The sad thing is that the set of countries is always the same.
Mercator Puzzle
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#62Does anyone know why Google insists on Mercator projection? I guess that it makes the implementation bit simpler, but on the other hand you'd imagine that if anyone then Google would have the resources to use some more reasonable projection for greater good.
The thing is, Mercator was never actually intended to be used as a map, per se. What it was supposed to be used for was a navigation chart, and it's extremely useful in that context: straight lines on the map correspond to straight lines in the real world, the compass directions are the same no matter where you look, and so on. Other projections distort these things, and there can be good reasons to do that depending…
Unless you want to find a straight line (great circle) between two distant points.
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#63When this first came around, I was surprised how big Greenland is after all. It's not a small island, it's as big as the entire US East Coast.
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#64Slight bug: if you bring the piece low enough, the color invert.
That's quite amusing. I see the problem: when the shape distorts enough to connect its boundaries across the south pole, the outside becomes the inside.
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#65There's a touch issue:
When you successfully match a country, the shape turns green. However you can move the shape once out of its position. It remains green after the move but you can't move it again (future attempts to move the green item are treated as panning the map)
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#66I'm partially ashamed to admit that I got all of them but one: a piece that had straight eastern and southern sides. It looked like a Canadian or Australian state/territory (large and having flat edges), but I couldn't place it. Also I had a hard time placing Brazil.
It was Mauritania. But I also zoomed in after like half of them so that's kinda cheating.
Meh, if the map supports zooming, I don't consider it cheating. I didn't even try to zoom, but I'd have used zoom had I been aware. Now the guy above that looked at the page source-- he's cheating. ;-)
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, Mercator was never actually intended to be used as a map, per se. What it was supposed to be used for was a navigation chart, and it's extremely useful in that context: straight lines on the map correspond to straight lines in the real world, the compass directions are the same no matter where you look, and so on. Other projections distort these things, and there can be good reasons to do that depending…
Unless you want to find a straight line (great circle) between two distant points.
Yes, you are correct, however that's a different sort of straight line: it is the shortest distance between two points, but it isn't the most easily navigable line. The navigable ones are lines of constant bearing, since a ship could/can set their compass and make adjustments to hold it "straight" rather than having to do the computations required to follow a great circle.
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#68I like that the piece for Australia starts above Greenland. That really puts everything into perspective right away.
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#69And I was reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuZYhFtSZsY
@puzzle: great idea!
Re: Mercator Puzzle
#70It's crazy how much Mercator distorts the globe. I was playing around with various map projections via WebGL shaders [1] and the size problems really stand out when the map is recentered. With modern digital maps, we should really stop using old projections that were designed to work on limited paper maps. [1] http://sxp.me/maps/ (Select equirectangular as the projection and drag the crosshairs to recenter.)
It's not really that it's old and out of date; it makes a different set of tradeoffs to other projections, and so typically looks better over small areas but isn't appropriate for a world map since the distortion becomes extreme near the poles.
This. There are a couple of different things people use maps for, but the biggest two are finding out where things are and figuring out routes between two things. Mercator throws the needle all the way toward finding routes between two things, and it is very, very good at that, but this comes at the expense of distorting exact locations and sizes of things.
Perhaps a compromise is possible, whereby Mercator is used when plotting routes between things but some other projection is used when you're looking for isolated points. Let each projection do what it does best.