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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

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Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#301

Post by qlte »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #7
AlexandrB wrote: post #3

What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically. My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorph…

> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically. This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Af…

Same, I'm also just barely old enough that a lot of the wall maps in elementary school were from the Cold War and remember thinking the USSR was like 1/4 the world's surface area thanks to the Mercator projection.

My teachers had to remind students so many times that the size for Greenland was just way off but it was hard for that to sink in for a kid used to seeing it every single day.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#302

Post by simonra »

prmph wrote: post #294
simonra wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain unconvinced. Even with regional maps people struggle with conceptualising that similar distances at places even relatively close can vary dramatically in time needed to traverse, or with regard to energy/fuel cost to cover, or population density, or a number of things that are important in the moment. It would be extremely hard to use a world scale map to convey actionable information that couldn't be delive…

I really do not see any proper argument you are making here. > their (almost certainly wrong) intuition So because some people can't use some information well, we should deny that information to all? > I also don't really see how checking world maps would be applicable outside the news in question being consumed as entertainment, Is this even an argument? I do not consume news purely for entertainment, neither do tho…

> So because some people can't use some information well, we should deny that information to all?

The argument isn't that using information is bad, it's that world scale maps are so shit at conveying usable information that there is no point in picking one projection over another (or any really) outside niche settings like sailing. Better to just use other non-map representations of the relevant information at that point.

> I do not consume news purely for entertainment, neither do those in my circle

Here my point was not that all news is entertainment, but rather that news one needs to reference a world scale map to make sense of in all likelihood isn't impacting anywhere near where one is living, nor near anyone amongst family or friends living abroad (hopefully one would remember the closest relevant neighbours), so those pieces are basically entertainment for the masses. (The assumption being that local impact to where the media is would be what's highlighted if there is some, hence the non-need for checking world scale maps in the event that the piece of news is impactful to the individual. So the pieces one feels like checking where on the globe are actually happening, one is in all likelihood checking because one is personally amused by finding out, not because it is useful beyond emotional gratification. And again no projections one could choose from would change the non-impact on the actions/decisions of the consumer of that piece of news.)

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#304

Post by thaumasiotes »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #257
flohofwoe wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was taught somewhere along the way that the term "Orient" for the East comes from the idea that maps were once oriented in that direction.

Put it out of your mind. The term "Orient" comes from the fact that the sun rises in the East; the Latin word (oriens) literally means "rising".

This is also why the contrasting term is "Occident" (meaning "falling"), but that word is less well known today.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#305

Post by marcus_holmes »

graemep wrote: post #205
marcus_holmes wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, if virtually all countries sign a treaty.

Right. Isn't this just a more efficient version of that?

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#306

Post by hn993302 »

josephcsible wrote: post #102
hn993302 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides size, there's distance. Like it's annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are, and every sea/air route appears to not take the shortest path. I'd be fine with this change if it weren't about trying to make Africa look more important. They're just fixing a misleading map.

Equal area projections don't preserve distance.

Yeah but it's a lot less bad than how distances look on Mercator

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#307

Post by hn993302 »

dnautics wrote: post #103
hn993302 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casually looking at a map to understand relatively how far away things are from each other

Unless your eye can casually assemble great circle routes it's hopeless on any projection except the radial one (and then only for routes emanating from one spot)

Nobody is looking for exactness here

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#308

Post by hn993302 »

Muromec wrote: post #40
dgellow wrote: post #4

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. It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for .

Huh, I didn't know it was actually used, but apparently they did it a few times like the Gulf War

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#309

Post by respectattentio »

Rubberducky1324 wrote: post #279
respectattentio wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How it is not a mistake? Because as you see, old map is everywhere and is used for everything. Just open Google Maps and see. It's not fair to make a false map a standard being used for everything.

The Mercator projection is not a mistake at all, it just chooses trade-offs when mapping a 3D sphere to a 2D plane that are relevant for marine navigation (preserving angles and directions, but not sizes for example). So if you want to do marine navigation, it's a good choice (no mistake). I can imagine it's not the best choice for things like Google Maps and learning maps in school, so the choice for Mercator could…

I didn't meant it is a mistake as a projection but as a choice adopted for everywhere you look.

Re: The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

#310

Post by watwut »

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 yes, the countries demanding the change want the change for political reasons. They pushed for it hard.

And they are from "other parts of world" namely Afrika. The only country that objectrd, for purely culture war reasons was Amerika.

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