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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

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Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#121

Post by brainwad »

exabrial wrote: post #106
bawolff wrote: post #83

I feel like people are making more of a fuss about this then it is. The UNGA isn't a body that controls what maps its member states use. They can make the recommendation of course, but it has yet to be seen if anyone follows it.

Yeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article: > Mercator useful for sailing This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the r…

Mercator is also useful for tiled maps, which is why web Mercator is a standard. The tiles always have nice north/south and east/west bounds and there is no difference in rendering depending on longitude or latitude. For software maps the better approach, as done by Google, is just to postprocess the Mercator tiles into a sphere at rendering time if the user is zoomed out enough.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#122

Post by holgerschurig »

alehlopeh wrote: post #105

Calling it Equal Earth was a bad move. The word “equal” has tons of baggage. Why not call it something less incendiary like Actual Earth or something? What ever happened to being pragmatic?

That's such a weird statement.

The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.

I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.

Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!

Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".

Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#123

Post by t-3 »

decimalenough wrote: post #92
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridians The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.

Don't give Trump any ideas.

The Meridian of America... coming soon on a limited edition Golden Map of America.

Featuring all 244 American States!

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#125

Post by holgerschurig »

exabrial wrote: post #106
bawolff wrote: post #83

I feel like people are making more of a fuss about this then it is. The UNGA isn't a body that controls what maps its member states use. They can make the recommendation of course, but it has yet to be seen if anyone follows it.

Yeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article: > Mercator useful for sailing This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the r…

> Mercator useful for sailing+

It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...

While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.

It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#126

Post by holgerschurig »

petermcneeley wrote: post #116

Ya people have no idea how big Africa truly is Here is the UK in Africa: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTAyODQ3Nzg.NTkyNDI2Nw*... Note of course this includes Scotland! The traditional English are basically a dot.

And people have no idea how diverse the cultures in Africa are.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#128

Post by cineticdaffodil »

holgerschurig wrote: post #126
petermcneeley wrote: post #116

Ya people have no idea how big Africa truly is Here is the UK in Africa: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTAyODQ3Nzg.NTkyNDI2Nw*... Note of course this includes Scotland! The traditional English are basically a dot.

And people have no idea how diverse the cultures in Africa are.

[dead]

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#129

Post by JuniperMesos »

I never had the impression that the Mercator projection, or indeed any particular world map projection out of the dozens in common use, had any kind of official status that needed to be removed. It seems obvious to me that different map projections have different tradeoffs, and that any particular publisher of a world map can and does use whichever one makes sense for the information they're trying to convey.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#130

Post by scotty79 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #111
scotty79 wrote: post #78

Since we are moving away from print and towards screens, shouldn't we be just using actual globes?

Yes. Specially, touch enabled screens with dynamically rendered graphics. The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great. Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!

Damn, I knew I've seen google maps going to globe after zooming out, but when I checked today it didn't. I wonder why they rolled that back.

Fortunately Google Earth is still a sphere not a cyllinder.

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