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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

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Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#211

Post by edflsafoiewq »

flohofwoe wrote: post #200
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean Peters himself was German.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#212

Post by philipallstar »

flohofwoe wrote: post #184
WelkinFolk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Mercato…

It's from longer ago than that. There was a West Wing "big block of cheese" episode that made it out to be a white supremacy issue, when the map is really just a useful map for navigation.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#213

Post by pluc »

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.

US angry US no big

US biggest! US #1!

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#214

Post by williamdclt »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #204
pilchard123 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that isn't a change to the definition of the meter. What do you think the motivation for the constant 299,792,458 is?

> that isn't a change to the definition of the meter

How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#215

Post by RamblingCTO »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #211
flohofwoe wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I mean Peters himself was German.

But my point is the "decolonization" bit. Fine, we work towards more accurate maps. Everbody (except the US government haha) wants that I guess. It's the identity politics part that still baffles me.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#216

Post by HPsquared »

pilchard123 wrote: post #189
HPsquared wrote: post #171

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…

Yes technically speaking there is a different physical reference now but that's where it came from. A bit like how 1 ft is now 304.8mm but that's because it's the size of a human foot (with some historic details no doubt).

Etymology vs dictionary, I suppose.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#217

Post by flohofwoe »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #211
flohofwoe wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I mean Peters himself was German.

True, but he mainly seemed to have made a splash in the US with the colonialism angle. I don't think there was much of an outrage in either direction in Germany about that topic in the 1970s. I guess most people just shrugged and moved on because popular map projections already did balance relative size vs shape long before the 70s, and Peters-Gall was just a variation and not all that different to what was already established.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#218

Post by culi »

goodcanadian wrote: post #173

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.

Robinson was a pretty decent compromise map but still has significant distortion far away from the equator. It is less distorted than Mercator but still tries to present a pleasing view of the world.

Mercator is still preferred for navigation because it preserves angles (that's why Google Maps uses it). Neither Robinson nor Equal Earth are great for preserving angles.

I think it's appropriate for the United Nations to adopt a map that seeks to preserve landmass sizes over Mercator which is only useful for navigation. I think Robinson is a compromise that doesn't perfectly maintain angles nor accurately reflects sizes but lands somewhere between the two "extremes"

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#219

Post by tialaramex »

holgerschurig wrote: post #151

Weird title. Cargography constantly challenged itself. Look at some of the possible projections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface. And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.

And the article text does a pretty good job (to me as a layman who was aware Dymaxion existed but doesn't spend much time thinking about this) of illustrating, just the title seems to be for a much more reactionary nonsense article.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#220

Post by oblio »

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.

Look up status quo bias. People are very adverse to change and worse, they're very vocal about it.
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