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Maps distort how we see the world

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#311

Post by nerdbert »

thrashh wrote: post #111
eddythompson80 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! That's the point of the post. The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small cohorts because th…

People have a problem with this post and these kind of posts because they imply it was deliberately done for evil reasons. The point of any article isn't just its factual content; it's the hidden message from the way it's said. I don't know if you intended to say it the way you did when you started off with the comment about poverty in the first two sentences, but by doing so, you set the tone for the rest of your ar…

It's unlikely that it was deliberately done for evil reasons.

However it contributes to a misunderstanding that may in some way favor richer countries, and that could be a reason why nobody's trying very hard to focus kids' exposure on more accurate maps.

The mechanism I'm alluding to is a sense that "this place is very big, and so it's reasonable that it controls more than other places." It's not a highly-developed intellectual analysis, but more of a gut-level conception that informs casual interpretation of news and events.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#312

Post by mcv »

defrost wrote: post #303
mcv wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poly…

You're right. For local navigation, local projections are of course best. I was stuck on the unspoken assumption of using a global map projection. When dealing with local maps, there's absolutely no reason to do that.

But those local map projections only work for that region. As soon as you want seamless transitions to other regions, these local projections don't work so well anymore.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#313

Post by [deleted] »

dwaltrip wrote: post #304
zimpenfish wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 queri…

[deleted]

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#314

Post by p0pcult »

coldtea wrote: post #295
usrbinbash wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows their countries bigger than they are, so... So what? Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican Coalition are benign emperors :D

> Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources. Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity. This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than th…

[dead]

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#315

Post by lucb1e »

messe wrote: post #293
lucb1e wrote: post #292

Regarding "How would fish draw a map?" (image: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... since there's no heading to link to) Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article described ho…

You've linked the wrong image (off by one); that one is the sarcastic depiction of the “international community”.

Oh crap, thanks for letting me know. Didn't see it in time for the edit window though :( if only HN had notifications or just lets you edit, y'know, your own posts

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#316

Post by bit_flipper »

rocqua wrote: post #236
bit_flipper wrote: post #82

This article doesn't touch on the actual reasons why Mercator is still in widespread use: * It was the first widespread projection because of its practical use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something considered somewhat…

No map shown to a driver at the detail level of navigating intersections should have to care about projections much. At that small a scale earth is approximately flat, and any half decent projection should have minimal distortions of any kind.

You can read about why projections still very much matter for large scale (which is what I think you meant; small scale would be something that shows you whole countries and not used for road navigation) maps in the article I linked. Google Maps tried out an alternative projection back when it was still Keyhole and ran into problems with angular distortion when zoomed in. The original post is sadly lost to Google shutting down their product forums, but here's a quote from a Google Maps engineer on their use of Mercator and why it matters:

The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While [Mercator] distorts a “zoomed-out view” of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc… so we’re sticking with this projection for now.

Sourced from https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/map-and-reality-distort..., but there are other citations of the same quote as well.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#317

Post by bagacrap »

anikan_vader wrote: post #222
bagacrap wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the claim was that the global poor are close to the equator. Given how little motivation I have to even move when it's very hot, and how moving is required to generate wealth, and how recently A/C was invented, it's probably not totally a coincidence. But yea Mercator isn't the problem.

I mean it’s pretty easily explained by the Industrial Revolution starting in Europe, which is very far north. The explanation that heat induces laziness is a bit suspect given that in older eras many of the most prosperous civilizations were near the equator. (Egypt, Sumeria, the Persians, Indus River Valley Civilizations, etc.)

I don't really know how to compare the prosperity of ancient Sumeria and Denmark, but ancient Rome did conquer ancient Egypt and the reverse never happened.

The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get more data unfortunately.

After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global superpower.

Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to have done better at progress and wealth as compared to Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done well lately, but maybe because of a/c - https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#318

Post by jgeada »

dwaltrip wrote: post #304
zimpenfish wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 queri…

Seriously, a loglog plot? Even in that, there is a seriously wide dispersion to your correlation. And then look at the same data on a linear plot.

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#319

Post by dwaltrip »

jgeada wrote: post #318
dwaltrip wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 queri…

Seriously, a loglog plot? Even in that, there is a seriously wide dispersion to your correlation. And then look at the same data on a linear plot.

The linear plot in that Wolfram link is messed up. It doesn't show all the data (caps out at 800 billion GDP). Here's a corrected linear plot, from the script that I linked (commenting out the log-log scaling):

https://ibb.co/9bBgwH8

There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a little messy, but it's undeniably there.

The starting point for this discussion was about the relationship between a country's size and population and it's power and influence. The correlation between area and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful relationship.

Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize any patterns on a linear plot.

I also don't understand your point about the dispersion. The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said the correlation was 99%.

Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...

Re: Maps distort how we see the world

#320

Post by awongh »

adammarples wrote: post #281
awongh wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you actually stated the problem but then glossed over it. Mercator is UX optimized for naval navigation . Besides street navigation (where projection is irrelevant) I would posit that most people use maps for human geography reasons- what countries are next to Senegal, what kind of border does Thailand have with Malaysia, etc. In the use case of understanding geopolitical borders Mercator isn’t optimized…

Well, what do you mean, the "accuracy" of political borders? Again, they're all inaccurate, just in different ways. Are you optimizing for length of border, or curvature, or orientation? Better nearer or further from the pole? Arguably there are far more borders nearer the equator than far from it, Africa has hundreds. And the Mercator projection does pretty much the best job at representing political borders length…

I’m thinking about accuracy when looking at google maps.

So do you mean that the length and orientation of the borders is the least distorted with the Mercator projection?

I’m actually not sure how a different projection would distort a country’s border. But for example I’m not putting a ruler against my screen and I don’t know if I need to know if a border is oriented North or not.

Mostly my point is, are we rendering maps for real users’ use cases or backwards rationalizing the status quo? Besides the level of effort that would be involved in changing it, can’t think of any real defense of the use Mercator projection itself in its current context.

Some other comments references street maps that are grids, so a non-mercator projection would bend a grid of streets- this makes sense- but again, the main critique is around the relative size of countries- i.e. the look of the map tiles only when zoomed out sufficiently far. Maybe this is the main UX hurdle- in google maps to change the projection above some level of zoom.

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