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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.
Web Mercator is easily the most used projection, now and in all of history.
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.
> It baffles me that anyone still uses Mercator projection for any serious purpose. Tell me you've never done any serious navigation off a map or chart without telling me...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emblem_of_the_United...
Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.
I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.
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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.
No, the Mercator map has been the world map you'd see everywhere by default, and it is not that useful except for sailing, which most of us are not doing This is a correction to that.
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What are the practical uses of a world scale map beyond sailing? I mean they could be neat for visualizing some useful route calculated as vectors and further used as vectors, but it would still be of mostly an aesthetic value, appealing to the viewers emotions, which could be achieved just as well with some palm oil and sugar.
> What are the practical uses of a world scale map beyond sailing? Wow, is this even a genuine question? I can use a world scale map to illustrate or explain some geographic point I make in a presentation. I can use it as a quick reminder of the geography related to some current news, etc. If the mariners want to continue using Mercator, who's stopping them?
As far as the news usecase goes I also don't really see how checking world maps would be applicable outside the news in question being consumed as entertainment, where my previous point on entertainment boiling down to personal pleasure and being fungible still stands.
Since we are moving away from print and towards screens, shouldn't we be just using actual globes?
Yes. Specially, touch enabled screens with dynamically rendered graphics. The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great. Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!
Well better really. It is a cylindrical projection, so it's more like "Mercator before it's unrolled".
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> 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…
It aims at peace yes, but importantly it is an inter -national organisation, meaning it lives beside nations and doesn't have any formal power over them. In some cases the individual treaties negotiated at the UN result in the UN having some formal influence over member nations, but even then the concrete commitments are usually very limited. For examy the Paris agreement basically just says you have to make a few re…
But from a practical perspective you are mostly right, although i think its important not to underestimate the soft power the UN has on behind the scenes things, which people significantly under estimate.
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.
I assume the UN is a major publisher of maps, often featuring them on all sorts of pamphlets, websites, and if television is to be believed that backdrop for smoke filled meetings. It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.
Goode homolosine projection, which enjoyed some popularity in the "Space Age", deserves a mention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection
