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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

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Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#171

Post by HPsquared »

jabl wrote: post #168
edoceo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use KM? We should reduce the number of units of measure in 2026.

If you do positioning in degrees, minutes, and seconds (or decimal minutes which I guess is more common nowadays), a 'natural' length unit for navigation is a minute of longitude, which is the original definition of the nautical mile. And then we get velocity as nautical miles per hour, or knots. Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the m…

Funnily enough the metre is defined by the globe as well: the arc from the equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km. I think this might be where the alternative angle metrics came from, which went with the metre:

full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.

Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#172

Post by kuschku »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #27
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #6

Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.

I like the aesthetics of Robinson, but it gives you the worst of both worlds: it's neither conformal like Mercator nor equal-area for honest data visualization. It's essentially a spline fit over 38 arbitrary numbers chosen to look nice, whereas Equal Earth accomplishes true equal area with a clean, 4-coefficient polynomial. Equal Earth is basically Robinson with a more straightforward formula and accurate areas.

Tbh, I don't see the use case for Robinson when Winkel-Tripel exists. For almost all use cases where you need a political world map, Winkel-Tripel is the better choice.

Equal earth also has its uses, it's a neat and clean map, but has more distortion in shape, which might be undesirable.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#173

Post by goodcanadian »

Decades ago, when I was a child, I viewed the Mercator projection as old fashioned and stupid. In fact, I rarely saw it. Most maps were Robinson's projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection). It baffles me that anyone still uses Mercator projection for any serious purpose.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#174

Post by marcus_holmes »

andsoitis wrote: post #124

A more interesting change would be to flip maps “upside down”. The “north is up” convention isn’t a real thing.

I ponder whether, if the poles flipped and we survived that relatively intact, there would be a sudden enthusiasm for "South is up".

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#175

Post by marcus_holmes »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #56
tensor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.

To say that "the world agreed" on something based on a General Assembly resolution is an interesting claim, if rather bold.

Is there any other way that the world could officially agree on something?

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#176

Post by jeroenhd »

politician wrote: post #79
xyzelement wrote: post #73

As the article says, all protections have some distortions and it's just a matter of which ones you chose. It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant. On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the ma…

I'd love to hear from the folks that downvoted this carefully neutral observation.

I don't think "European children will look at the map and feel less significant" is a carefully neutral observation. It's an assumption that European children feel superiority because their country is slightly bigger.

If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.

If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#177

Post by flohofwoe »

I would really like to know which parts of the world use Mercator projection on their standard school wall maps.

At least in Germany (and both former East and West) it certainly isn't in use since at least the 1950s (and probably much earlier), but instead a projection type that maps land masses closer to their actual relative sizes. Mercator is extremely rare and only used in very specialized professional maps (e.g. for navigation), but certainly not as the popular map projection in education.

Also don't schools use physical globes anymore?

This whole drama sounds like it's about a century late to the party tbh.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#178

Post by TitaRusell »

c048 wrote: post #143
JuniperMesos wrote: post #129

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.

This was also exactly what I was taught in school when I was 10 years old. We also saw examples of other maps from other parts in the world that put their location front and center. That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.

At least they're not renaming any lakes.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#180

Post by WelkinFolk »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #179

The comments overwhelmingly say: mercator isn't really in use. So what is this weird "decolonization" push then? Virtue signalling? I see it a lot from US-based people nowadays. Seems like a weird fetish as a European.

I don't think this is a US only thing. Even in India, where I'm from, everyone I've spoken to or know tends to like this change.
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