There's already several, Gall Peters being the most (in)famous. Other than accurately showing size, such maps are pretty useless. Mercator is actually useful for navigation because it maintains angles, all "size accurate" projections have to sacrifice that.
You can see that any translation from 3D sphere to 2D plane will always create a tradeoff of geometry somewhere. E.g. Distorted shapes and lines, torn oceans, etc.
Wars are won with tanks^W drones, not by measuring the area in a map. Laypeople may be confused, but when a government decides to invade another country or add some economical penalty, they know the real data like real-world-surface, GDP, number of weapons, ...
Pretty neat.
One tip it took me a while to realize is that after you tap on a country, the compass rose (now the same color as the country) can be used to rotate it.
But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?
I think part of that is an illusion, since for something bowing upwards, the usualy anchor point of top left seems rotated clockwise.
But there is still a real rotation - look at wyoming or colorado for a perfect rectangle. My guess is the div element isn't quite centered - perhaps too much padding on the right edge, causing the center point to be off to the right. So when it bows you get the rotation bias
The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.
Not only in area, but also in population: about 200 million, 2/3 of the USA population. The population of our 5 largest cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte) is bigger than the 5 largest cities of the USA (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix):
It's useful for navigation in the open ocean without satnav or even a chronometer, which is what it was designed for in the 1500s. Not for much else.
Is the use of Mercator in schools common, globally? Based on what I've read on the internet it's common in the US, but I have no idea about other countries. In Finland I think I only ever saw Robinson or Winkel-tripel type compromise projections. Mercator was maybe used as an example of how projections distort things.
It preserves angles, which is what makes it useful in navigation. Mercator is bad at relative sizes for places far apart, but when you look at a small patch shapes are less distorted. For that reason, online maps use a version of Mercator.
I thought Mercator became popular due to online maps like Google using it. It's convenient for tiles because it's square.
I don't think I've ever seen a Mercator map of the world printed out, though. Is that seriously a thing? It looks completely ridiculous. Every poster I've seen has been a more rectangular projection like Robinson.
Google Maps doesn't use Mercator — it uses a 3D globe. If you zoom out you can see the whole globe and there doesn't seem to be any jump where the projection changes, or any distortion of country sizes.
Edit: I just noticed that Google Maps on Firefox and Chrome is indeed 3D, but on Safari it is 2D Mercator.
Wow - in my head, Australia was somehow ~20-25% the size of US (I'm from Europe) - really surprising, and shows how misleading the projection can be in this regard.
The real surprise is ~95% lives on 1/3 of that land. Other 1/3 is plateau, 1/3 is desert. An extra dumb derrived stat I like is about ~25% of the worlds smokers are concentrated on ~0.6% of earth's land mass (that 1/3 of PRC).
Australia and Canada are both slightly bigger but if you consider population density they are immense territories. Then there is Russia, which is in a league of its own. You don't see many "Check fuel. Next gas, xxx miles" signs in the US.
One of the rules I came up with while driving the coast of Aus a good while ago was just "always fill up". Oh and also "carry a jerry can of spare fuel"
The first bit came after one day when I skipped a servo and then it was over half my remaining fuel further along the road, I hadn't seen another and I realised "well I can't go back. Shit."
The second bit got expanded to two jerry cans after I had to use one because even though I made it to the servo in rural FNQ, it was 5.15pm and they were already closed. Thankfully that day the extra 20l got me to Port Douglas.
We do still have a few remnants of the imperial system - "90 mile straight" on the Nullabor comes to mind. The longest straight road in Aus, or maybe the world I don't know. When you're already suffering brainrot on your multi-day Nullabor drive, the announcement that you're not even going to have to turn the steering wheel for over an hour is... well it didn't fill me with joy!
I really enjoy this! I wish it would also support cities, it would help me get a better sense of the size of a city to compare it to one I'm familiar with already. But I guess city limits are less well defined that country limits. Anyway, great project!
That site only seems lock the zoom value of the two maps together, not correct for distortions. E.g. zoom in on Svalbard on one side and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other. Svalbard appears larger despite being many times smaller. This means if you zoom into Longyearbyen it will appear several times larger than it should compared to say Kinshasa.
Longyearbyen is a pathological example but it's quite easy to end up thinking a city in the UK is ~1.75 linearly and ~3x by area compared to one on the equator using this site.
Surely any city is small enough that projection distortion is negligible? So you can just open cities on two maps side by side and zoom in/out till the scales are equal.
same here, I was looking for a tool that does exactly that a few weeks ago. Ended up just comparing 2 google maps with same zoom level, but it's not practical at all. Open to any suggestion you may have!
What a nice well made tool. I was shocked how massive Algeria is! Maybe larger than half of Europe. And Tunisia which is a tiny country in my head, seems to be not tiny at all.
Why would Algeria's land size have anything to do with that?
Algeria is more than 80% desert and has a population of ~46 million. Non-desert area accounts for ~480k km^2 out of their ~2400k km^2 land . Europe has far more livable space than Algeria does. Spain is pretty comparable with a population of ~48 million in 505k km^2.
I get that there are political reasons, but "Algeria is big so Algerians shouldn't need to leave" is a pretty surface-level observation.
I don't think the poster meant it as a revenge thing. France at some point made it illegal to deny the Frenchness of Algeria, you could go to prison for this back then. The two countries have had a very long history of close relations with its all ups and downs, and many French lived in Algeria and Algerian lived in France. I have no connection to either of those countries I'm just interested in history.
If you drag something large over so it covers the south pole the shading can invert so that only the region covering the south pole is unshaded.
That's how I proved that the actual size of Australia is approximately 90% of the area of the globe. Who knew the mercator projection could be so confusing! :)
Nothing is "hijacked"; it just sets the hash to allow permalinks. It should probably actually load the state when pressing back (or replace the current entry instead of adding a new one). But that's just a bug and not malice, as some seem to assume.
I feel very lucky to have grown up with a huge (~ 75 cm diameter) globe as a centerpiece in the living room; I never ended up with Mercator-derived misconceptions in the first place.
I recommend everyone with even the slightest interest in the world or the need to understand things like time zones, seasons, flight paths etc. to get a globe, even just a small one. You just can't understand a non-Euclidean space by looking at projections and 3D globes on screens don't seem to cut it either.
> You just can't understand a non-Euclidean space by looking at projections
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, from a mathematical perspective you absolutely can. In fact, manifolds[0] are defined in terms of local coordinate charts. :-)
I rarely/never saw mercator projection as a kid. I think I probably saw mostly Robinson projection[1] as it seems that is what national geographic was using at the time. Mercator looks so completely wrong to me; I don't know why so many people use it. It seems to have gotten more common. Anyway, I agree that a globe is best.
Since 1973 there have been 9 changes to EU borders (in 1973, 1981, 1985, 1986, 1995, 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2020)
Since 1973, at least 69 sovereign states have been created or altered! That's not even counting states that have had multiple changes to their territory in that time.
It's interesting to me how the large countries are roughly similarly sized. Canada, Australia, US, Brazil, China, Russia, India are all within a factor of 2, and it shows when you drag it across eachother. India and Russia as outliers slightly.
It's about half of my state in Brazil (which is one of the smallest in the country). However, I've been to Belgium many times and it feels bigger. I think the key is the population density: 388/km^2 in Belgium vs 70/km^2 here. Like, yes, it's big, but empty space is truly boring.
It's interesting how Russia appears to only be about twice as large as the United States or China, but on a typical map it looks at least 3-4 times larger.
I've been using, and sharing, this site for several years. I think it's excellent. The two things I'd like to see are the provinces, at least in larger countries, and large bodies of water. I'd like to be able to drag Ontario, Lake Superior, the Caspian Sea, New South Wales, and so on, around the way you can with countries and US states.
I first discovered this about three months ago in a reddit comment under 'r/geography', and I still, from time to time, use it and enjoy it. Back then, I posted it here in HN, but zero traction!
Anyway, for those interested in previous discussions, here we are:
141 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadIt preserved rhumb lines.
Search for "equal-area" in the list of map projections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
You can see that any translation from 3D sphere to 2D plane will always create a tradeoff of geometry somewhere. E.g. Distorted shapes and lines, torn oceans, etc.
I used to say "No human being who has ever lived has made a consequential decision because 'Greenland big brah' and people just need to get over it."
But given the current administration, I...
Wars are won with tanks^W drones, not by measuring the area in a map. Laypeople may be confused, but when a government decides to invade another country or add some economical penalty, they know the real data like real-world-surface, GDP, number of weapons, ...
But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?
But there is still a real rotation - look at wyoming or colorado for a perfect rectangle. My guess is the div element isn't quite centered - perhaps too much padding on the right edge, causing the center point to be off to the right. So when it bows you get the rotation bias
This explains much of the current global political situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees
The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_munic%C3%ADpios_do_Br...
Is the use of Mercator in schools common, globally? Based on what I've read on the internet it's common in the US, but I have no idea about other countries. In Finland I think I only ever saw Robinson or Winkel-tripel type compromise projections. Mercator was maybe used as an example of how projections distort things.
I don't think I've ever seen a Mercator map of the world printed out, though. Is that seriously a thing? It looks completely ridiculous. Every poster I've seen has been a more rectangular projection like Robinson.
Edit: I just noticed that Google Maps on Firefox and Chrome is indeed 3D, but on Safari it is 2D Mercator.
You don't see that in Australia either: we don't use miles, and we don't call it 'gas'. Typically it would be "No fuel next X km"
The first bit came after one day when I skipped a servo and then it was over half my remaining fuel further along the road, I hadn't seen another and I realised "well I can't go back. Shit."
The second bit got expanded to two jerry cans after I had to use one because even though I made it to the servo in rural FNQ, it was 5.15pm and they were already closed. Thankfully that day the extra 20l got me to Port Douglas.
We do still have a few remnants of the imperial system - "90 mile straight" on the Nullabor comes to mind. The longest straight road in Aus, or maybe the world I don't know. When you're already suffering brainrot on your multi-day Nullabor drive, the announcement that you're not even going to have to turn the steering wheel for over an hour is... well it didn't fill me with joy!
See: https://thepeoplesrepublicofcouch.org/beaches/
Longyearbyen is a pathological example but it's quite easy to end up thinking a city in the UK is ~1.75 linearly and ~3x by area compared to one on the equator using this site.
I've been using _TrueSizeOf_ for years...
Algeria is more than 80% desert and has a population of ~46 million. Non-desert area accounts for ~480k km^2 out of their ~2400k km^2 land . Europe has far more livable space than Algeria does. Spain is pretty comparable with a population of ~48 million in 505k km^2.
I get that there are political reasons, but "Algeria is big so Algerians shouldn't need to leave" is a pretty surface-level observation.
That's how I proved that the actual size of Australia is approximately 90% of the area of the globe. Who knew the mercator projection could be so confusing! :)
Weird that back isn't restoring the state. Just stays the same for me.
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, from a mathematical perspective you absolutely can. In fact, manifolds[0] are defined in terms of local coordinate charts. :-)
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection
Geologically or geographically, there are 7 continents:
Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America, South America, and the mostly-sunken Zealandia.
Since 1973, at least 69 sovereign states have been created or altered! That's not even counting states that have had multiple changes to their territory in that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da... -> sort by date of latest territorial change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station
I first discovered this about three months ago in a reddit comment under 'r/geography', and I still, from time to time, use it and enjoy it. Back then, I posted it here in HN, but zero traction!
Anyway, for those interested in previous discussions, here we are:
(2020), 556 points, 266 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787
(2017), 193 points, 66 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973
(2019), 155 points, 49 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538
(2015), 105 points, 36 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024