121–130 of 173 posts
Very cool. However it's not using great circle routes for airline directions, for example ask to go from Calgary to London. It should go well over Greenland, but instead just follows the same path you'd get from drawing a line on a Mercator map.
Fun fact: this is called a rhumb line, ie a line of constant true bearing.
I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.
Australian maps are shown with Oz in the middle, and the pacific / indian oceas each side, with South East Asia and Antarctia surrounding, exactly the same way US maps put the US in the center.
That's fascinating! I grew up in the US and I'm not sure I've ever used a world map with the US in the center. Curious where you got this impression. I can find some examples if I specifically search online, but they look very weird to me.
Every world map I grew up with has the US on the far left, presumably due to the convenience of splitting the map on the Pacific Ocean. The first example that came to my mind: https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's a theorem of differential geometry that we cannot have a (perfectly) accurate 2d map of the earth.
The author of TFA didn't write "perfectly accurate" but "land mass size on a relative scale". Bud is correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but only vertically.
I was trying to ask the parent to expand on the many things he was claiming lol
An article from "The Map Room" [1] on the argument about Boston public schools having adopted that map, which really dominates Google results right now I guess, but even within the lens of that topic it hits the major points.
And here's a "New Internationalist" article about Arno Peters [2] -- it sounds like he was fine as a historian, and I even agree with his motivation for not wanting to plot historical events on a Mercator map, but it sure would have been great if he had learned about the equal-area alternatives to Mercator that Gall and Mollweide and Eckert and other geographers had already made.
It's not that I'm against making a map projection to "question Western imperalism". I take more issue with Peters' questioning of basic geometry -- he claimed his map preserves angles, which is clearly false (imagine a NW-SE road meeting a NE-SW road in Ecuador and what that right angle would look like in Gall-Peters), and he claimed that it was the "only" equal-area projection.
And I don't think it actually advances the conversation about equality to make a map that looks right in Europe and stretches Africa and South America like taffy.
EDIT: left out the links
[1] https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is-fighti...
Google Maps must be one of the modern wonders of the world, it's still nothing short of breathtaking to zoom out of streetview in crowded London and then land somewhere on a country crossroads in remote Vietnam.
Google Earth VR is mindblowing.
Mostly things that can be fixed in the future (except perhaps "requires multiple click-drags to go to the opposite side", where before you could see most/all of the world at once). But it still seems a bit more shiny than useful.
Google Maps must be one of the modern wonders of the world, it's still nothing short of breathtaking to zoom out of streetview in crowded London and then land somewhere on a country crossroads in remote Vietnam.
Granted, nothing compares to actually experiencing the culture and places in person, but street view makes for a completely different, incredible experience.
I had to do some funky magic to stitch square tiles in a sphere from bing maps and do reverse mercerator projection. I had to also ensure GPS coordinates would exactly align to the right pixel otherwise the 3D chart would all look weird. So there was a lot of fun math involved over a bunch of evenings and weekends.
The hard part though, was to do an animation that would unravel a spherical earth into a flat earth and vice versa.
Naive me though it would be a simple linear interpolation that would take a couple of minutes but it ended up being many many nights of crazy mathematics to get it right.
Map projections are really interesting. Much respect to their inventors.
