Maps distort how we see the world • Hacker News Board

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#31

Post by nwallin » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #3

> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer1—seem smaller than they are. Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy. One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centere…

> The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.

It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection.

Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#32

Post by interroboink » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #20

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #7

Every kid should have a globe to understand countries and distortion better.

They all do.[1] [1] https://earth.google.com/

Aside from the humor of that page failing to load for me (Firefox), I also smirk at the fact that it would still be projecting the globe onto a _flat_ screen to view it (:

Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#33

Post by interroboink » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

I have a poster of a South-up map[1], which is fun to look at and wiggle those expectations in my mind from time to time.

Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection.

[1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others)

[2] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#34

Post by yorwba » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #21

r3trohack3r wrote: post #12

One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map. There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there. But it’s still a fun observation. I liked t…

That reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map: https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536... It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.

If you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the poles that appears in commonly-used maps.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#35

Post by midasuni » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

Freebytes wrote: post #25

earthboundkid wrote: post #16

This is dumb. Every elementary school classroom has a globe. We see how big the countries are on globes routinely.

Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many more maps online.

Especially the southern hemisphere, as their head is normally above the globe

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#36

Post by idlewords » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #6

Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!) Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top ( https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is... ). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the…

There's a similar phenomenon of terminology creep with language terms like 'High German' and 'Low German'. This nomenclature has been adopted into fantasy literature to suggest a more noble vs. fallen version of some ancient dialect, but all it meant originally is that 'high' speakers were upstream (and therefore uphill) from the 'low' speakers.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#37

Post by kibwen » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

simonbw wrote: post #26

kibwen wrote: post #23

Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative d…

I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes. https://xkcd.com/977/

XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it into being a data interchange format were ill-advised relative to just making it a good text-based markup language, but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and XPath that XML had from the start!

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#38

Post by philshem » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #6

Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!) Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top ( https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is... ). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the…

I received a gift from a friend in Uruguay that is from the clockmaker Girosur. The clock runs backwards, rhetorically asking “why is North up?”

https://girosur.com/como-funcionan/

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#39

Post by stephenboyd » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#40

Post by graypegg » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

jgeada wrote: post #24

Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection! Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings)…

Exactly! This article mostly avoids it but the usual popsci refrain of “the map you know is WRONG” is a pet peeve of mine! It’s not like one projection is any worse than another, as long as they are useful for the context it’s designed for. Maps are diagrams!