201–210 of 324 posts
This explains why the UN is making such an otherwise stupid resolution from a mathematical point of view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you. > it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically. That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fi…
> The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense. They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things…
In contrast the EU is (partially) a supernational organisation: in some fields the EU holds formal power over what happens in the member nations (because the member nations changed their national law to give EU that power).
We are in 2026: why not a rotating globe?
(I.e., all the webpages with a rotating globe with "News" spelled around it in the fashion of the animated Universal logo, embedded as an animated GIF [GIF89a].)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.or…
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.
Don't worry; Americans assume as a matter of course that England includes Scotland. Your internal political divisions are of interest only to you.
The widget also appears to include Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, Americans probably wouldn't expect.
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who wer…
The causality you gloss over seems to be more important than the causality you'd like us to focus on. The ships came first.
Empire -> need for chronometers -> chronometers.
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who wer…
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner:
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…
Goode homolosine projection, which enjoyed some popularity in the "Space Age", deserves a mention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection