> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer1—seem smaller than they are.
Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centered.
It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection.
Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.
> One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough.
This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe. I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom out enough.
Using a perspective projection works because our brains automatically understand the distortions caused by that sort of projection and account for them.
Reprojecting on-the-fly is a way around it. Yes, you're still projecting to two dimensions but it drives home the point that the area of a landmass is relative depending on what the user is looking at. Something like: https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d
I'm fond of the Dymaxion (and either the land connected or the ocean connected forms - as applicable) because it has some neat applications showing migratory routes.
My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when looking at other projections.
Interesting post with eye opening stats (even after reading many posts like this I'm still amazed at how big Brazil is!)
Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current country). This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps.
There's a similar phenomenon of terminology creep with language terms like 'High German' and 'Low German'. This nomenclature has been adopted into fantasy literature to suggest a more noble vs. fallen version of some ancient dialect, but all it meant originally is that 'high' speakers were upstream (and therefore uphill) from the 'low' speakers.
This is one of those 'common misconceptions' where I hear about its refutation more often than I encounter people who believe the supposed misconception. Much like anything talking about map projections, in fact.
You may need to read more crappy fantasy books. To cite a completely representative example, consider 'High Valyrian' from Game of Thrones https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/High_Valyrian, a liturgical language that of course is contrasted with Low (or Bastard) Valyrian, a degenerate family of dialects.
I don’t doubt they exist, but the only two examples I ever hear are the GoT one you mentioned and High/Low Gothic in WH40k. But I see that factoid about High/Low German repeated multiple times a year. It was a common entry on ‘fantasy cliche’ lists even in the dial-up era of the Internet.
Upper/lower is not weird, if you're used to a country with deep vallies (upper part of valley, lower part of valley, follows the river naming exactly, of course).
There was Upper Canada vs Lower Canada. On a map, they were inverted, but it was in reference to the St-Lawrence river and water from the Great Lake. You would first arrive in Lower Canada (from Europe) and keep navigating to reach Upper Canada.
European / Levant maps through the mediaeval period frequently placed east at the top of the map. This is where the sun rose, and "to orient" is "to determine where East lies", and was (for Europeans) the direction toward Jerusalem.
I suspect that north-as-top orientations were strongly influenced by the invention / importation of the magnetic compass.
Aside from the humor of that page failing to load for me (Firefox), I also smirk at the fact that it would still be projecting the globe onto a _flat_ screen to view it (:
Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.
I tried again in a 'blank' profile, and it worked there.
On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really.
But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the other profile.
Are you using "resist fingerprinting" in Firefox? I've noticed that causes mystery total blocks or additional "click and hold to show you are not a bot" challenges on many sites (Fedex, Kickstarter, Walmart, Lowes) and at random. Often it seems in some backend XHR that the app writer didn't think to handle bot blocks on, so the page half loads.
Hm. Page loads fine for me in Firefox. Has for years (unlike google maps itself where oddly I get blocked for their 3d mode, even when that same mode works fine on earth.google.com)
If you're on Linux, maybe check your drivers, or do webgl.force-enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled ?
There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge:
Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a two-ton block of cheese. It was there, for any and all who were hungry, it was there for the voiceless.
Probably seen that clip a dozen times and this was the first time I noticed Whitford manspreading in the middle of the clip and Janney batting his leg back. By the look on his face, it seems improvised to get a laugh out of her.
it’s a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top. Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How about maps with north and south swapped?
Maybe more accurate is that there wasn’t some nefarious bias that was meant to oppress people.
Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
Unilaterally? If they want to use maps that center Asia in their education and work, who is stopping them? In fact I'd wager they start their education by learning about the geography of Asia first.
I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".
Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...
It's crazy how populists and misinformation agents have successfully convinced people that any mention of a potential bias is an "woke" attack on their whole personality and world view.
Only if you count bad evangelists as "misinformation agents". There are unfortunately plenty of bad actors who have persistently tried to use it as a social cudgel and an excuse to fight for social dominance, shield oneself from being questioned (including self-reflection), and to write others off. To be frank, it is no wonder people view it as an attack when that is exactly what it has been used for.
For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!
Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem. And no, they should not be printing any part of the world in the center of the globe!
>Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
I'd argue that, by coincidence, putting Africa/Europe in roughly the centre happens to be the most sensible. Extraterrestrials with no knowledge of humans would probably do this.
The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.
You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.
Actually, in China I saw a map where the cut was in the Atlantic Ocean. I am not sure how wide spread that is but I would say it makes sense for any world map used in Eastern Asia.
It makes things further from the equator appear huge. There's no conspiracy or biases involved, unless of course you're proposing that the Mercator projection was developed to give Antarctica a false sense of superiority.
One of the common maps used in schools cuts off the bottom quarter of the map, including Antarctica making the southern hemisphere half the size of the northern
Germany the state - indeed, but German as a culture/language/nationality(in the contemporary definition) was definitely there.
Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the XX century.
My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define one's identity.
It ends too soon. The funniest part is when they talk about the northern hemisphere being on top and then them putting it on the bottom and her saying it is freaking her out.
It's fascinating how we're expected to believe senior White House officials are such perfect strawman doofuses that they have never seen a globe or the Mollweide projection, or were ever reprimanded by a geography teacher for saying "up" instead of "North". The only thing that scene is missing is for her to fall over in shock and disbelief at hearing that the Earth is round.
They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.
This clip is always hilarious to me. Smugly declares "it's where you've been living this whole time," as he stands in front of a projection that is just as flawed, as all projections are, as the Mercator. The only priority of that map projection is attempting to account for the accurate area of landmasses, sacrificing correct shape of landmasses, as well as a ton of navigational utility.
A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!" Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe projection when you zoom out far enough.
This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at parties.
And that’s the tradeoff of using a globe, whereas the tradeoff of the Peters projection is that the map is distorted in various ways, and the tradeoff of Mercator is that the map is distorted in other ways.
Which is why that West Wing clip is, frankly, pretentious, because it doesn’t discuss the negatives of Peters, wrongly implies that it’s “the” correct way to view the world, and makes no mention of other major projections, or even a globe.
Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers, which is typically great for the continental US, but I probably wouldn’t use it so much if I regularly made maps of other places!
To be fair, the West Wing was pretentious in so many other ways that this is one of the few clips that borders on genuinely educational. Flawed? Yes. But it's not an educational show, it's a bizarre hyper-liberal hour-long lecture to the viewer where for some reason every single character talks like an over the hill Jewish man with the same verbal tics and expressions.
And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.
No I mean like when you open your maps application and want to go somewhere with GPS, latitude and longitude will be vertical and horizontal and proportionally spaced due to the map using a projection like Mercator...
https://earth.nullschool.net has a range of different projections available (on top of the main functionality of the site, which is itself a pretty cool map of wind/weather/atmospheric patterns).
The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be static images.
Pretty cool to think about the amount of work going on behind the covers to alter these projections on the fly. And how costly it was to build them originally by hand.
work, sure, but not _that_ much. It's affine transformations / some fast linear algebra, for the most part. Your second point is for sure true, though.
One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map.
There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there.
But it’s still a fun observation.
I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym:
It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
If you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the poles that appears in commonly-used maps.
I saw a Japanese map recently and it took me a full minute to understand what I was looking at. Japan was at the center, and North America was on the right.
The 'geocentric conceit' thing is just a moralized overinterpretation of people trying to be practical.
Obviously if you're traveling out from and back to one place over and over, the most sensible thing to do is to put that place near map center. It makes it easy to see all the other places in relation to your home, because how they relate to your home is what's relevant to you. Those are the distances and routes you want to be the most clear. When taking a sphere and mapping it to a rectangle there is no way to not do this - somewhere has to be the middle so you might as well choose somewhere practical.
Sagan like many others often sells morality porn - the feeling of "I know better than those ignorant less moral ones". A lot of entertainment is like this these days.
This is why I'm glad Google maps is available in a 3d globe! Even at relatively close zoom levels the subtle differences in scale are really noticeable.
Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to always start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox it just reverts back to a flat map.
The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser does this. It displays meteorological (and related) data, not political or geological features, but is still pretty interesting. There are also numerous alternative projections available
Have you ever seen a globe? They are always tilted so you can easily view countries below the equator.
Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...
Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it into being a data interchange format were ill-advised relative to just making it a good text-based markup language, but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and XPath that XML had from the start!
Of discontinuous projections, I prefer Waterman over Dymaxion, it feels more regular and is more intuitive to see how it wraps around a sphere (or geoid). While Waterman might have more distortion in some absolute sense, the regularity of the distortions makes it still more pleasing (subjective, I know). One weird thing about Dymaxion is how the 70° parallels around both north and south poles are distinctly lumpy.
But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.
Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection!
Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Exactly! This article mostly avoids it but the usual popsci refrain of “the map you know is WRONG” is a pet peeve of mine! It’s not like one projection is any worse than another, as long as they are useful for the context it’s designed for. Maps are diagrams!
> I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection!
Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes.
It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.”
It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.”
FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this).
I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)
> It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.”
That's not less stupid than the other statement. It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
> It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
Quite the opposite, no? It's like spending your whole life looking at only your evening shadow (Hello, Plato) and then seeing yourself in a good mirror and realising your actual height relative to the world around you for the first time.
You have a fixed and narrow definition of what important means.
Importance should change depending on context.
Sure, you are definitely allowed to say that a certain metric (i.e. population size or density) has more practical applications and provides better signal for “blah blah”.
I’m curious why you think my definition of important is fixed and narrow. I didn’t define it and I agree that importance is a factor of context.
I commented that it was curious that someone would think size is so important that learning the true size of countries would change their world view. In that land mass isn’t usually very important for political or cultural significance (eg, Canada is huge and that doesn’t make it important, Russia is important not because of its size, etc etc).
> That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?
Yes. That and population. Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.
> Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands expanded their landmass by creating their empires? Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands lost their power and influence when they lost their empires and landmass?
> Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
Yes along with other reasons - population, geographical location, etc.
> Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.
But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small.
I mean you have to have natural resources and can’t be tiny, but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that. It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
The countries with the 2 highest GDPs, China and the US, are in the top 4 largest countries. India, #5 in GDP, is #7 in area.
I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.
It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger population and more natural resources. And more space to carry out economic activities with said people and resources.
The linear plot in that Wolfram link is messed up. It doesn't show all the data (caps out at 800 billion GDP). Here's a corrected linear plot, from the script that I linked (commenting out the log-log scaling):
There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a little messy, but it's undeniably there.
The starting point for this discussion was about the relationship between a country's size and population and it's power and influence. The correlation between area and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful relationship.
Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize any patterns on a linear plot.
I also don't understand your point about the dispersion. The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said the correlation was 99%.
Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.
That's weird, are you looking only at the top 10 countries?
I've reproduced dwaltrib's results using World Bank data on 251 countries, and I get a Pearson's r of 0.82 and a p value of 5.6e-61 (!). I.e. a strong correlation, with high confidence. It makes sense too -- larger countries generally have more people, and more people generally generate more economic activity.
Code if you want to try yourself:
import pandas as pd
gdp = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_NY.GDP.MKTP.CD_DS2_en_csv_v2_5551501.csv").set_index("Country Name")
It is obviously true. The five permanent security council members are US, China, Russia, UK and France. US, China and Russia are obviously gigantic. UK is gigantic via its ties to Canada, Australia, NZ. After all the silly monarch of britain is the head of state of all these nations. And France has a gigantic empire still. Go check out their EEZ.
> but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
Germany and Japan aren't powerful. Powerful nations aren't occupied by a foreign power. Germany and Japan are extraordinarly weak. Their economic well being is entirely dependent on the generosity of another nation.
There is a reason why Germany and Japan tried to expand their territories in ww2. They failed and they have to live with the consequences.
> I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that.
Sure. Landmass by itself isn't everything. As I said, you have to factor in population, quality of land, ports, neighbors, etc.
> It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
You quoted "the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential."
Do you know what populous means? It's silly to quote something and not understand it.
> I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
I was basing it off of “IME” and “AFAICT” similar to what you just did in your own ad hominem attack ironically. I don’t tend to preface things like that when commenting and usually I assume this when reading comments online. I used to write “anecdotally” but it’s 2023.
On Quora, there’s a “group” sort of like a subreddit titled “It’s OK to be White”. There’s about 35k people who follow it. Their mission is to “uplift White cultures and oppose anti-White racism”.
Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn’t need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other people from that group come out of the woodworks to complain. These memes aren’t even posted in that group. And I wish I could say that it’s just these weirdos on Quora that act like this. But no. I’ve seen it on Instagram. On Facebook. I’ve heard it in real life. It’s a thing that bothers a certain demographic of people. While it’s not a “major” thing and shouldn’t matter, it’s still a thing that I tend to see often.
I see there’s miscommunication here though. I do agree with you that most people “don’t care”. That’s the phrase we have been using. What you are saying and what I also believe is that most people are “map agnostic” for lack of a better phrase. They don’t care in that sense. Like life is too short. It’s just a map.
But when I used the phrase “don’t care” and added underscores around it and the words “at all” in my comments yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and _negative_ opinions about not caring.
For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And the other language he used evoked that he was “flabbergasted” that people care about map distortions. (Do you see how this is a different definition of “don’t care”?)
The language he was using and the emotions involved “mirrored” the language and emotions that I see on Quora and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
You’re right. I don’t have any concrete data or surveys or experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain, etc.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a moron and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I did it again!)
I doubt people are actively giving less value or worth to places that appear smaller on the map. Additionally, the majority of people just don’t have a concrete frame of reference of distances beyond how far we can see. As such, the only real exposure to vast distances at the scale of continents is going to be via maps, unless you have the privilege of being in LEO. It’s pretty rare that flat projection is useful for anything except trivial, surface information paired with the sort of infantilizing teaching that prompts students into pointing to their home country. If this is your only exposure to the world, it’s easy to see how you will begin to assign some value at a subconscious level. Any indirect representation of something larger is going to be a compromise based on the needs of the application, but we can do better than the flat projection just from a UX level.
> Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection!
That's the point of the post. The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small cohorts because there is a specific shape of the world map that most people who are not map-heads or spherical projection experts take for guaranteed. Get a non-Mercator projection map and put it in your dinner room, and then see how many of your guests will comment about "so.. why is this map weird? It doesn't look right?" then tell them "every flat map projection distorts [...]"
> Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps used in data visualization charts etc., non of those are using the map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator projection simply because "that's the right shape of the world" regardless of what "right" means. Not because they evaluated the compromises of the different projections and figures "oh maybe someone will be lost at sea and only have access to our GDP per capita world map visualization, better use Mercator projection to preserve local angles and line up with compass headings"
> Get a non-Mercator projection map and put it in your dinner room, and then see how many of your guests will comment about "so.. why is this map weird? It doesn't look right?" then tell them "every flat map projection distorts [...]"
This is actually a pretty cool conversation topic during dinner. I would take the opportunity to show off. It doesn't have to be a downside. "Hey, did you know that [interesting stuff]...?".
If your guests are the kind of people who get irritated instead of awed by cool explanations about the world, I admit then you have a problem.
yeah, I think it would be an interesting discussion topic. Especially if you could show the 6th figure from that post (the one showing the 7,500km distortion). It just depends on how you put it. OPs remarks were condescending as if the only reason to bring this up is "because of size hang ups" as oppose to "bring this up to question your own basic wrong assumptions about the world"
It's far from common knowledge or a well known fact that the only reason the World Map looks the way it looks is just an arbitrary projection type that's picked for equally arbitrary reasons. Because as I mentioned, compass navigation is hardly the only map use-case. It may have originally started that way in the 1,200s or whatever, but today we use maps for all sorts of visualizations and other things. And the assumption that "Mercator projection" is the "right" shape of the world is held by most not because they have "size hang ups" but because it's just the way it is. Just like any assumption you hold that you never question because there is no reason to question it really.
2. European nations who were good at sailing created the age of empires (yes this was a bad thing)
3. These empires persisted until the end of WW2 (1945) or arguably even the Suez crisis (1956) at which point the American/Soviet world order began
Changing a map is changing everyone's internal worldview, and for obvious reason empires were not about to allow such a massive change unless they had a good reason[0] so It's really only been about 80 years and most of them we were at war with the Soviets, so when we thought about maps, we thought about if they were red or star spangled, not which projection.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just not at all surprised we have the "original" one.
0 - I could easily see an alternate history where e.g. the Spanish and/or Portugese use a different one if it makes them look "better" than the English, or vice versa. Now i'm curious of what projection could be 'anglo/iberi-maximal'
I lost it in the post. Whenever I hear the “crisis” part presented without the perfectly rational explanation I get frustrated and spend more time trying to figure out if this is a problem.
Saying “maps distort the way we see the world” is a problem unless you immediately follow it with “and that’s ok because…”
Otherwise we waste time on stuff like “eyeballs distort the way we see the world” when it’s true but not an issue at all.
Especially since the first paragraph mentions how countries closer to the equator tend to be poorer. As if that’s somehow relevant.
I don't understand what you're saying. The article doesn't present this as a crisis. It doesn't really make sense to say it's okay or not okay, except insofar as anything that isn't an existential threat is okay, I suppose.
The second sentence of the article strongly implies some nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries is at the root of the popularity of mercator projections.
That is entirely on you tho. Becasuse that sentence does not imply anything about concentration of power nor about globally powerful countries and even nothing about origin of popularity of mercator projections.
It does imply that poor countries around equator are bigger then they look like. That is it.
Well, they is a "nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries". And the Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows their countries bigger than they are, so...
> And the Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows their countries bigger than they are, so...
So what?
Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican Coalition are benign emperors :D
>Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection?
No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources. Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
> They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources.
Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.
> Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
Excuse me? Who is imposing what on whom now, and how?
Last time I checked, everyone is free to use whatever map projection they want, centered on whatever point of the globe they want. Or they can use an actual globe.
> has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
Yeah, pretty sure I don't perceive Antarctica as some kind of superior super-nation. Or greenland, although I gotta say, it's a really cool place, especially during summer.
>Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.
Yes. And if someone breaks your legs, you should totally be able to run a marathon after, say, 15 years. After all, they haven't broke your legs for a while.
History and national development doesn't work like that. A major handicap can still keep you back for centuries.
It's even more than a handicap relatively too. It's not just that you were held down (and the other side neutral): the handicap for you was at the same time an enrichment off your back for the other side.
Even more more so, since "independent nations" is mostly a facade for the busines as usual, of neocolonialism: the same shit, but somewhat more convert (bribing politicians, setting up banana-republic conditions, if needed bringing in the army, supporting this or that dictator into power, and so on, and using monetary policy and foreign aid to make sure they never stand on their legs).
Yeah, I'm not gonna discuss colonialism here. Multiple generations are a long time to get things in order. Many countries rebuilt from scratch into powerful industrialized nations within decades after major wars.
And it's also not the topic of the discussion tbh. This is about the impact of the Mercator projection, and unless I get to see a peer reviewed study convincing me otherwise, my point stands.
The poor countries claim has a footnote and a promise to explore it in another article. It doesn't say anything further about this.
The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article, unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...)
I read it as the post is simply pointing out something that a large percentage of the population was not even aware about. I don't think it goes any deeper than that.
Why is it important that poor people live near the equator? I expect that a large part of the population is aware of this fact.
So bringing it up doesn’t contribute to the article and is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many other true but irrelevant facts.
Because the equator in the Mercator projection is the closest to "true size"...which means that the wealthier nations, well above that, are in fact exacerbated in apparent land mass.
I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little.
Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is linked to apparent size - Africa looks smaller then it is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then they are. When we talk about a problem affecting somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if only subconsciously.
No one claimed people do this. You have created a straw man-ception. Our awareness of the world is informed by distorted maps, even if it only impacts us subconsciously.
I don’t think you are getting what I’m saying. Greenland is larger than countries we spend far more time obsessing over with history lessons.
Importance in education and subsequently people’s mental models is not at all driven by size on the projection. It’s a dumb theory not backed by any real research.
The problem with these kind of posts is that they also ignore the existence of globes. No one should be surprised by the "size" of any country because globes already exist which are a pretty close to true representation.
> Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps used in data visualization charts etc., non of those are using the map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator projection simply because "that's the right shape of the world" regardless of what "right" means
I question what percentage of those maps in reality are actually Mercator? I feel this is one of those strawman memes that mercator is everywhere, when in practice it feels relatively rare to actually encounter it.
I wonder how much location bias affects this. I also grew up with basically only seeing equal-area projections and globes -- that's just what my school district used. It was weird seeing all the online memes about Mercator when I grew up never seeing it, heh.
What country do you live in? If I visit there I'll look out for them because I see equal-area projs like never. Even the decorative one in my room right now clearly has Greenland look more than half the size of all of Africa.
The kiddy maps my kids had were using mercator projection. And I am pretty solid that it was because that is "the right shape of the world". The map was not meant for navigation, it was meant to display funny pictures about countries and maybe teach the kid countries exists if kid bothers. It was made by an artist after all, not by cartographer.
Map projection trade-offs are discussed a lot. I studied it at school, I can't count the number of "do you realize how big country X compared to country Y" articles, (the one linked here is a good one btw) and it often pops up in trivia questions. Everyone has seen a globe, and non-Mercator maps are everywhere. Famously on National Geographics.
Also, using a (truncated) Mercator projection for a GDP per capita map (or any political map that isn't about land mass) is not a bad idea as its most notorious flaw becomes an advantage because coincidently, it tends to enlarge small countries and shrink large countries, which makes for a more readable map.
> it tends to enlarge small countries and shrink large countries, which makes for a more readable map.
It enlarges the two biggest countries in the World (Russian and Canada) while shrinking central American and central African countries that aren't particularly big to say the least…
I'd like to think you're being ironic here, but I suspect you're not, so no: the vast majority of the world is outside the US and has not, in fact, seen an obscure episode of a TV drama about American politics.
I just learned about the equal earth projection, which was apparently invented very recently in 2023. It’s the best looking equal area projection I’ve seen.
As an adult I was shocked to find out how the projection I grew up with altered my perception of my poverty-stricken country. I had no idea for my entire life that it was so much larger than other countries on the map I thought were larger. I doubt I am rare here at all.
And I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. And I doubt I am rare here at all also.
The West Wing is not the President's office, but rather the section that contains The Oval Office, which is President's office, along with other executive offices and rooms, such as the Press Briefing room, the Situation Room, etc.
I've seen this type of post/thread many times, and yet I still learn something new every time.
For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much of Scotland is actually west of England because Great Britain doesn't actually go straight-up north to south but is rather "tilted".
I also didn't know that Papua was so big, before today I wondered how could there be so much linguistic diversity in what I though was a medium sized island.
So I don't mind the geography trivia from time to time.
> For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much of Scotland is actually west of England because Great Britain doesn't actually go straight-up north to south but is rather "tilted".
Even as a Brit this sometimes catches me out. I live near Bournemouth which is approx in the middle of the south coast of England. If I draw a straight line due North, it's only just inside Scotland. ALL of Scotland is west of London.
Unrelatedly, the other amusing fact is that when the ISS goes overhead (256 miles high at perigee), it is much closer to me than Glasgow (450 miles away).
People have a problem with this post and these kind of posts because they imply it was deliberately done for evil reasons.
The point of any article isn't just its factual content; it's the hidden message from the way it's said. I don't know if you intended to say it the way you did when you started off with the comment about poverty in the first two sentences, but by doing so, you set the tone for the rest of your article. (You also didn't expand on that tidbit so it kind of leaves your audience wondering why you mentioned it.)
Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of generalization from the subjective inferences made from your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others, presumptuous?
I'm getting tired of the progressive tendency to read offence, bigotry, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. into every little word & minutiae of nuance uttered by others. It's on the verge of induced pareidolia for outrage & victimhood.
Do you reside or hail from one of the aforementioned countries, or are you merely "signal boosting" and getting outraged on their behalf?
> Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of generalization from the subjective inferences made from your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others, presumptuous?
No, you're just being stupid.
This isn't a new issue. There's an episode of The West Wing about the evils of the Mercator projection. It aired 22 years ago.
When you write an essay doing nothing more than repeating a several-decades-old cliche, people are going to assume you don't have anything to say other than the content of the cliche they heard decades ago. And they will be right.
It's unlikely that it was deliberately done for evil reasons.
However it contributes to a misunderstanding that may in some way favor richer countries, and that could be a reason why nobody's trying very hard to focus kids' exposure on more accurate maps.
The mechanism I'm alluding to is a sense that "this place is very big, and so it's reasonable that it controls more than other places." It's not a highly-developed intellectual analysis, but more of a gut-level conception that informs casual interpretation of news and events.
You know whose problem this is. The map buyer/owner. They can buy whatever projection fits their fancy. I happen to have Robinson projections at home because I don't prefer the cylindrical projection. I used to have homolosine projections but they were funky in other ways. Preferably people would have a Globe and also have some flat projections.
The faux outrage is hard to take. I grew up with the chopped up non Mercator maps and nobody cared looking at one or another.
It was called out multiple times in my geography glasses in the 80s that the flat contiguous map was wrong and we spent lots of time looking at globes and North or South Pole centered maps.
Nobody is being oppressed or underrepresented by this projection. This isn’t an episode of the west wing.
The idea that we're all in the dark about the real relative sizes of the countries is silly. It's not like we look at a globe and get shocked by the sizes of the countries.
> The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed
And?
The trade-offs between longpolling and websockets are rarely discussed outside of very small cohorts. The tradeoff between wankel-engines and piston-based motors are rarely discussed. The tradeoffs between oak and pearwood are rarely discussed.
That's why our society has division of labor and people becoming experts in their topics.
And I am pretty sure experts on cartography have discussed the different merits and tradeoffs and converged on Mercator for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't care. It works, I can use it, and as long as no one can point out a tangible problem with it, I see no reason to worry about it. Same as the cartographer doesn't need to know or care why I decided that the chatapp he installed uses longpolling to communicate with the backend instead of a websocket. Same as I don't need to know or care why the carpenter who made my desk used oak instead of pear or rosewood.
And seeing countries as smaller or bigger than they are isn't a problem in my eyes. I can reasonably expect an educated person to know that maps are 3D->2D projections and are thus distorted. If I want to know the exact size, I can always look it up. I don't have a more or less favourable view of a country or its people based on the countries apparent size on a map.
The issue isn't possible bias on the part of educated cartographers and differential geometers. It's the bias of the majority, i.e. everyone else, that matters. A vast majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.
> A vast majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.
That’s a fun hypothesis, but is there actually data supporting (1) that “a vast majority” of westerners misperceive country size in this way, and (2) that specifically such a perception causes them to consider foreigners to be unimportant?
Although implicit bias exists, studies show its impact on the real world is much smaller than commonly believed.
> Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.
And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed study, or similarly supported source for this statement.
Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the world.
Nearly no one inhabits Greenland and Antarctica, which might help explain why the only visible relative increase in Arctic/Antarctic nationalism comes from enthusiastic polar bears and mildly racist penguins.
I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft" sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any effects, much less design a viable study that demonstrates causation.
I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly convincing unless we lived in a universe where people told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding people in other countries?"
Mercator just has an embedded momentum, it isn't somehow superior to other projections. Why do some people still use tech X when tech Y exists? Momentum, resistance to change, etc.
The biggest miss on maps (and no fault of cartography, as there is no way to represent this well) is height and depth. The heights of mountains and the depths of water --it's hard to understand how shallow bodies of water are when compares to linear distances: the deepest part of the ocean is less distance linearly than the width of the city of SF.
> I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries.
Something that jumps out at me with the size is that the arctic regions are often viewed as huge and massive. However, when viewed with their true size, it greatly highlights just how fragile they are.
North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa.
Europe: 7 territories, as large as Africa.
USA: 3 territories, Canada: 5, Australia: 2
China, India, Brazil which are all very large: 1
I'd love maps where Europe is smaller to become the norm in schools and daily use oberall. Maybe it would make people migrating here from huge and vast countries reconsider.
I think that obsession you are referring to is part of a far larger mental illness that is coursing through European minds and cultures; the constant, compulsive obsession with trying to find the most obscure and ridiculous reasons, causes, and excuses for how brown people are Noble Savage victims and Europeans must hate themselves.
This time the reason why Europeans must hate and destroy themselves is … spins the wheel … that maps are flat and the planet is not.
European people and culture all over that planet is very mentally sick and self-destructive. Any individual person that exhibited even slightly as mentally ill mentalities as Europeans, we would immediately seek help for them.
I feel like you actually stated the problem but then glossed over it.
Mercator is UX optimized for naval navigation. Besides street navigation (where projection is irrelevant) I would posit that most people use maps for human geography reasons- what countries are next to Senegal, what kind of border does Thailand have with Malaysia, etc.
In the use case of understanding geopolitical borders Mercator isn’t optimized for that.
Asking why people are dissatisfied with mercator is like asking why my grandma is dissatisfied with the command line interface on the Linux laptop I got her. Doesn’t she know it’s the best for programmers??
Why are we trading off the accuracy of political borders for navigating by rhumb lines?
I personally feel like a better projection would be one that basically ignored or distorted the oceans. On google maps there’s no reasons why the proportions of the Atlantic or Pacific would be relevant.
Well, what do you mean, the "accuracy" of political borders? Again, they're all inaccurate, just in different ways. Are you optimizing for length of border, or curvature, or orientation? Better nearer or further from the pole? Arguably there are far more borders nearer the equator than far from it, Africa has hundreds. And the Mercator projection does pretty much the best job at representing political borders length and orientation within Africa than any other.
I’m thinking about accuracy when looking at google maps.
So do you mean that the length and orientation of the borders is the least distorted with the Mercator projection?
I’m actually not sure how a different projection would distort a country’s border. But for example I’m not putting a ruler against my screen and I don’t know if I need to know if a border is oriented North or not.
Mostly my point is, are we rendering maps for real users’ use cases or backwards rationalizing the status quo? Besides the level of effort that would be involved in changing it, can’t think of any real defense of the use Mercator projection itself in its current context.
Some other comments references street maps that are grids, so a non-mercator projection would bend a grid of streets- this makes sense- but again, the main critique is around the relative size of countries- i.e. the look of the map tiles only when zoomed out sufficiently far. Maybe this is the main UX hurdle- in google maps to change the projection above some level of zoom.
>If size is your thing, use some other projection!
They're not complaining about what they can use for themselves.
They are complaining about what is in mainstream use (in schools, websites, books, documentaries, and so on) and thus what kinds of perception people get.
The worst argument. These days how many people navigate by compass headings vs how many people base personal and policy decisions due to distorted view of the planet which downsizes planet's oceans and puts the great pacific garbage patch at the far edge of the map, out of sight out of mind?
Just use another projection? Mercator is everywhere, nothing else.
And yes, size of countries is important too (eg. how people fear Russia because it seems large and discount the importance of Africa because it's next to the equator).
"Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation." Most maps people are exposed to aren't being used for navigation, but for education (at least where the question of the Mercator projection is concerned).
People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall?
"If size is your thing, use some other projection!" This is basically exactly what the people "hung up" on the Mercator projection are saying! We should be using other projections! It seems a totally reasonable thing to point out to me.
> People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall?
Are world history classes favoring Mercator? Are newscasts using Mercator in background images? Are wall maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing answers!)
As a kid I often encountered oval‐shaped world maps which obviously weren’t Mercator (most likely Robinson or Winkel tripel). And road maps of the United States had curved borders, not straight borders, so those obviously weren’t Mercator either (possibly Alders). And I had globes both at home and at school. So while Mercator is certainly common, and it’s worth explaining tradeoffs in map projection especially in an educational context, I question whether it’s actually as universal as people here are saying.
Every chance I get I try to promote the Cahill-Keys projection. Not only does it better preserve area and reminds you that the earth is a sphere, it is also one of the more esthetically pleasing projections out there.
I agree with many other comments here that this is more an effect of the practical purpose that maps are created for than any presumed nefarious motivation. Look at the list of supported projections in the PROJ database - it's a very long list, and they're all there to solve some particular problem.
Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps.
I imagine having your maps rotated compared to most of the world (90% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere) would probably be a pain to deal with.
It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention.
maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator projection is problematic, I got news for you.
The overlay of Canada on Europe is always a fun one. We moan so much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of public transit and reasonable infrastructure to get around, but we're also comparing a population of (just recently hit!) 40,000 and ~700,000. Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area.
This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
> Orders of magnitude larger, but roughly same land area.
You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass. That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
Seriously. Half the population is in southern Ontario. There's no reason we can't have a serious high speed rail line Toronto<->Quebec City that would serve - without exaggeration - most Canadians.
I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in this corridor is a policy failure.
90% of Canadians live in a "small" strip of land that is comparable in size to Europe. That area (along with several regions and city pairs in the US) could have excellent inter-city and intra-city transit. But we just don't.
Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build for people. Almost everything about our built environment is optimized for cars and the result is sprawl. The cause is our public policies, building regulations, and zoning.
It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because people don't try to commute across the country, just like people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin every day. The vast majority of travel is local and occasionally regional.
> We moan so much here (perhaps rightfully so) about lack of public transit and reasonable infrastructure to get around
Funny thing is that Canada used to have that public transit infrastructure, from big cities even into tiny little towns. The country was built on it!
We eventually ripped it up because it turns out people liked driving cars more. And I posit that they still do. If the will was there, it could be rebuilt, but it turns out moaning is a lot easier.
And fuck all the suffering along the way? Honestly Canada needs to address that before it can even begin to start thinking about more immigration. Canada is not even vaguely equipped to handle more people as it stands now.
Fun thing is that USSR (and Russia as its descendant) was actually never using Mercator anywhere near education, since the distortion was too great in places where it was important. You would imagine it would be good for ego, but pragmatic reasons prevailed.
Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common.
On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs that?
I remember one particular trip I had on LSD. I spent some of the time inspecting my childhood neighbourhood in Belfast on Google Maps with the 3D view, and looking at it from angles other than North -> Top.
It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the city but also the socio-political history of it. I would definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you know.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadDepends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centered.
It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection.
Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.
This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe. I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom out enough.
Reprojecting on-the-fly is a way around it. Yes, you're still projecting to two dimensions but it drives home the point that the area of a landmass is relative depending on what the user is looking at. Something like: https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d
Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We See the World" you should see what not having a map does!
For a more distorted way to see the world, try: http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/
My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when looking at other projections.
Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...
Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current country). This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps.
See these interesting answers to get more information about the terms Upper/Lower Egypt: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...
https://girosur.com/como-funcionan/
I’m not convinced. Historically, Arabic and Egyptian maps had south on the top (https://muslimheritage.com/maps/)
I suspect that north-as-top orientations were strongly influenced by the invention / importation of the magnetic compass.
<https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58426/why-north-always-m...>
[1] https://earth.google.com/
Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.
Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine.
Anything interesting in the console?
On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really.
But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the other profile.
Same on the other profile.
Good to know about, though (:
If you're on Linux, maybe check your drivers, or do webgl.force-enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled ?
I agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI
Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".
Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...
For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!
They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:
https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...
It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.
I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.
Then you changed it to who designed the maps.
In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.
Make up your mind?
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.
You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.
[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
Your starting point or any other point?
He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator
Everything was a bit complicated in that region in the medieval period. In the C16, you immediately come up short with the concept of "Germany".
Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the XX century.
My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define one's identity.
If you want to avoid YouTube, here's just the video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/szn691fdcgvxwh8/map_proj...
edit: updated YouTube link to include the full version
They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.
A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!" Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe projection when you zoom out far enough.
This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at parties.
With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.
Which is why that West Wing clip is, frankly, pretentious, because it doesn’t discuss the negatives of Peters, wrongly implies that it’s “the” correct way to view the world, and makes no mention of other major projections, or even a globe.
Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers, which is typically great for the continental US, but I probably wouldn’t use it so much if I regularly made maps of other places!
And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.
Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?
The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be static images.
There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there.
But it’s still a fun observation.
I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym:
https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html
It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
Obviously if you're traveling out from and back to one place over and over, the most sensible thing to do is to put that place near map center. It makes it easy to see all the other places in relation to your home, because how they relate to your home is what's relevant to you. Those are the distances and routes you want to be the most clear. When taking a sphere and mapping it to a rectangle there is no way to not do this - somewhere has to be the middle so you might as well choose somewhere practical.
Sagan like many others often sells morality porn - the feeling of "I know better than those ignorant less moral ones". A lot of entertainment is like this these days.
We live in Europe where the default map is Atlantic-centric so I wanted to make sure he got a different perspective.
At best you could argue it puts humans relatively close to the center, but the geocentric model also operates with a smaller solar system.
And the implied “closer to the center is better” is not justified. E.g. Dante literally puts the devil in the middle of the universe.
Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to always start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox it just reverts back to a flat map.
<https://earth.nullschool.net/>
(There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)
Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...
Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
https://xkcd.com/977/
But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.
It uses fewer major triangular sections, has a more regular pattern to it, and best of all tries to keep the equator more or less horizontal.
Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes.
It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.”
It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.”
FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this).
I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)
That's not less stupid than the other statement. It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
Quite the opposite, no? It's like spending your whole life looking at only your evening shadow (Hello, Plato) and then seeing yourself in a good mirror and realising your actual height relative to the world around you for the first time.
That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?
Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
I would expect that revelations about population would be more worldview adjusting (Nigeria and Indonesia are so huge).
Importance should change depending on context.
Sure, you are definitely allowed to say that a certain metric (i.e. population size or density) has more practical applications and provides better signal for “blah blah”.
But I’m not discussing “blah blah”.
I commented that it was curious that someone would think size is so important that learning the true size of countries would change their world view. In that land mass isn’t usually very important for political or cultural significance (eg, Canada is huge and that doesn’t make it important, Russia is important not because of its size, etc etc).
If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting over it?
No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are huge.
Yes. That and population. Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.
> Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands expanded their landmass by creating their empires? Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands lost their power and influence when they lost their empires and landmass?
> Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
Yes along with other reasons - population, geographical location, etc.
But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small.
I mean you have to have natural resources and can’t be tiny, but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that. It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.
It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger population and more natural resources. And more space to carry out economic activities with said people and resources.
Edit: I just queried Wolfram Alpha about this. It generated a plot for me, which shows what I expected. Check it out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=list+of+countries+with+...
Edit2: bonus feature, GPT-4 wrote me a script to plot this also, check it out: https://chat.openai.com/share/ffa45c61-8b7a-44e1-b757-041f31...
https://ibb.co/9bBgwH8
There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a little messy, but it's undeniably there.
The starting point for this discussion was about the relationship between a country's size and population and it's power and influence. The correlation between area and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful relationship.
Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize any patterns on a linear plot.
I also don't understand your point about the dispersion. The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said the correlation was 99%.
Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...
datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".
I've reproduced dwaltrib's results using World Bank data on 251 countries, and I get a Pearson's r of 0.82 and a p value of 5.6e-61 (!). I.e. a strong correlation, with high confidence. It makes sense too -- larger countries generally have more people, and more people generally generate more economic activity.
Code if you want to try yourself:
import pandas as pd
gdp = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_NY.GDP.MKTP.CD_DS2_en_csv_v2_5551501.csv").set_index("Country Name")
land_area = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_AG.LND.TOTL.K2_DS2_en_csv_v2_5552158.csv").set_index("Country Name")
gdp["GDP"] = gdp["2020"]
gdp["Land"] = land_area["2020"]
gdp = gdp.dropna(subset=["GDP", "Land"])
from scipy import stats
print(stats.pearsonr(gdp.Land, gdp.GDP))
#+RESULTS: : PearsonRResult(statistic=0.8151313879150333, pvalue=5.621180589722219e-61)
It is obviously true. The five permanent security council members are US, China, Russia, UK and France. US, China and Russia are obviously gigantic. UK is gigantic via its ties to Canada, Australia, NZ. After all the silly monarch of britain is the head of state of all these nations. And France has a gigantic empire still. Go check out their EEZ.
> but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
Germany and Japan aren't powerful. Powerful nations aren't occupied by a foreign power. Germany and Japan are extraordinarly weak. Their economic well being is entirely dependent on the generosity of another nation.
There is a reason why Germany and Japan tried to expand their territories in ww2. They failed and they have to live with the consequences.
> I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that.
Sure. Landmass by itself isn't everything. As I said, you have to factor in population, quality of land, ports, neighbors, etc.
> It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
You quoted "the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential."
Do you know what populous means? It's silly to quote something and not understand it.
Can you elaborate on that ?
Did you think bigger = better ?
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing that?
https://itsoktobewhite.quora.com/
On Quora, there’s a “group” sort of like a subreddit titled “It’s OK to be White”. There’s about 35k people who follow it. Their mission is to “uplift White cultures and oppose anti-White racism”.
Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn’t need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other people from that group come out of the woodworks to complain. These memes aren’t even posted in that group. And I wish I could say that it’s just these weirdos on Quora that act like this. But no. I’ve seen it on Instagram. On Facebook. I’ve heard it in real life. It’s a thing that bothers a certain demographic of people. While it’s not a “major” thing and shouldn’t matter, it’s still a thing that I tend to see often.
I see there’s miscommunication here though. I do agree with you that most people “don’t care”. That’s the phrase we have been using. What you are saying and what I also believe is that most people are “map agnostic” for lack of a better phrase. They don’t care in that sense. Like life is too short. It’s just a map.
But when I used the phrase “don’t care” and added underscores around it and the words “at all” in my comments yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and _negative_ opinions about not caring.
For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And the other language he used evoked that he was “flabbergasted” that people care about map distortions. (Do you see how this is a different definition of “don’t care”?)
The language he was using and the emotions involved “mirrored” the language and emotions that I see on Quora and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
You’re right. I don’t have any concrete data or surveys or experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain, etc.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a moron and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I did it again!)
That's the point of the post. The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small cohorts because there is a specific shape of the world map that most people who are not map-heads or spherical projection experts take for guaranteed. Get a non-Mercator projection map and put it in your dinner room, and then see how many of your guests will comment about "so.. why is this map weird? It doesn't look right?" then tell them "every flat map projection distorts [...]"
> Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps used in data visualization charts etc., non of those are using the map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator projection simply because "that's the right shape of the world" regardless of what "right" means. Not because they evaluated the compromises of the different projections and figures "oh maybe someone will be lost at sea and only have access to our GDP per capita world map visualization, better use Mercator projection to preserve local angles and line up with compass headings"
This is actually a pretty cool conversation topic during dinner. I would take the opportunity to show off. It doesn't have to be a downside. "Hey, did you know that [interesting stuff]...?".
If your guests are the kind of people who get irritated instead of awed by cool explanations about the world, I admit then you have a problem.
It's far from common knowledge or a well known fact that the only reason the World Map looks the way it looks is just an arbitrary projection type that's picked for equally arbitrary reasons. Because as I mentioned, compass navigation is hardly the only map use-case. It may have originally started that way in the 1,200s or whatever, but today we use maps for all sorts of visualizations and other things. And the assumption that "Mercator projection" is the "right" shape of the world is held by most not because they have "size hang ups" but because it's just the way it is. Just like any assumption you hold that you never question because there is no reason to question it really.
1. It's very useful for sailing
2. European nations who were good at sailing created the age of empires (yes this was a bad thing)
3. These empires persisted until the end of WW2 (1945) or arguably even the Suez crisis (1956) at which point the American/Soviet world order began
Changing a map is changing everyone's internal worldview, and for obvious reason empires were not about to allow such a massive change unless they had a good reason[0] so It's really only been about 80 years and most of them we were at war with the Soviets, so when we thought about maps, we thought about if they were red or star spangled, not which projection.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just not at all surprised we have the "original" one.
0 - I could easily see an alternate history where e.g. the Spanish and/or Portugese use a different one if it makes them look "better" than the English, or vice versa. Now i'm curious of what projection could be 'anglo/iberi-maximal'
I lost it in the post. Whenever I hear the “crisis” part presented without the perfectly rational explanation I get frustrated and spend more time trying to figure out if this is a problem.
Saying “maps distort the way we see the world” is a problem unless you immediately follow it with “and that’s ok because…”
Otherwise we waste time on stuff like “eyeballs distort the way we see the world” when it’s true but not an issue at all.
Especially since the first paragraph mentions how countries closer to the equator tend to be poorer. As if that’s somehow relevant.
It does imply that poor countries around equator are bigger then they look like. That is it.
So what?
Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican Coalition are benign emperors :D
No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources. Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.
> Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
Excuse me? Who is imposing what on whom now, and how?
Last time I checked, everyone is free to use whatever map projection they want, centered on whatever point of the globe they want. Or they can use an actual globe.
> has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
Yeah, pretty sure I don't perceive Antarctica as some kind of superior super-nation. Or greenland, although I gotta say, it's a really cool place, especially during summer.
Yes. And if someone breaks your legs, you should totally be able to run a marathon after, say, 15 years. After all, they haven't broke your legs for a while.
History and national development doesn't work like that. A major handicap can still keep you back for centuries.
It's even more than a handicap relatively too. It's not just that you were held down (and the other side neutral): the handicap for you was at the same time an enrichment off your back for the other side.
Even more more so, since "independent nations" is mostly a facade for the busines as usual, of neocolonialism: the same shit, but somewhat more convert (bribing politicians, setting up banana-republic conditions, if needed bringing in the army, supporting this or that dictator into power, and so on, and using monetary policy and foreign aid to make sure they never stand on their legs).
And it's also not the topic of the discussion tbh. This is about the impact of the Mercator projection, and unless I get to see a peer reviewed study convincing me otherwise, my point stands.
The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article, unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...)
So bringing it up doesn’t contribute to the article and is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many other true but irrelevant facts.
I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little.
Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is linked to apparent size - Africa looks smaller then it is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then they are. When we talk about a problem affecting somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if only subconsciously.
[1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.NTAzNDg...
Consider saying "If you want to learn more about it".
Saying only "if you want to learn" is condescending and patronizing and is a thing those imperialists living in the northern hemisphere do.
I don’t think you are getting what I’m saying. Greenland is larger than countries we spend far more time obsessing over with history lessons.
Importance in education and subsequently people’s mental models is not at all driven by size on the projection. It’s a dumb theory not backed by any real research.
People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.
Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.
Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size.
With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely.
.
... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...
The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.
I question what percentage of those maps in reality are actually Mercator? I feel this is one of those strawman memes that mercator is everywhere, when in practice it feels relatively rare to actually encounter it.
https://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Political-World-Map-3360....
Also, using a (truncated) Mercator projection for a GDP per capita map (or any political map that isn't about land mass) is not a bad idea as its most notorious flaw becomes an advantage because coincidently, it tends to enlarge small countries and shrink large countries, which makes for a more readable map.
It enlarges the two biggest countries in the World (Russian and Canada) while shrinking central American and central African countries that aren't particularly big to say the least…
Not true. They're honestly discussed all the time to the point of becoming tiresome.
For others who haven't, here it is: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY
Although the projection it proclaims as superior, Gall-Peters, has grievous flaws of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
And I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. And I doubt I am rare here at all also.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532282
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787
And it was something we covered in school on the 80s.
It’s an interesting post but not really revelatory.
For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much of Scotland is actually west of England because Great Britain doesn't actually go straight-up north to south but is rather "tilted".
I also didn't know that Papua was so big, before today I wondered how could there be so much linguistic diversity in what I though was a medium sized island.
So I don't mind the geography trivia from time to time.
Even as a Brit this sometimes catches me out. I live near Bournemouth which is approx in the middle of the south coast of England. If I draw a straight line due North, it's only just inside Scotland. ALL of Scotland is west of London.
Unrelatedly, the other amusing fact is that when the ISS goes overhead (256 miles high at perigee), it is much closer to me than Glasgow (450 miles away).
The point of any article isn't just its factual content; it's the hidden message from the way it's said. I don't know if you intended to say it the way you did when you started off with the comment about poverty in the first two sentences, but by doing so, you set the tone for the rest of your article. (You also didn't expand on that tidbit so it kind of leaves your audience wondering why you mentioned it.)
I like the rest of the article though.
The comment about poverty was compatible with believing it was deliberate and evil, careless, or excusable but unfortunate.
Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of generalization from the subjective inferences made from your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others, presumptuous?
I'm getting tired of the progressive tendency to read offence, bigotry, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. into every little word & minutiae of nuance uttered by others. It's on the verge of induced pareidolia for outrage & victimhood.
Do you reside or hail from one of the aforementioned countries, or are you merely "signal boosting" and getting outraged on their behalf?
No, you're just being stupid.
This isn't a new issue. There's an episode of The West Wing about the evils of the Mercator projection. It aired 22 years ago.
When you write an essay doing nothing more than repeating a several-decades-old cliche, people are going to assume you don't have anything to say other than the content of the cliche they heard decades ago. And they will be right.
However it contributes to a misunderstanding that may in some way favor richer countries, and that could be a reason why nobody's trying very hard to focus kids' exposure on more accurate maps.
The mechanism I'm alluding to is a sense that "this place is very big, and so it's reasonable that it controls more than other places." It's not a highly-developed intellectual analysis, but more of a gut-level conception that informs casual interpretation of news and events.
It was called out multiple times in my geography glasses in the 80s that the flat contiguous map was wrong and we spent lots of time looking at globes and North or South Pole centered maps.
Nobody is being oppressed or underrepresented by this projection. This isn’t an episode of the west wing.
And?
The trade-offs between longpolling and websockets are rarely discussed outside of very small cohorts. The tradeoff between wankel-engines and piston-based motors are rarely discussed. The tradeoffs between oak and pearwood are rarely discussed.
That's why our society has division of labor and people becoming experts in their topics.
And I am pretty sure experts on cartography have discussed the different merits and tradeoffs and converged on Mercator for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't care. It works, I can use it, and as long as no one can point out a tangible problem with it, I see no reason to worry about it. Same as the cartographer doesn't need to know or care why I decided that the chatapp he installed uses longpolling to communicate with the backend instead of a websocket. Same as I don't need to know or care why the carpenter who made my desk used oak instead of pear or rosewood.
And seeing countries as smaller or bigger than they are isn't a problem in my eyes. I can reasonably expect an educated person to know that maps are 3D->2D projections and are thus distorted. If I want to know the exact size, I can always look it up. I don't have a more or less favourable view of a country or its people based on the countries apparent size on a map.
That’s a fun hypothesis, but is there actually data supporting (1) that “a vast majority” of westerners misperceive country size in this way, and (2) that specifically such a perception causes them to consider foreigners to be unimportant?
Although implicit bias exists, studies show its impact on the real world is much smaller than commonly believed.
And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed study, or similarly supported source for this statement.
Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the world.
I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft" sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any effects, much less design a viable study that demonstrates causation.
I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly convincing unless we lived in a universe where people told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding people in other countries?"
Actually 90%!
Something that jumps out at me with the size is that the arctic regions are often viewed as huge and massive. However, when viewed with their true size, it greatly highlights just how fragile they are.
If you've ever played Risk, the Amero-Eurocentrism is extreme.
https://cdn.matthewhaeck.com/content/images/2015/02/risk.jpg
https://freeprintableaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/risk-...
North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa. Europe: 7 territories, as large as Africa. USA: 3 territories, Canada: 5, Australia: 2 China, India, Brazil which are all very large: 1
This time the reason why Europeans must hate and destroy themselves is … spins the wheel … that maps are flat and the planet is not.
European people and culture all over that planet is very mentally sick and self-destructive. Any individual person that exhibited even slightly as mentally ill mentalities as Europeans, we would immediately seek help for them.
Mercator is UX optimized for naval navigation. Besides street navigation (where projection is irrelevant) I would posit that most people use maps for human geography reasons- what countries are next to Senegal, what kind of border does Thailand have with Malaysia, etc.
In the use case of understanding geopolitical borders Mercator isn’t optimized for that.
Asking why people are dissatisfied with mercator is like asking why my grandma is dissatisfied with the command line interface on the Linux laptop I got her. Doesn’t she know it’s the best for programmers??
Why are we trading off the accuracy of political borders for navigating by rhumb lines?
I personally feel like a better projection would be one that basically ignored or distorted the oceans. On google maps there’s no reasons why the proportions of the Atlantic or Pacific would be relevant.
So do you mean that the length and orientation of the borders is the least distorted with the Mercator projection?
I’m actually not sure how a different projection would distort a country’s border. But for example I’m not putting a ruler against my screen and I don’t know if I need to know if a border is oriented North or not.
Mostly my point is, are we rendering maps for real users’ use cases or backwards rationalizing the status quo? Besides the level of effort that would be involved in changing it, can’t think of any real defense of the use Mercator projection itself in its current context.
Some other comments references street maps that are grids, so a non-mercator projection would bend a grid of streets- this makes sense- but again, the main critique is around the relative size of countries- i.e. the look of the map tiles only when zoomed out sufficiently far. Maybe this is the main UX hurdle- in google maps to change the projection above some level of zoom.
I want relative size of everything to be mostly correct. But I could take Africa being 5-10% smaller simply because of its relative size.
All while the East and West of Cities to be accurate. i.e ALL of continental South America lies east of the state of Michigan.
They're not complaining about what they can use for themselves.
They are complaining about what is in mainstream use (in schools, websites, books, documentaries, and so on) and thus what kinds of perception people get.
Just use another projection? Mercator is everywhere, nothing else.
And yes, size of countries is important too (eg. how people fear Russia because it seems large and discount the importance of Africa because it's next to the equator).
What an exaggeration. Mercator may be the most common, but Winkel and Alders are both commonly encountered in the United States.
People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall?
"If size is your thing, use some other projection!" This is basically exactly what the people "hung up" on the Mercator projection are saying! We should be using other projections! It seems a totally reasonable thing to point out to me.
Are world history classes favoring Mercator? Are newscasts using Mercator in background images? Are wall maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing answers!)
As a kid I often encountered oval‐shaped world maps which obviously weren’t Mercator (most likely Robinson or Winkel tripel). And road maps of the United States had curved borders, not straight borders, so those obviously weren’t Mercator either (possibly Alders). And I had globes both at home and at school. So while Mercator is certainly common, and it’s worth explaining tradeoffs in map projection especially in an educational context, I question whether it’s actually as universal as people here are saying.
> We should be using other projections!
Are we not?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_project...
Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps.
Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred around Antarctica: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...
Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection.
[1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others)
[2] https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343348
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...
maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator projection is problematic, I got news for you.
This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass. That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in this corridor is a policy failure.
I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build for people. Almost everything about our built environment is optimized for cars and the result is sprawl. The cause is our public policies, building regulations, and zoning.
It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because people don't try to commute across the country, just like people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin every day. The vast majority of travel is local and occasionally regional.
Funny thing is that Canada used to have that public transit infrastructure, from big cities even into tiny little towns. The country was built on it!
We eventually ripped it up because it turns out people liked driving cars more. And I posit that they still do. If the will was there, it could be rebuilt, but it turns out moaning is a lot easier.
And fuck all the suffering along the way? Honestly Canada needs to address that before it can even begin to start thinking about more immigration. Canada is not even vaguely equipped to handle more people as it stands now.
Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common.
On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs that?
It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the city but also the socio-political history of it. I would definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you know.