I think that it's supposed to demonstrate how inaccurate the Mercator projection (the one that's used on Google Maps) is at conveying relative size of continents. For example, Greenland looks enormous whereas it's actually quite small, while Africa looks much smaller than it is in reality.
Google uses this projection because it's best at preserving angles and shapes.
> But unlike a standard Mercator projection, you can substitute any point on earth as the "pole". (The initial view shows Boston as the pole point)
> Furthermore, this map cuts of much, much closer to the poles than normal, allowing you to see many more orders of magnitude of distortion.
> Because this yields a map several times taller than it is wide, it is shown sideways from its usual orientation.
> The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away.
> Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles.
> But I've often wondered what lies beyond those cut-offs... to make a map that didn't cut off but simply kept going. As the distortion progresses towards infinity, you would eventually reach the scale of cities, houses, insects, atoms...
> But of course that'd all be on a featureless expanse of ice. No map service even publishes image tiles for such extreme latitudes.
> To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole.
> This is called an oblique Mercator, and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the equator of the map to avoid distortion. But whereas others avoid distortion, we embrace it.
> Note how strange the oblique Mercator looks even without the increased cutoffs. The standard Mercator is so ingrained in the public consciousness that we perceive it as 'normal'. But once you shift the pole its ubiquitous distortion is laid bare.
> Lastly, increasing the cutoffs produces a map much taller than it is wide. So it is presented sideways here for easier viewing. (set the pole to the North Pole like usual to see this most clearly)
Very nice demonstration of the degree of distortion of the Mercator projection! Most Mercator projections cut off the poles to avoid showing that distortion, but here, the "pole" sits in the middle of New York City. (Or other selectable locations.)
I really enjoy explaining this to people (especially Americans when I'm talking about how comparable my home country, Australia, is in terms of land mass to mainland USA).
Showing them Bucky Fuller's dymaxion map is always fun.
Crashed FF (29.0.1) on Windows (7, SPs unknown): I run with cookies disabled, cliked on "temporarily allow" in Cookie Monster (1.2), FF died. Restarted, page took forever to load, slow script warnings, eventually closed tab.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] threadGoogle uses this projection because it's best at preserving angles and shapes.
> But unlike a standard Mercator projection, you can substitute any point on earth as the "pole". (The initial view shows Boston as the pole point)
> Furthermore, this map cuts of much, much closer to the poles than normal, allowing you to see many more orders of magnitude of distortion.
> Because this yields a map several times taller than it is wide, it is shown sideways from its usual orientation.
> The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away.
> Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles.
> But I've often wondered what lies beyond those cut-offs... to make a map that didn't cut off but simply kept going. As the distortion progresses towards infinity, you would eventually reach the scale of cities, houses, insects, atoms...
> But of course that'd all be on a featureless expanse of ice. No map service even publishes image tiles for such extreme latitudes.
> To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole.
> This is called an oblique Mercator, and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the equator of the map to avoid distortion. But whereas others avoid distortion, we embrace it.
> Note how strange the oblique Mercator looks even without the increased cutoffs. The standard Mercator is so ingrained in the public consciousness that we perceive it as 'normal'. But once you shift the pole its ubiquitous distortion is laid bare.
> Lastly, increasing the cutoffs produces a map much taller than it is wide. So it is presented sideways here for easier viewing. (set the pole to the North Pole like usual to see this most clearly)
Showing them Bucky Fuller's dymaxion map is always fun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
http://www.genekeyes.com/FULLER/Internet-specimens/dymaxion....
:( It looks really cool, I'll have to check it out at home.