101–110 of 119 posts
This reminds me of the Peters Projection, one of the weirder attempts to map the oblate spheroid nature of the earth to a 2D plane. http://www.petersmap.com/
Wow, it would definitively be hard to use such a map in Canada looking at how it squeeze the polls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't understand the problem at all. Both PRC and ROC say that Taiwan is entirely under Chinese control, that there's only one China, and that they govern all of its territory.
That is oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy. Taiwan is a democracy, and one of the major parties firmly opposes any concept of Chinese rule and seeks recognition of Taiwan. The other party leans towards being the sole leader of all of China. However in practice (being currently elected) they just improve economic ties with China while opposing unification or formal recognition of Taiwan. The PRC sees Taiwan as…
FYI the ROC also sees Taiwan as a province of China. There is another province called FuJian province, ROC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_Province,_Republic_of_Ch...
i don't think it's unique to China take a look at this POI on 4sq: http://4sq.com/rArZMj It starts with a street view. If you zoom in a little, turns out the bar is out in the water! When you switch to Satellite view, the bar is where it is supposed to be, on the shore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is also worth noting, and easily forgotten, that part of 'historical' Tibet is in India. Already been one war fought along that border.
> that part of 'historical' Tibet is in India. It's also worth noticing that India was never an integral country in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, I agree that this is an example of purely the geometry, not a political attempt. But I know people who , upon seeing the distortion, were surprised at how many maps were "wrong". This shows that you can't rely on the market to weed out inaccurate maps. After all, a map that had the south at the top (rather than the bottom) would be viewed as "wrong" and would be penalized with poor sales. The idea that the ma…
I see what you're saying. I agree. As an aside, I have often wondered at the way North=up became, and remains, completely universal. An upside-down globe "looks" as wrong to me as an upside-down portrait. Obviously there's no reason this must be so; it's nothing more than familiarity with the shapes of the continents from a particular perspective. Some day, I'd like to have a globe or a big mercator-type map with Sou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
those would have to be accurate in order to function The most common form of map, Mercator projection, greatly distorts the area of land around the equator, and makes northernly (& southerly) lands appear much larger. It makes Canada, Greenland, Alaska, et al. appear quite large compared to Africa & South America. But those areas are much larger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection#Uses
Yes I was familiar with that at the time, but I don't recall if it was mentioned in our particular discussion. In any case, Taiwan is relatively far South in its region so the projection effect would tend to be reduced. It would actually have the effect of making mainland China look larger.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I really don't get why they would make them secret. It's helpful to know the ford depths of a river crossing before you get there with your tanks. Take a fanciful example. One could not, say, send a U.S. Army survey team to measure the depth of the Orne before the allies landed in Normandy. The Germans would really object to that kind of thing.
Properly not with tanks. But one old guy with a fishing pole in a boat?
Back in the early 90's (in the US) I had a friend who was a college student from China. In the common area of her dorm there was a huge wall-size Rand-McNally map of the world. We were looking it over. "There's China" I said. "And there's Taiwan." "You know Taiwan is really not that big." she said. "What do you mean?" "Map makers show it larger than it really is in order to exaggerate its importance." I was a little…
http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2008/07/this-i...
Here's a completely anecdotal, "a friend of a friend.." story, but I think it's a cool yi and you'll enjoy it: A friend of a friend is a cartographer who works in DC. According to this person, the official subway map of DC distorts the true geography of the city -- and the subway lines -- as much for security purposes as it does graphic design purposes. The red line, in particular, apparently is drawn with a complete…
Subway "maps" tend to be more like generalized graph diagrams than cartographically accurate maps. After all, you're stuck in a box and your only choice is which node to get off at. But it wouldn't surprise me if an overlay on a cartographic map was intentionally inaccurate. One time I was in DC a cab driver was trying to get me to my hotel. His GPS went totally nonfunctional when we were in view of the Pentagon. It…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not get mixed up about what the projection did and didn't do. As you point out, the importance of rhumb lines comes not from the fact that the thing they keep constant -- the bearing (with respect to north/south) -- was something that could actually be measured. Rhumb lines are not, however, the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. Those would be great circles. In particular, note that along a rhum…
Argh. Misnegation from earlier version. "As you point out, the importance of rhumb lines comes from the fact that..." -- there shouldnt' be a not there.
Unless you use a globe, every projection onto a flat rectangular surface distorts.
Now how does that make more plausible the claim that world map makers are inflating the area of Taiwan on purpose?