The UN challenges five centuries of cartography • Hacker News Board

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#181

Post by flohofwoe » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 8:56 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #174

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".

AFAIK in the past there were all sorts of 'up' conventions, for instance medieval European maps sometimes put East up, because Jerusalem is in the East.

Ancient mediterranean maps often were South up, as well as maps of Islamic cartoghraphers.

There were also Roman road maps which were entirely schematic, more like our modern public transport maps (e.g. such maps only cared about how locations were connected by roads and their distances, but not about any geographical mapping)

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#182

Post by adwn » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #157

JdeBP wrote: post #59

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro ), and it does not. And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion. Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter t…

The standard Dymaxion projection centers on the North Pole, which doesn’t address the whole issue of favoring the northern hemisphere.

Both the world's population (with 88% to 12%) and landmass (with 68% to 32%) favor the northern hemisphere, so it makes sense to favor it in a general map as well.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#183

Post by SiempreViernes » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

sgc wrote: post #75

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.

One can still note a poor decision based on its merits. An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not. Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1],…

No, the resolution doesn't include a map, it's purely about which projection to use so obviously it doesn't mention any land borders.

As best I can tell the Ukrainian ambassador saw the example map made by the Equal Earth creator in 2014 with its somewhat questionable choice in colouring Crimea and saw an opportunity for virtue signalling. Or maybe he really thought the vote was about that specific political map from 2014.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#184

Post by flohofwoe » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

WelkinFolk wrote: post #180

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.

Yeah but does the Indian education system actually use Mercator projection on their wall maps and geography learning material? E.g. how much is the average Indian citizen actually confronted with highly distorted map projections in their daily life (unless their professional job is involved with navigating ships of course where Mercator projections makes sense).

From my side of the world (Europe), this whole "Mercator projection is associated with colonialism" drama seems to have originated a couple of years ago in the US and was mostly amplified by artificial social media outrage.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#185

Post by XorNot » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

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.

I mean it also accurately depicts relative land mass sizes? For the purposes of the UN that seems fairly relevant compared to Mercator which is a good map if you're actually navigating a coast line but atrocious if you're trying to gauge how big the territory you're talking about actually is.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#186

Post by edflsafoiewq » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

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.

The article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#187

Post by edflsafoiewq » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #78

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

The projection you see with your eyes is actually not that great in a sense. You can only see half of the world at a time and it's quite distorted as you move towards the edge. Also on a computer you should be able to "spin" any map projection, not just a globe.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#188

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:16 AM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #157

JdeBP wrote: post #59

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro ), and it does not. And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion. Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter t…

The standard Dymaxion projection centers on the North Pole, which doesn’t address the whole issue of favoring the northern hemisphere.

How australians see it? Is north up or bottom?

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#189

Post by pilchard123 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:16 AM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #171

jabl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Originally it was defined like that, but it was fairly quickly redefined as the distance between marks on a prototype platinum bar. It's had a couple of other definitions since then, but it's currently defined "by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit ms⁻¹, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs".

https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/metre

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#190

Post by whatsThisBtn4 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

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.

Yep.

The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.

That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.

K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."