10 ms·
Mercator Puzzle
- bobdylan1 14y agoThis I like. But why does moving the pieces up and down produce a sort of cylinder?
- fferen 14y agoI think it's because the mercator projection distorts size, while the pieces try to stay the same (real-world) size as you move them. I didn't make the game, I just found it.
- DCoder 14y agoBecause that's how the Mercator projection distorts object size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection#Distortion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection#Distortion
- hayksaakian 14y agoThis freaks out on the latest chrome android beta. Wonky flashing over parts of the map. Nexus 7
- tantalor 14y agohttps://code.google.com/p/gmaps-samples/issues/entry https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-samples/issues/entry
- hayksaakian 14y agoWasn't sure if it was just me/chrome or everyone.
- kenbot 14y agoBloody Mercator. Confusing generations of Australian schoolchildren since ...always. "But you said we were the biggest island!"
- rplnt 14y agoWe've been always taught that Greenland is the biggest island. If we'd allow Australia to compete, we as well might include Eurasia :)
- artursapek 14y agoThe morphing of those SVG shapes is mystifying.
- ajays 14y agoThat's the Mercator transform for ya.
- trafficlight 14y agoI wish it randomized the puzzle pieces every time. And there should be a timer.
- jessriedel 14y agoSlight bug: if you bring the piece low enough, the color invert.
- delinka 14y agoThat's quite amusing. I see the problem: when the shape distorts enough to connect its boundaries across the south pole, the outside becomes the inside.
- Whitespace 14y agoI'm partially ashamed to admit that I got all of them but one: a piece that had straight eastern and southern sides. It looked like a Canadian or Australian state/territory (large and having flat edges), but I couldn't place it. Also I had a hard time placing Brazil.
- adamnemecek 14y agoIt was Mauritania. But I also zoomed in after like half of them so that's kinda cheating.
- GFischer 14y agoI did that too, after 10 pieces (Mauritania was one of the hardest).
- delinka 14y agoMeh, if the map supports zooming, I don't consider it cheating. I didn't even try to zoom, but I'd have used zoom had I been aware. Now the guy above that looked at the page source-- he's cheating. ;-)
- woj 14y agoMauritania ;)
- chii 14y agohaha, i had a different piece that was difficult - it was the saudi arabia piece. That took me forever to see.
- flaie 14y agoI had a hard time finding Ukraine, Thailand was also slightly hard to place pixel-perfect !
- yohui 14y agoTook me a couple tries to get Thailand, too, as it didn't snap to the map the first time I placed it. A version with all countries would be an interesting teaching tool, to learn about geography and cartography. Would need to option to display only some countries at a time, to avoid overwhelming the user.
- SCAQTony 14y agoThat was boss, "only" took me a 30-minutes! Well done and great for learning geography.
- lmm 14y agoSeriously 30 minutes? Is this an American thing? To my mind almost all of them were obvious from the shapes alone (the one with straight edges wasn't, but the very fact that its borders are straight lines tell you there's only a few parts of the world it could be in).
- dmckeon 14y agoStraight line border segments for nations seem to correlate well with borders determined by treaties between colonial powers. Dragging all the red outlines to the equator was a big help. Initial placement of red outlines in oceans might make the goal more obvious from the initial view. A "satellite POV" might be interesting (same click&drag UI spins the earth/repositions the POV). The red outlines could then be placed in the empty corners.
- m_myers 14y agoPlease don't make it a "my country vs. your country" thing. Some people have more aptitude for geography than others; it doesn't much matter where they are (as long as some schooling exists). I'm American and didn't have any trouble. And who said the GP was American, anyway?
- sethbannon 14y agoThis reminds me of this great segment from the West Wing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM
- hartror 14y agoSeriously, I need to watch West Wing I think someone posts an awesome and politically relevant clip on HN once a month (that I see and watch).
- DCoder 14y agoYes, The West Wing is worth watching in its entirety.
- coldarchon 14y agoIf there is one youtube video this reminds me off then Yakko from Animaniacs singing the world's countries song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x88Z5txBc7w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x88Z5txBc7w
- fossuser 14y agoSolution: http://i.imgur.com/Odujjao.png http://i.imgur.com/Odujjao.png In case you're stuck on a piece.
- zokier 14y agoDoes anyone know why Google insists on Mercator projection? I guess that it makes the implementation bit simpler, but on the other hand you'd imagine that if anyone then Google would have the resources to use some more reasonable projection for greater good.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoGoogle Earth uses a completely different (and superior) system, however it's more resource intensive.
- qwertyboy 14y agoTL;DR The Mercator projection is a solution to a problem that does not exist in Google Earth. Projections, Mercator included, are ways to map a 3D shape (the globe) onto a static 2D surface (a map). Google Earth uses a dynamic 2D surface (a screen) to display a changing view of a 3D object. See TL;DR.
- nadahalli 14y agoI have been waiting for MANY years for them to do something about this. At least after the XKCD strip came out. http://xkcd.com/977/ http://xkcd.com/977/
- jemfinch 14y agoI think this is an externally visible link: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/A2ygEJ5eG-o/discussion http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/A2ygEJ5eG... . It's the answer I received when I filed an internal bug on this. "Hi John - Thanks for the feedback. Maps uses Mercator because it preserves angles. The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While this distorts a 'zoomed-out view' of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc... so we're sticking with this projection for now."
- 14y ago
- crap_cone 14y agoanswers in the sauce : var answers = { australia: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-45.379453600000005, 110.69313639999996), new google.maps.LatLng(-8.571888000000001, 155.16969360000007)), southAfrica: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-36.73497648232876, 13.33984375), new google.maps.LatLng(-21.010097985940735, 35.87890625)), greenland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(57.9905285, -75.1942745), new google.maps.LatLng(83.97751860000001, -9.709575500000028)), finland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(59.21319690000001, 19.53808950000007), new google.maps.LatLng(70.7889305, 31.90050659999997)), mongolia: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(40.74287280000001, 86.85821429999999), new google.maps.LatLng(52.641200000000005, 121.12602760000004)), thailand: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(3.9541530000000003, 95.39209260000007), new google.maps.LatLng(21.477918000000003, 106.6929963)), peru: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-19.255824000000004, -82.93600620000001), new google.maps.LatLng(1.5, -67.99965480000003)), brazil: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-35.42974050000001, -74.69401470000003), new google.maps.LatLng(6.5, -33.06445550000001)), iceland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(62.758218600000006, -25.764343499999995), new google.maps.LatLng(67.1959161, -11.481647000000066)), drcongo: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-15.448980381203414, 9.3359375), new google.maps.LatLng(7.485096269212087, 36.015625)), ukraine: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(43.456458529383056, 20.234375), new google.maps.LatLng(53.29973879045674, 42.34375)), madagascar: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-26.898128422978452, 39.5703125), new google.maps.LatLng(-10.366188047247464, 55.3515625)), saudiArabia: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(14.77959730788355, 33.41796875), new google.maps.LatLng(33.68098354643421, 57.28515625)), mexico: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(11.700047540913861, -119.90234375), new google.maps.LatLng(34.264084202839264, -83.65234374999994)), mauritania: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(12.387690937704622, -18.7890625), new google.maps.LatLng(29.336753501211746, -2.3046875)) };
- sxp 14y agoIt's crazy how much Mercator distorts the globe. I was playing around with various map projections via WebGL shaders [1] and the size problems really stand out when the map is recentered. With modern digital maps, we should really stop using old projections that were designed to work on limited paper maps. [1] http://sxp.me/maps/ http://sxp.me/maps/ (Select equirectangular as the projection and drag the crosshairs to recenter.)
- archangel_one 14y agoIt's not really that it's old and out of date; it makes a different set of tradeoffs to other projections, and so typically looks better over small areas but isn't appropriate for a world map since the distortion becomes extreme near the poles.
- Millennium 14y agoThis. There are a couple of different things people use maps for, but the biggest two are finding out where things are and figuring out routes between two things. Mercator throws the needle all the way toward finding routes between two things, and it is very, very good at that, but this comes at the expense of distorting exact locations and sizes of things. Perhaps a compromise is possible, whereby Mercator is used when plotting routes between things but some other projection is used when you're looking for isolated points. Let each projection do what it does best.
- 205guy 14y agoI have been wishing for a long time to have an outline feature in Google maps (or any map tool for that matter). I always want to compare the size of things (partly because of the distortion of the projection), say is the city of SF larger or smaller than NYC? I was stoked when Google added city boundaries, so that means they know them. Now there just needs to be a way to select a city, state/province/department/whatever, or country and drag it somewhere.
- halter73 14y agoImagine how much harder this would be if you also had to rotate.
- ColinWright 14y agoFantastic. As a bonus side-effect, people never believe me when I tell them Australia is bigger than Europe, and this will let them play and see it for themselves.
- mbq 14y agoActually, Australia is smaller than Europe (in means of the area) -- its 7.7M(km^2) to 10.2M(km^2).
- ColinWright 14y agoDepends on what you think of as the boundaries of Europe - the area quoted includes areas of land that many people I speak with don't include. It's easiest just to let people overlay the map. Added in edit: Europe does in fact extend a lot further North-East than people think, and when you include that area - yes - Europe is bigger. The actual overlay still surprises people.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoI imagine he means Europe sans Russia, which is true.
- asaarinen 14y agoJust in case somebody's interested, here's a related experiment we made to generate and display map tiles in a "google earth-style" projection using CSS transforms: https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map
- drbig 14y agoI would really like to see it with random selection of countries every time your reload the page - and then to see it in primary schools during geography lessons - that would be a killer!
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoThere's an educational game like that, 'Stack the countries'. It's loads of fun. (Available for iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZzzw4ohq-o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZzzw4ohq-o https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stack-the-countries/id407838198?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stack-the-countries/id407838...
- bramus 14y agoSame here ... So I created a dynamic version myself: http://bramus.github.com/mercator-puzzle-redux/ http://bramus.github.com/mercator-puzzle-redux/ :-)
- porker 14y agoI really enjoyed this! Like a good jigsaw puzzle only better...
- pavlov 14y agoAs a Finn, I'm thankful for Mercator's contribution to improving Finnish self-esteem. It's an insignificant corner of Europe with less people than most Chinese cities nobody has ever heard of, but at least it looks big on the map!
- resettarget 14y agowell, I guess if a guy hears of Nokia probably (s)he knows about Finland :-)
- icodestuff 14y agoI had no idea how small Finland was... Not that much bigger than some of those small African equatorial countries.
- tzury 14y agoI cheated at 8/15. Viewed source and got all rest of countries names.
- martinced 14y agoWonderful: just spent quite some time playing it. It would be amazingly lovely if you could also display simultaneously other mappings than the Mercator one. Say a sphere in 3D in the upper right corner, with the "figures" moving / showing on both mappings. It's interesting to see that if you take the eight biggest countries by size (well, ok, Antartica ain't a country), they all are very placed in term of GDP: Russia: 10th (GDP), 1 (size) Antartica: ---, 2 (size) Canada: 11 (GDP), 3 (size) China: 2 (GDP), 4 (size) U.S.A.: 1st (GDP), 5 (size) Brazil: 6 (GDP), 6 (size) Australia: 12 (GDP), 7 (size) India: 9 (GDP), 8 (size) You then have Argentina and Kazakhstan lacking quite a bit behind: Argentina: 26 (GDP), 9 (size) Kazakhstan: 49 (GDP), 10 (size)
- guard-of-terra 14y agoThe sad thing is that the set of countries is always the same.
- smackfu 14y agoWhen this first came around, I was surprised how big Greenland is after all. It's not a small island, it's as big as the entire US East Coast.
- niggler 14y agoThere's a touch issue: When you successfully match a country, the shape turns green. However you can move the shape once out of its position. It remains green after the move but you can't move it again (future attempts to move the green item are treated as panning the map)
- Lambdanaut 14y agoI like that the piece for Australia starts above Greenland. That really puts everything into perspective right away.
- dirkk0 14y agoAnd I was reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuZYhFtSZsY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuZYhFtSZsY @puzzle: great idea!
- stcredzero 14y agoGot it. Zooming is essential on a tablet, because of the "my fat finger is in front of my eyes" problem, which I've solved, by the way. As it is, you have to zoom in to be able to see and drag. (I took down the solution. If someone knows their way around VNC, it will get posted faster.)
- kabell 14y agoThis is an awesome UI concept that could be used to demonstrate other kinds of projections, too. It would be awesome to see similar apps related to perspective transformations, rectilinear vs. fisheye lenses, tilt-shift lenses, panorama stitching, etc.
- thewisedude 14y agoFantastic! I learnt something new today. I did not know that the world was projected using Mercator projection and the how that played a role in distortion of the land size.
- aubergene 14y agoD3 has an amazing projection system for creating SVG maps from GeoJSON. https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Projections https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Projections