Yeah. Frakking "Peters" (sic) projection. It's Gall-Peters, and it's still terrible.
By the way, most online maps (such as Google Maps) use a variant of Mercator, because otherwise shapes and north-south vs east-west distances (when you're zoomed in) are highly distorted.
I think Mercator and Gall-Peters type projections are both just about equally as bad for global views. Africa and other equatorial areas are heavily distorted whereas mid-latitude areas are fairly accurate, so it's just as US/Eurocentric as Mercator.
The projections which compromise shape distortion and size distortion are pretty good, like Winkel-Tripel. I think I prefer the projections that preserve both shape and size while ripping the map along oceans. Like Dymaxion.
I have one of these. They are great for just leaving lying around the living room always to hand. No need to worry about it breaking. Easy to quickly grap when the topic of other countries come up with my daughter. Useful when we need a kick about too!
Azimuthal equidistant projections are really something else, especially in this globalized age of air travel. For example, did you know Sydney, Seattle, and Rio de Janeiro are all about 12000 km from Dubai in three different, but beautifully evenly spaced directions [1]?
And that plotting the different combinations of these city pairs from Seattle [2], Sydney [3], and Rio [4] gets almost the same result, except that the shortest distance between Australia and South America is about 1500 km longer and crosses over Antarctica?
In other words, Dubai, Seattle, Sydney, and Rio are approximately the vertices of a regular tetrahedron on the surface of the earth (with the Rio to Sydney edge being a bit longer than the others).
It would be interesting (although entirely useless) to know if there are other quartets of cities like that. It seems like it would be hard enough to find four equidistant points on the surface of the earth that are all on land...
Michigan artist David Barr (1940-2015) created the 'Four Corners Project' [1] exhibited at the Smithsonian, where he inscribed a regular tetrahedron into a transparent globe. In choosing his points, he used his personal criteria:
1: Each of the 4 areas needed to be untouched by western technology
2: One of the points had to be on Easter Island
3: Each of the 4 positions needed to be on land
His effort was written about in a 1982 issue of InfoWorld magazine [2], and the mathematical background is fascinatingly detailed in the paper 'Mathematical Geography and Global Art: The Mathematics of David Barr's "Four Corners Project"' by Sandra L. Arlinghaus and John D. Nystuen [3].
On a different website, Sandra Arlinghaus further details [4] David Barr and John D. Nystuen's math and even includes a link to a still-working .kml generator for Google Earth [5] that can be used to help with this task.
A friend, who knows more about aviation than me, once told me that Dubai is a great location to build up an airline hub which could provide non-stop flights to every major airport. I was now wondering whether Seattle, Rio and Sydney would also make good locations.
I checked, and there actually exist non-stop flights from Dubai to the other locations, but I was not able to find non-stop flights between Seattle-Rio, Sydney-Rio or Seattle-Sydney. Funny.
It is however a bit ironic, that there are 12.000 km non-stop flights (or even farther to Auckland for example) from Dubai, but you cannot fly 2133 km non-stop to Tel Aviv.
In practice, Seattle's location in one particular corner of the continental US, anchoring a metropolitan area that's "only" 13th in population (by CSA), and not possessing a significantly populated catchment hinterland means that it's heavily disadvantaged to the gain of LAX and SFO, which are frequently "close enough", but serve much larger metropolitan areas.
In the US, where most passenger traffic is domestic, this works out to LAX or SFO being the first choice for a benefit-maximizing west coast hub. Nearby Vancouver in Canada essentially acts as Canada's LAX, so the advantages are multiplied for them -- but Canada's smaller domestic population means the numbers are correspondingly scaled down.
The US' large domestic aviation market also means that flyers quite expect to be flown to a directional hub that serves flights to a particular part of the world first. Towards Brazil, this is often a big hub on the Atlantic seaboard: Miami, New York, Atlanta, or Houston. [1] In Brazil, the primary international airport is GRU out of São Paulo, instead of Rio. They're less than 350 km apart. You'll probably find direct flights to GRU instead. Quantas flies from Sydney to Santiago, which is a comparable distance to GRU but doesn't need to reach as southerly of a latitude.
Plotting distances from a "typical" busy continental European airport like Paris to major hubs in the US, it can be seen [2] that it's advantageous to "collect" passengers towards busy Chicago and New York, utilizing spare domestic capacity to shorten the international leg: Seattle's positioning is awkward here.
Flying from the US to a busy Asia/Pacific destination like Hong Kong, Seattle is oriented favorably [3] to catch some traffic from the middle of the US and serve as a directional hub, but still has to compete with LAX and SFO.
Flying from Sydney to the US, LAX and SFO are the closest, and the entire country lies conveniently behind them [4].
I realize I actually know very little about the political process in China
are there regular elections there? what are they voting on? I perceive that you're not voting for any politicians from opposition parties to the official communist party, am I wrong? are you voting on who gets to control the party apparatus within the communist party? who is that vote actually open to?
They elect congress members, but there's only one party.
There's more than a billion people in China. If 10% of them turn out to vote, then that's already more than the turnout for the 2016 presidential election.
Local people's congresses are directly elected. Higher levels up to the National People's Congress, are indirectly elected by the level below.
So imagine you vote for town council. The town councils in your county elect a county council, the county councils elect a state legislature, and the state legislatures elect Congress.
Elections for local people's congress are - for China - fairly open. There are 50-100% more candidates than seats. But candidates are in practice only nominated by the CP and related organizations. But the point is, you can choose between a couple of alternative CP picks, rather than having a single CP pick imposed upon you. A little bit like elections in Iran, I guess. That's not wide open elections like in the West, but it's not nothing.
Elections are more centrally controlled the higher up in the hierarchy you go, but there is always some wiggle room.
I thought this made for a really good example of how cartograms could be incredibly misleading depending on the underlying data you pick. If you didn't know what was going on, you'd probably look at that map and think, wow, China is so democratic! But of course it's a one-party system and people are only voting for limited choices within that party at a very low level, so, not so much.
I also can't tell if the map is supposed to illustrate turnout as a percentage or as an absolute number. The wording ("Territory size shows the estimated proportion of all people who voted in elections between 1945 and 1998 who voted there.") suggests the former, but the actual sizes on the map appear to be the latter, which makes it nearly indistinguishable from the population cartogram: http://worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=2
any title with the word 'change' in it suggesting that after reading the article is going to have a marked impact on my life usually has the direct opposite effect. I thought a clickbait wasn't really a thing on HN?
That would still hold true in an east-up map.. We are projecting out of the plane of the map when we stand up/walk..
Separate note - while i get that north-up is just a convention and a mental construct, the south-up map really threw me off. As i was staring into the map, I felt the urge to turn my monitor around and had the same visceral need to set things right as i would upside down on a roller-coaster. This caught me completely by surprise because i was expecting to just make a mental note that this was a new convention i could get used to. Instead i "felt" uncomfortable - did this happen to anyone else?
I'll agree that the rotational axis of a planet is relevant to the projection of a map. There is no "East pole", and it makes sense to give special significance to the North and South directions.
A transverse map projection [1] doesn't make much sense as a default. The linked image shows the lines of longitude severely distorted, and a compass rose would not make sense on this map. There is a real, physical reason why north and south should be at opposing edges of the map.
But it's perfectly reasonable to rotate a map by 90 or 270 degrees - nothing about the "way planets work" implies that you need to orient the map in this direction when raising it from a horizontal plane to a vertical wall.
If anything, the reason would be that the circumference of the equator is twice the distance between the poles, and human eyes are better suited for panning in the horizontal.
All of these articles imply that Mercator projection is widely used at least somewhere. Is it true though? In Ex-USSR majority of maps are(were) proportional, probably Robinson projection, in schools and in daily life.
And using something like Gall-Peters for an online map would be absolutely terrible except for mid-latitude countries (like North America). On a zoomable map, it's important to keep relative north-south and east-west distances very close to the same when zoomed in.
Seems to me that online maps should render the Earth as a sphere (or, heck, a properly shaped spheroid) centered on the viewport, where scrolling around rotates the sphere. This will look flat when zoomed in, will look accurate when zoomed out, and won't have any weird distortions of area or direction. I'm sure Google Maps didn't do it this way originally because it wasn't feasible when your minimum target was IE5 running on Windows 98, or whatever, but it surely could be done now.
I think it's best not to do it as a sphere as you suggest, as that would make it not feasible to use on low resource devices. Also, wouldn't work as well with the tiling approach.
> Why does Google maps use the inaccurate, ancient and distorted Mercator Projection?
> Maps uses Mercator because it preserves angles. The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While this distorts a 'zoomed-out view' of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc... so we're sticking with this projection for now.
Eh, too much talk about how map projections are the tools of the evil colonialists/developed nations. The Mercator projection became widespread because "of its ability to represent lines of constant course as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians", not because it exaggerates areas towards the poles for political European supremacy reasons. North is consistently depicted as up (not only in European maps but around the world) probably because the stars including the north star Polaris are "up" from our point of view. Maps are centered in the GMT meridian because the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on earth and thus the most logical point for the break.
No need to make everything a struggle about "race". Make scientific arguments or credible social arguments, but don't just assume off the bat everything is "problematic" and make even patently scientific decisions attributable to malice and oppression. It doesn't help.
I concur. Of the maps proposed, other than maybe the Peter's projection version, i don't see any practical value for wide option of any of the other maps. Peter's projection is interesting because it correctly depicts the relative sizes of nations and gives better perspective to things most people think about (for example, how large Africa really is). Reading too much into things like the grand meridian was chosen because of colonial supremacy is pointless. Yes sure it was, but it works and the cost to switch is too high. Any other arbitrary place we choose as reference will have the same problems in the future.
Boston public schools recently announced that they will shift to using world maps based on the Peters projection,
Why not teach them both maps, or, rather, teach them that it's hard to represent the world in 2D space. O.o get them looking at maps from all angles and configurations.
47 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
By the way, most online maps (such as Google Maps) use a variant of Mercator, because otherwise shapes and north-south vs east-west distances (when you're zoomed in) are highly distorted.
I think Mercator and Gall-Peters type projections are both just about equally as bad for global views. Africa and other equatorial areas are heavily distorted whereas mid-latitude areas are fairly accurate, so it's just as US/Eurocentric as Mercator.
The projections which compromise shape distortion and size distortion are pretty good, like Winkel-Tripel. I think I prefer the projections that preserve both shape and size while ripping the map along oceans. Like Dymaxion.
And that plotting the different combinations of these city pairs from Seattle [2], Sydney [3], and Rio [4] gets almost the same result, except that the shortest distance between Australia and South America is about 1500 km longer and crosses over Antarctica?
[1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DXB-SYD%0D%0ADXB-SEA%0D%0ADXB-G... [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-SYD%0D%0ASEA-DXB%0D%0ASEA-G... [3] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-SEA%0D%0ASYD-DXB%0D%0ASYD-G... [4] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GIG-SEA%0D%0AGIG-DXB%0D%0AGIG-S...
It would be interesting (although entirely useless) to know if there are other quartets of cities like that. It seems like it would be hard enough to find four equidistant points on the surface of the earth that are all on land...
1: Each of the 4 areas needed to be untouched by western technology
2: One of the points had to be on Easter Island
3: Each of the 4 positions needed to be on land
His effort was written about in a 1982 issue of InfoWorld magazine [2], and the mathematical background is fascinatingly detailed in the paper 'Mathematical Geography and Global Art: The Mathematics of David Barr's "Four Corners Project"' by Sandra L. Arlinghaus and John D. Nystuen [3].
On a different website, Sandra Arlinghaus further details [4] David Barr and John D. Nystuen's math and even includes a link to a still-working .kml generator for Google Earth [5] that can be used to help with this task.
[1] http://boingboing.net/2016/03/29/the-amazing-4-corners-proje... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=DjAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=P... [3] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/monog01/fullte... [4] http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.ht... [5] http://montalk.net/coordinates.htm
I checked, and there actually exist non-stop flights from Dubai to the other locations, but I was not able to find non-stop flights between Seattle-Rio, Sydney-Rio or Seattle-Sydney. Funny.
It is however a bit ironic, that there are 12.000 km non-stop flights (or even farther to Auckland for example) from Dubai, but you cannot fly 2133 km non-stop to Tel Aviv.
In the US, where most passenger traffic is domestic, this works out to LAX or SFO being the first choice for a benefit-maximizing west coast hub. Nearby Vancouver in Canada essentially acts as Canada's LAX, so the advantages are multiplied for them -- but Canada's smaller domestic population means the numbers are correspondingly scaled down.
The US' large domestic aviation market also means that flyers quite expect to be flown to a directional hub that serves flights to a particular part of the world first. Towards Brazil, this is often a big hub on the Atlantic seaboard: Miami, New York, Atlanta, or Houston. [1] In Brazil, the primary international airport is GRU out of São Paulo, instead of Rio. They're less than 350 km apart. You'll probably find direct flights to GRU instead. Quantas flies from Sydney to Santiago, which is a comparable distance to GRU but doesn't need to reach as southerly of a latitude.
Plotting distances from a "typical" busy continental European airport like Paris to major hubs in the US, it can be seen [2] that it's advantageous to "collect" passengers towards busy Chicago and New York, utilizing spare domestic capacity to shorten the international leg: Seattle's positioning is awkward here.
Flying from the US to a busy Asia/Pacific destination like Hong Kong, Seattle is oriented favorably [3] to catch some traffic from the middle of the US and serve as a directional hub, but still has to compete with LAX and SFO.
Flying from Sydney to the US, LAX and SFO are the closest, and the entire country lies conveniently behind them [4].
[1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GRU-MIA%0D%0AGRU-JFK%0D%0AGRU-H... [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CDG-JFK%0D%0ACDG-ORD%0D%0ACDG-A... [3] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=HKG-SEA%0D%0AHKG-LAX%0D%0AHKG-S... [4] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-DXB%0D%0ASYD-HKG%0D%0ASYD-L...
I realize I actually know very little about the political process in China
are there regular elections there? what are they voting on? I perceive that you're not voting for any politicians from opposition parties to the official communist party, am I wrong? are you voting on who gets to control the party apparatus within the communist party? who is that vote actually open to?
There's more than a billion people in China. If 10% of them turn out to vote, then that's already more than the turnout for the 2016 presidential election.
So imagine you vote for town council. The town councils in your county elect a county council, the county councils elect a state legislature, and the state legislatures elect Congress.
Elections for local people's congress are - for China - fairly open. There are 50-100% more candidates than seats. But candidates are in practice only nominated by the CP and related organizations. But the point is, you can choose between a couple of alternative CP picks, rather than having a single CP pick imposed upon you. A little bit like elections in Iran, I guess. That's not wide open elections like in the West, but it's not nothing.
Elections are more centrally controlled the higher up in the hierarchy you go, but there is always some wiggle room.
I also can't tell if the map is supposed to illustrate turnout as a percentage or as an absolute number. The wording ("Territory size shows the estimated proportion of all people who voted in elections between 1945 and 1998 who voted there.") suggests the former, but the actual sizes on the map appear to be the latter, which makes it nearly indistinguishable from the population cartogram: http://worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=2
Anyways, VR/AR globes will solve these problems pretty quickly.
Separate note - while i get that north-up is just a convention and a mental construct, the south-up map really threw me off. As i was staring into the map, I felt the urge to turn my monitor around and had the same visceral need to set things right as i would upside down on a roller-coaster. This caught me completely by surprise because i was expecting to just make a mental note that this was a new convention i could get used to. Instead i "felt" uncomfortable - did this happen to anyone else?
A transverse map projection [1] doesn't make much sense as a default. The linked image shows the lines of longitude severely distorted, and a compass rose would not make sense on this map. There is a real, physical reason why north and south should be at opposing edges of the map.
But it's perfectly reasonable to rotate a map by 90 or 270 degrees - nothing about the "way planets work" implies that you need to orient the map in this direction when raising it from a horizontal plane to a vertical wall.
If anything, the reason would be that the circumference of the equator is twice the distance between the poles, and human eyes are better suited for panning in the horizontal.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection...
> Why does Google maps use the inaccurate, ancient and distorted Mercator Projection?
> Maps uses Mercator because it preserves angles. The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While this distorts a 'zoomed-out view' of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc... so we're sticking with this projection for now.
[1]: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/A2ygEJ5e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Map-of-h...
No need to make everything a struggle about "race". Make scientific arguments or credible social arguments, but don't just assume off the bat everything is "problematic" and make even patently scientific decisions attributable to malice and oppression. It doesn't help.
Why not teach them both maps, or, rather, teach them that it's hard to represent the world in 2D space. O.o get them looking at maps from all angles and configurations.
I'm all for better map projections, but there's zero need for the author's moral grandstanding in the article.