261–270 of 351 posts
With the advent of the paperless office, the increasing ubiquity of screens, and the steady progress in 3D rendering performance – there will soon be little need for 2D map projections. We just render the Earth as a sphere and do some perspective projection.
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)…
They're not complaining about what they can use for themselves.
They are complaining about what is in mainstream use (in schools, websites, books, documentaries, and so on) and thus what kinds of perception people get.
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I don't understand what you're saying. The article doesn't present this as a crisis. It doesn't really make sense to say it's okay or not okay, except insofar as anything that isn't an existential threat is okay, I suppose.
The second sentence of the article strongly implies some nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries is at the root of the popularity of mercator projections.
There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI
This clip is always hilarious to me. Smugly declares "it's where you've been living this whole time," as he stands in front of a projection that is just as flawed, as all projections are, as the Mercator. The only priority of that map projection is attempting to account for the accurate area of landmasses, sacrificing correct shape of landmasses, as well as a ton of navigational utility. A globe is the only correct p…
Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?
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> Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential. But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small. I mean you have to have natural resources and can’t be tiny, but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass. I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in ratio…
> But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small. There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.
| name | gdp_pos | gdp | land_pos | land |
|----------------|---------|----------|----------|---------|
| United States | 1 | 26854599 | 4 | 9147593 |
| China | 2 | 19373586 | 3 | 9596961 |
| Japan | 3 | 4409738 | 62 | 377976 |
| Germany | 4 | 4308854 | 63 | 357114 |
| India | 5 | 3736882 | 7 | 3287263 |
| United Kingdom | 6 | 3158938 | 79 | 242495 |
| France | 7 | 2923489 | 49 | 543940 |
| Italy | 8 | 2169745 | 72 | 301339 |
| Canada | 9 | 2089672 | 2 | 9984670 |
| Brazil | 10 | 2081235 | 5 | 8515767 |
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
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Agree. Most of the general-public wall maps I see out there use equal-area projs.
Really? In my entire lifetime I’ve seen maybe five? Including the one hanging up in my childhood home. Even Google Maps uses Mercator by default.
https://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Political-World-Map-3360....
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)…
Feels like you're pretending that Amero-Eurocentrism is not a thing, that there is no agenda or bias to be examined or criticized. If you've ever played Risk, the Amero-Eurocentrism is extreme. https://cdn.matthewhaeck.com/content/images/2015/02/risk.jpg https://freeprintableaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/risk-... North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa. Europe: 7 territories, as large as Africa. USA: 3 t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The second sentence of the article strongly implies some nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries is at the root of the popularity of mercator projections.
That is entirely on you tho. Becasuse that sentence does not imply anything about concentration of power nor about globally powerful countries and even nothing about origin of popularity of mercator projections. It does imply that poor countries around equator are bigger then they look like. That is it.
