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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

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191–200 of 324 posts

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#191

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.

I would expect that most people have seen a globe at least once in their life though? ;)

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#192
> Mercator is the most-widely used projection (Google Maps uses it, for one), but it was created in 1569 during the age of exploration. It's mostly good for sea navigation. Any straight line drawn on the map represents a constant compass bearing.

It's also good for knowing how much daylight you get somewhere or whether someone there is likely to be awake right now.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#193
post #185
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#196
I wonder how many people can reliably identify a Mercator projection when they see a map. My personal belief is that many people think map they have seen are Mercator projections when they are not and that "Mercator" is for most a synonym with "the normal world map I am used to", even though it (likely?) isn't.

Based on some quick search the atlas I used in school in Germany mostly used winkel-tripel projection (or the eckert IV). Does my memory remember the map accurate enough to determine that now? Hell no.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#198
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…

I really like oblique projections. Have you seen this neat one from Kerkovits - A Low-Distortion Oblique Map Projection of the World’s Landmasses (2024)?

https://files.catbox.moe/k11gqq.avif

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#199
Google maps solves this neatly by just projecting the world map on a sphere when you zoom out. On desktop at least. It seems on mobile they use a 2D Mercator projection. But they just don't allow you to zoom out all the way, which is a bit weird. At least on my Pixel phone.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#200

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.

...which seems to have been an entirely US-centric debate (especially when it was brought up again in the late 2010s), which explains why Europeans seem kinda baffled by the discussion. But projections that preserve size much better than Mercator were common in education systems outside the US long before the 1970s - mostly a projection closer to Robinson which is a compromise between preserving relative size without distorting shape too much, while still mapped on a common (but not rectangular) 2D area.
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