- someothherguyy 26d agoso? people still need to use and visualize a map that isn't some strange abstraction. how useful is a population map when attempting to locate a small country to understand geography?
- dataflow 28d agoWhy don't they use the Mollweide projection instead?
- iamnothere 28d agoOr Collignon!
- bell-cot 28d agoNoted in the linked UN news source: > Six countries – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine – abstained. It would have been interesting if NPR had covered the diplomatic and economic considerations behind those countries abstaining, and no other right-wing nationalist regime siding with the US.
- DemocracyFTW2 28d agoReading the Wikipedia article on the Equal Earth projection it would seem the map used in the resolution indicates national boundaries.
- bell-cot 28d agoAnd Wikipedia outlines in considerable detail why those boundaries are quite objectionable to a good number of nations in Europe. Quoting multiple UN Ambassadors on this resolution. Vs. NPR found an angle that'd push their reader's buttons, and figured their job was done. Glad I stopped donating to NPR in the early aughties.
- anticorporate 27d agoMedia organizations famously are able to do more in-depth reporting when you stop funding them...
- whoarewethen 27d ago[flagged]
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- dotancohen 28d agoThe old map's Africa looks just like Africa on my globe. I understand that the new Africa is bigger, but it no longer looks like the real shape of Africa on planet Earth. When I look at a map - political or geographic - my primary observation is the shapes of the nations or landforms. Not the size.
- yorwba 28d agoYes, contrary to reporting, the map doesn't represent Africa more accurately, but instead it represents regions near the poles more accurately to eliminate size distortion, at the expense of more shape distortion near the equator. But you aren't going to see many news outlets titling "UN backs new map showing Greenland's true relative size with US alone in opposition."
- krackers 28d agohttps://map-projections.net/compare.php?p1=equalearth&p2=robinson&w=1&sm=1&d=1 https://map-projections.net/compare.php?p1=equalearth&p2=rob...