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Maps distort how we see the world

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Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#301

Post by dwaltrip »

resolutebat wrote: post #139
snoman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? Is there a person above 25 that hasn’t seen the episode (or clip) from The West Wing about map projections at this point?

I'd like to think you're being ironic here, but I suspect you're not, so no: the vast majority of the world is outside the US and has not, in fact, seen an obscure episode of a TV drama about American politics. For others who haven't, here it is: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY Although the projection it proclaims as superior, Gall-Peters, has grievous flaws of its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_…

I just learned about the equal earth projection, which was apparently invented very recently in 2023. It’s the best looking equal area projection I’ve seen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#302

Post by OOPMan »

Mildly interesting then I got to then end and saw the "come back next week for my premium on article on WHY" and couldn't help feeling this was basically just a content mill article full of factoids trying to get you to give some random guy on the internet money.

Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#303

Post by defrost »

mcv wrote: post #299
defrost wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. The Mercator family is "the best" map family for those who navigate by rhumb lines. I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given the vast numbers of GPS ena…

We don't navigate by rhumb lines, we navigate by directions and local shapes, and those are the important things that stay the same in Mercator. If some angles on the map are smaller than they should be while others are larger, that's confusing. Mercator keeps this consistent. Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty terrible. Of course today with c…

> But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it.

For you, perhaps.

As a professional geographer since ~ 1980 (ish) I did enjoy the NZMG (1949) that remained in use until 2001 - it was centred down the mean common spine of the North and South Islands and minimised distortion across the entirety of the New Zealand land and waters [1]. It was one of only three (IIRC) complex-number polynomial expansion projections in common use - but they're ideal for certain land form shapes.

I've seen a lot of local ellipsoid+datum+projection mapping systems globally - I was doing global geophysical mapping during the transition to WGS84 and got into the weeds wrt transforms between that and the 300+ mapping systems commonly in use about the globe prior to todays uniformity.

Pilots, of course, use aeronautical charts based on LCC (Lambert conformal conic projection) as straight lines there approximate Great Circle routes, satellite agencies use variations on the projections of John P. Snyder [2].

I'd humbly suggest that if you honestly believe that the Mercator family is the be all and end all for navigation then perhaps you're in need of further reading [2].

[1] https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...

[2] https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395\*

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#304

Post by dwaltrip »

zimpenfish wrote: post #266
erwald wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Assuming I've converted [1] and [2] correctly into this SQLite3 database and queried it correctly, not really, no. | 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 |…

The countries with the 2 highest GDPs, China and the US, are in the top 4 largest countries. India, #5 in GDP, is #7 in area.

I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.

It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger population and more natural resources. And more space to carry out economic activities with said people and resources.

Edit: I just queried Wolfram Alpha about this. It generated a plot for me, which shows what I expected. Check it out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=list+of+countries+with+...

Edit2: bonus feature, GPT-4 wrote me a script to plot this also, check it out: https://chat.openai.com/share/ffa45c61-8b7a-44e1-b757-041f31...

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#305

Post by sicariusnoctis »

usrbinbash wrote: post #291
sicariusnoctis wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't possible bias on the part of educated cartographers and differential geometers. It's the bias of the majority, i.e. everyone else, that matters. A vast majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.

> Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas. And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed study, or similarly supported source for this statement. Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the world.

Nearly no one inhabits Greenland and Antarctica, which might help explain why the only visible relative increase in Arctic/Antarctic nationalism comes from enthusiastic polar bears and mildly racist penguins.

I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft" sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any effects, much less design a viable study that demonstrates causation.

I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly convincing unless we lived in a universe where people told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding people in other countries?"

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#306

Post by nathan_compton »

bentley wrote: post #289
nathan_compton wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation." Most maps people are exposed to aren't being used for navigation, but for education (at least where the question of the Mercator projection is concerned). People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall? "I…

> People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall? Are world history classes favoring Mercator? Are newscasts using Mercator in background images? Are wall maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing answers!) As a kid I often encountered oval‐shaped world maps wh…

If you ask an american to imagine a world map, they are imagining the mercator projection if they can imagine anything at all.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#307

Post by bentley »

nathan_compton wrote: post #306
bentley wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall? Are world history classes favoring Mercator? Are newscasts using Mercator in background images? Are wall maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing answers!) As a kid I often encountered oval‐shaped world maps wh…

If you ask an american to imagine a world map, they are imagining the mercator projection if they can imagine anything at all.

Your “nuh‐uh” is a weak response to an American anecdote.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#308

Post by eythian »

cjfd wrote: post #259
eldaisfish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top. Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How about maps with north and south swapped?

Actually, in China I saw a map where the cut was in the Atlantic Ocean. I am not sure how wide spread that is but I would say it makes sense for any world map used in Eastern Asia.

I recall that being reasonably common in New Zealand when I was growing up.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#309

Post by nathan_compton »

bentley wrote: post #307
nathan_compton wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask an american to imagine a world map, they are imagining the mercator projection if they can imagine anything at all.

Your “nuh‐uh” is a weak response to an American anecdote.

Can't argue with that.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#310

Post by nerdbert »

kortilla wrote: post #224
XorNot wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the equator in the Mercator projection is the closest to "true size"...which means that the wealthier nations, well above that, are in fact exacerbated in apparent land mass. I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little. Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is link…

Nobody looks at a map before saying “most of the world is experiencing X”. This is a fantasy straw man.

Obviously not. And nobody said that. Talk about straw men.

People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.

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