this is the difference btw
to
What we had in school in the U.S.
The Robinson projection:
What many U.S. texts moved to after I left school.
The Winkel Triple Projection:
Apparently the Mercador map is what digital maps seem to use because the lines are 90 degrees so it makes it easier.
Great to see the United States being humiliated internationally again.
I mean it’s stupid but there’s so much more humiliation going on rn
I’m glad with all the issues on the planet, we’ve tackled this one and solved it.
Literally thinking the same thing
I wonder if some people welcome trumps threats to leave nato and the UN. How many peices of logical legislation could pass without the US blocking them.
Well, NATO isn’t about legislation so much as mutual defense. And the UN’s resolutions have as much impact as individual countries permit, in many cases.
It’s often said that the real point of the UN and the security council veto power was to offer the world’s most powerful nations a way to come to a more permanent table and disagree, instead of war being the default threat.
I’m sure that Google will quickly change their map projections from Pseudo-Mercator to Equal Earth projection as quickly as they changed the names of the bodies of water because President orange cheeto said so… right?.. Riiiight?
Web Mercator is a special kind of abomination, even down to the way the map is cropped to be exactly square. But it is probably the most suitable for navigation, as Mercator itself was designed specifically for it.
Buildings, streets and map features would be more distorted under Equal Earth projection than they already are with Web Mercator. Web Mercator also has the benefit that the cardinal directions are always straight respective to the XY grid, even though the Y direction is non linear.
There is no perfect way of flattening a 3D spheroid into a 2D map, sadly.
But at the scale of streets and building surely the type of map projections is such a mute point the earth might as well be flat.
Not actually, it depends on the projection.
The most noticeable visual distortion of a map projection at street level isn’t actually size and area, but angle. While Mercator and Web Mercator distort both size and area, angle remains the same. But projections like Equal Earth distort angle to keep area and size the same.
In practice, what this means is that with Web Mercator, you will see an intersection as 2 perpendicular lines crossing each other, leaving four 90° angles. But with Equal Earth, depending on the location, all those angles will be different, and the lines won’t be perfectly perpendicular.
(of course, Web Mercator also has this issue, because it uses a perfect sphere instead of a spheroid for the projection, but the very slight difference isn’t really noticeable, and using a spheroid is more compute-heavy)
Map navigation and satellite imagery are very specific cases where a Mercator or Mercator style projection are better suited, mainly because of the preservation of the angles. However, for any other case, Equal Earth is a very good projection, and I agree it should be used over Mercator. Especially in education.
I knew there was something amiss 😄
Well, your initial comment made you quite the hute.
It would be funny if they built their entire system on one projection.
Even Israel voted differently to the US, that’s way funnier than it should be
Magastan voted no.
I guarantee you that Donny will make a freedom correct map of the world.
Made out of “gold” and sold to the highest bidders!
yeahh I know africa is a lot bigger than we tought but what suprised me as indonesia its very big compared to old map
The United States cast the sole vote against, dismissing the initiative as part of a “radical ideological project.”
“radical” lost all meaning in the US
It has. I am just hoping that once cheeto man is out of office that life in the US can progress back to something more recognizable again.
I saw the US was against it an thought it had to be smth like this. Only americans can look at a problem like “you can’t project a 3D sphere onto a 2D plane” and think “waow this is a little too political for me” (I know I’m oversimplifying but u get the gist)
In other words, the reasons and explanations were too difficult for the American envoy to grasp.
Did the US vote no, because they are smaller on new maps?
Their stated reason boils down to “New map is woke”.
I hate this timeline.
Greenland is also much smaller in the new map. So in essence they shrunk his ambition down to the size of his little dingleberry and there was nothing he could do but whine.
Or because China looks bigger?
As I heard it, Africa is smaller on map than it should be. “It would be woke to fix that”
Even Russia’s like: sure don’t care.
I mean, the mercator map was meant for ship navigation, not as a geopolitical bat.
Exactly, which is why it really grinds my gears when people try to present the map as intentionally amplifying some countries at the expense of others. That’s not the point, it’s just a side effect of inventing the first map that could actually be used for long-distance navigation.
For the UN it makes complete sense to use a different projection.
How does an inaccurate map work in favor of long distance navigation? Genuinely curious because I fail to see any benefit.
The only advantage I see is you can read all the small countries on the map, which you may not be able to on more realistic maps.
The maps were very accurate in terms of latitude (north/south position) which meant ships could find a particular port or harbor even if they had only a rough idea of their longitude (east/west position) by sailing along the latitude lines until they hit land. How big it made a particular piece of land look was irrelevant.
It’s not well known, but maps started to become super-accurate in terms of longitude as well in the 1670s or thereabouts. Astronomers had observed that Jupiter had eclipses of its moons about a thousand times a year, and thanks to Isaac Newton and others they were able to predict the exact times (in Greenwich England) of these eclipses a few years in advance and publish them. Observers around the world with good telescopes could view these eclipses and note the time differences between their observations and the published Greenwich times and use this to precisely calculate their longitude. It was not really possible to do this reliably on board a sailing ship because of the difficulty of keeping a high-powered telescope trained on Jupiter on a pitching and rolling deck (although many attempts were made) so this led to accurate maps but still not fully accurate navigation until the perfection of ship’s clocks a century later.
The other thing is on the Mercator, if you measure from point A to point B, and it gives you a compass heading, this is the correct compass heading to use to navigate to point B from point A. This is not true unless a map is designed for this purpose.
It won’t necessarily be the shortest distance – to plot that out, it is best to use a globe and chart the arc of a great circle path, which is a straight line on the curved surface of the earth. But that path will have the compass changing all the time.
If you are navigating by compass, which ships and airplanes had to do more often way back when, the mercator was great.
Posting for the benefit of @[email protected] and anyone else who didn’t know.
Thanks a lot for the explanation. I had no idea, but now with that knowledge it’s quite obvious why and how it works with that kind of map.
Moral of the story: pretty much every decision is made for logical reasons. Sometimes the reasons are unclear, motivations are selfish, or circumstances later change such that the decision is no longer sound, but it’s very rare that “they’re just stupid” is the cause.
Didn’t think so, I just didn’t knew the reason. Therefore I asked.
Now I’m annoyed that I got downvoted for asking at all. What’s the moral there? Don’t ask questions?
The map is extremely accurate in the sense that a course plotted on the map can be followed by following a compass course. The same does not apply for earlier maps, or by far most modern maps that are designed to match real-world sizes.
The reason the Mercator projection became the standard is that it was, for a long time, the only map you could use to safely navigate long distances, especially across oceans.
Maybe the US has a broken voting button, they would want to click “yes”, but it ends up as “no” every time.
/s
They probably tried to mail in their vote, but it got stuck at USPS because of a botched bar code.
They, like clockwork, vote against everything. They were one of maybe 3 countries that voted no that water is a human right.
They’re just a contrarian nation.
Why the us voted against? In the new map they look bigger than Canada, it should appease the baby in command.
They don’t want Trump to see how small Greenland actually is. I think he reckons it’s about half the size of the United States because he’s an idiot. Not that this map projection is at all new, or has been a secret or anything, but trump isn’t exactly the investigating type and so he probably hasn’t seen it before, but if the information is shoved in his face he might become upset.
