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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.
> 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"
> That's the point of the post.
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.
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.
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So...?
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.
It literally does. Dont play ignorant.
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.
[1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.NTAzNDg...
Nobody looks at a map before saying “most of the world is experiencing X”. This is a fantasy straw man.
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.
No it’s not. Nobody cares about Greenland despite it being larger than all of Europe on the projection.
Well I actually used to think - before being educated about map constraints and the Mercator projection - that "Wow Greenland is HUGE".
How old were you when you learned that though? I thought the same thing until we were shown why it’s misleading in like the 4th grade.
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> Greenland is not Africa.
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.
> if you want to learn.
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.
Obviously not. And nobody said that. Talk about straw men.
People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.
The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that it's somehow connected.
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.
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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...)
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.)
I like the rest of the article though.
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.
Probably eddythompson80 is not Tomas Pueyo.
The comment about poverty was compatible with believing it was deliberate and evil, careless, or excusable but unfortunate.
> People have a problem
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.
Did you read the post? I didn't think it was too subtle. Especially because it was so out of place.
Maybe we are using different maps of this literary territory.
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> 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.
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.
Agree. Most of the general-public wall maps I see out there use equal-area projs.
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.
Really? In my entire lifetime I’ve seen maybe five? Including the one hanging up in my childhood home. Even Google Maps uses Mercator by default.
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.
I had mostly seen this projection, until i grew up.
https://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Political-World-Map-3360....
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> The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small cohorts
Not true. They're honestly discussed all the time to the point of becoming tiresome.
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).
Right? Is there a person above 25 that hasn’t seen the episode (or clip) from The West Wing about map projections at this point?
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.
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
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.
Ah, oops, that should say 2018, not 2023.
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.
It is a TV show from 1999 that centered on the literal office of the same name that the US President holds court in.
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'm in my thirties and I've never even heard of that show. I'm from Sweden, by the way.
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This is certainly not the first time I’ve seen the topic on HN…
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.
> 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.
Is it that surprising/arbitrary though?
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'
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…
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 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.
Globes are a lot more rare than maps.
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> 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?"
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.
I think most people know what a globe is. And that a globe is not a 2D map, even though they might not be able to articulate that.
this almost like we should use another map in school. but I sure this is contained in geology of high school.
> 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.)
> But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
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).
> 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.
> But this is obviously not true.
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.
> 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.
There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.
Assuming I've converted [1] and [2] correctly into this SQLite3 database and queried it correctly, not really, no.
| name | gdp_pos | gdp | land_pos | land |
|----------------|---------|----------|----------|---------|
| United States | 1 | 26854599 | 4 | 9147593 |
| China | 2 | 19373586 | 3 | 9596961 |
| Japan | 3 | 4409738 | 62 | 377976 |
| Germany | 4 | 4308854 | 63 | 357114 |
| India | 5 | 3736882 | 7 | 3287263 |
| United Kingdom | 6 | 3158938 | 79 | 242495 |
| France | 7 | 2923489 | 49 | 543940 |
| Italy | 8 | 2169745 | 72 | 301339 |
| Canada | 9 | 2089672 | 2 | 9984670 |
| Brazil | 10 | 2081235 | 5 | 8515767 |
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
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.
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...
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Seriously, a loglog plot? Even in that, there is a seriously wide dispersion to your correlation. And then look at the same data on a linear plot.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...
> The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.
datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".
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")
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)
Thanks for double checking. I ran out of steam on the convo heh.
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>That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?
If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting over it?
History was spent fighting over valuable resources, not sheer size.
No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are huge.
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”.
But I’m not discussing “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).
Because you used phrases like “really important” and “more important”. It sounds very juvenile.
> 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.
On what are you basing that?
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.
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!)
> But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
Can you elaborate on that ?
Did you think bigger = better ?
> 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.
Exactly.
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.
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!
and all maps are WRONG
And also Mercator remains popular because everyone is used to it and nobody actually cares that Greenland isn't really half the size of africa
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.
> 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.
"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.
> We should be using other projections!
Are we not?
If you ask an american to imagine a world map, they are imagining the mercator projection if they can imagine anything at all.
Your “nuh‐uh” is a weak response to an American anecdote.
Can't argue with that.
Even those plastic vacuformed relief maps distorts things... otherwise you probably wouldn't notice the mountains.
I wonder if Projection of Earth is the wrong way to do a map for average person. Where we dont use it for navigation.
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.
Also 80% of the population lives in the northern hemisphere. It's not an evil scheme to cheat the 20% who live down there.
> Also 80% of the population lives in the northern hemisphere. It's not an evil scheme to cheat the 20% who live down there.
Actually 90%!
Feels like you're pretending that Amero-Eurocentrism is not a thing, that there is no agenda or bias to be examined or criticized.
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
The fact that you had to pick an example from a casual board game from 1957 kind-of shows how much of a non-issue this is.
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.
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>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).
> Just use another projection? Mercator is everywhere, nothing else.
What an exaggeration. Mercator may be the most common, but Winkel and Alders are both commonly encountered in the United States.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_project...
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.
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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.
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.
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This article doesn't touch on the actual reasons why Mercator is still in widespread use:
* It was the first widespread projection because of its practical use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something considered somewhat inconsequential.
* Mercator and its cousin Web Mercator are extremely simple and fast to calculate relative to other projections. Compare the formula for Web Mercator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formul...) to Equal Earth, an excellent compromise projection for general use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formula...). Web Mercator is very easy to generate and serve tiled maps out of, Equal Earth and the like require somewhat non-trivial engineering to make serving those maps at scale to users in a web browser economical and quick.
* Preserving angles is legitimately important still for large scale (very zoomed in) road maps. Projections which preserve size can cause things like 90 degree road intersections to render at very strange angles which confuses drivers. Mercator and Web Mercator are therefore excellent choices of projection for local road navigation, which is by far the most common use of maps today for most people.
I strongly recommend folks interested in map projections to read this from Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections. Google Maps now has similar features, but both companies relied on Mercator for many years with good reasons before technology caught up and better solutions became available.
No map shown to a driver at the detail level of navigating intersections should have to care about projections much. At that small a scale earth is approximately flat, and any half decent projection should have minimal distortions of any kind.
You can read about why projections still very much matter for large scale (which is what I think you meant; small scale would be something that shows you whole countries and not used for road navigation) maps in the article I linked. Google Maps tried out an alternative projection back when it was still Keyhole and ran into problems with angular distortion when zoomed in. The original post is sadly lost to Google shutting down their product forums, but here's a quote from a Google Maps engineer on their use of Mercator and why it matters:
The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While [Mercator] distorts a “zoomed-out view” of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc… so we’re sticking with this projection for now.
Sourced from https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/map-and-reality-distort..., but there are other citations of the same quote as well.
Why does Apple have the only map (that I know of) that projects Earth as a ball, as it is? It seems like a very obvious solution.
In the 90s, my family (inveterate roadtrippers) always kept a Rand McNally road atlas in the car. Each page had a map covering (usually) a whole state. I don’t know what projection it used—Albers, perhaps?—but I remember as a child wondering why some straight‐looking state borders were actually subtly curved.
Navigation concerns these days may include getting as fast as possbile(i.e traveling on the geodesic), avoiding bad weather areas(forecasts), using the least fuel as possible etc..
Stereographic projection(of the half sphere where the origin and destination lies on) solves the geodesic issue, and it's different from the Meractor
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:
The video quality of that clip was so bad I uploaded a new 1080p version to YouTube: https://youtu.be/dxhWybPCEpI
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
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.
Doh! Thanks for the spot. The 2nd part is actually from a different scene, but I combined them both and updated the links above.
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.
> as well as a ton of navigational utility
Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?
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...
A globe is not a map projection.
With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.
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.
A globe IS a map projection. It's the projection of the surface of the planet onto a sphere.
Except Mercator wasn't German.
He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.
"5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594"
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".
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 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
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.
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So... government cheese?
And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.
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.
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.
[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
Maybe instead of putting Europe in the middle we could do something sensible like put the split left-right edges down the middle of the widest ocean.
>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
Fyi China calls itself 'Zhongguo' — literally 'Middle Kingdom' (Country)
The vast majority of items are manufactured in Asia now, especially globes. By your logic, should they unilaterally start printing Asia in the center?
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...
Saying there is a bias is not an accusation of wrong doing or "demonization".
Not necessarily, but usually. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422476 linked a clip from the West Wing that blames biased Eurocentric maps for perpetuating colonialism.
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!
This isn’t my logic, it’s the logic of the map designers.
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.
First you said the center is decided by who made the maps.
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?
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!
> Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem.
They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:
https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...
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.
That is the default map in Japan, just search google images for 世界地図
I recall that being reasonably common in New Zealand when I was growing up.
Almost no one lives in the south so they are never swapped.
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If you nake a map for your navigation, what would you put in center?
Your starting point or any other point?
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.
It is fiction. Relax and enjoy the show.
The only way I could enjoy that farce is after multiple, life-alteringly serious concussions.
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:
That reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map: https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536...
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.
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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.
That's why I put this map on my kid's wall: https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-classic-pacific-centered
We live in Europe where the default map is Atlantic-centric so I wanted to make sure he got a different perspective.
Give him a globe! I remember playing with a globe as kid and trying to position it so I could see only water. But that is just one option.
The geocentric model does not put humans in the center though.
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.
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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.
He doesn't often do anything. He died in 1996. I've read a few of his books and I don't get this impression at all.
> 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.
> The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
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
Probably 99% of the time I look at, or use, a map, it's at a scale where the Mercator projection is entirely fair, and highly useful. For probably half of the uses I have for maps, whatever distortion relative to an actual globe it introduces isn't even noticable. Then there are the rare times I look at a map at something approaching hemispheric scale. But come on, people, I've been told since 4th grade about the distortions of a world map at that scale. I literally can remember Ms. Kraft in 4th grade explaining how the map made Greenland look nearly as big as Africa, when in fact it was more like the size the larger countries in Africa.
And, anyone who has traveled internationally much at all is well aware that, say, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than it looks on a world map - because we fly, for the most part, great circle routes, and flight times give you a very good measure of how far things are. First time you look at a flight to Sydney, the size of the Pacific Ocean, relative to the North Atlantic, pretty much hits you over the head.
So, while I find articles like this kinda fun for a couple of minutes (what strange comparison will this author pull out of their hat to make the point that flat maps distort world persectives?), it's mostly for entertainment value. There really isn't much to see.
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.
See these interesting answers to get more information about the terms Upper/Lower Egypt: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...
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.
Great example. And the Alemannisch dialect is "hoch hoch Deutsch," or extra-high German, being from way up in the German-speaking Swiss Alps.
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.
<https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58426/why-north-always-m...>
I received a gift from a friend in Uruguay that is from the clockmaker Girosur. The clock runs backwards, rhetorically asking “why is North up?”
"Clockwise" is the angular direction that the shadow of a northern-hemisphere sundial appears to move.
Right, that's one of the points that clock is making.
one look at that clock and I'm rhetorically convinced, it does no good to reverse things, let's rotate that clockwise and keep north up!
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).
I always thought Upper/Lower Egypt referred to regions that were upstream/downstream relative to the Nile.
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.
> This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps.
I’m not convinced. Historically, Arabic and Egyptian maps had south on the top (https://muslimheritage.com/maps/)
Brings to mind one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/07
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.
I wonder if anyone ever came up with an elaborate mechanism connected to a pen.
To hijack discussion, here's another quirk of mapping: Border disputes can be uplifted into state law. Google adjusts how it renders maps into IN economy IPs because its illegal to show maps about Kashmir which imply Pakistan's claims over the territory are legitimate.
I've had to adjust slide-ware for use in the Indian subcontinent.
A different kind of "distortion" but very real.
Projections can be complicated. I value mapping tools which let you re-center a global map off 0° Longitude. I also value maps which manage to fit all of the Pac-rim island economies into some kind of view: No way is land mass or distance to scale, to usefully show this region.
If you believe maps, Hawaii is almost as big as Alaska and just offshore of the Catalina Islands. It also seems to have a very squared-off moat, maybe its a border wall...
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
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.
I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes.
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!
I prefer a similar one, the Cahill-Keyes projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...
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.
I printed the Dymaxion SVG on A3+ card paper. Makes a great icosahedron!
Dymaxion map: one island, one ocean.
Yeah, it must be the Mercator projection why the global south is poor.
Never mind New Zealand and Australia...
Never mind that the whole post-USSR Asia is on the same level as some African countries...
It must be those damn maps.
Actually the claim was that the global poor are close to the equator. Given how little motivation I have to even move when it's very hot, and how moving is required to generate wealth, and how recently A/C was invented, it's probably not totally a coincidence.
But yea Mercator isn't the problem.
I mean it’s pretty easily explained by the Industrial Revolution starting in Europe, which is very far north. The explanation that heat induces laziness is a bit suspect given that in older eras many of the most prosperous civilizations were near the equator. (Egypt, Sumeria, the Persians, Indus River Valley Civilizations, etc.)
I don't really know how to compare the prosperity of ancient Sumeria and Denmark, but ancient Rome did conquer ancient Egypt and the reverse never happened.
The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get more data unfortunately.
After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global superpower.
Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to have done better at progress and wealth as compared to Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done well lately, but maybe because of a/c - https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
This seems to come up a lot lately. I don't see why this matters. If you're doing something like charting a flight path where it actually matters what the real sizes are, I'm sure you have access to the correct information. If you're just going about your normal life as a dental hygienist or something, what difference does it make if Russia is not as big as you assume?
> Are these maps chosen for good reasons and these distortions are a side-effect, or are they purposefully deceitful? Are there better maps we could choose? I’ll explore this in the premium article this week. Subscribe to read it!
Ah, I see. It's just bait to drive subscriptions. You can read for free on Wikipedia about why the Mercator projection is useful for navigation.
What is wrong with people that they assume there is some evil cabal of mustache-twisting villains who deliberately make misleading maps?
A good collection, I especially like the Mediterranean-in-Australia one.
Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We See the World" you should see what not having a map does!
If you think only in Mercator (e.g.), it's easy to fall into erroneous concepts. A great example of this came when, years ago, I had a business trip from Texas where I live to Dubai.
A friend asked, cleverly aware of the distance involved, if the flight went east or west -- because if you have Flat Map Brain, that's what you default to, right?
The answer is "neither."
The route went mostly north from Houston, crossed Canada and began trending south (without turning!) over / around Iceland; we approached Dubai from the north, more or less.
I remember the flight back home going over Iran, but it was at least a decade ago and regional tensions may have made them change that. This site
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211
shows them avoiding Iranian airspace now, but the flight path seems otherwise about the same.
This site shows the shortest path between 2 airports: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=IAH-DXB
I'd imagine your flight would've avoided Russia, afaik even before the war they were obnoxious about who can fly over them/how much it would cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U
I've no recollection about flying in Russian airspace, but I definitely did snap a phonecam pic of the seatback map showing us flying between the Elburz mountains and Tehran. This was in 2012, so 11 years ago (per the date of the pic I found).
The path suggested by that position absolutely implies flight over Russian territory, but obviously I have no data beyond that. It seems unlikely that an airliner would, like, zigzag around; n.b. that I was on Emirates, not a US carrier, and Russia (and other countries) probably doesn't treat them like they would an airline run out of a NATO country.
Or, at least, probably didn't in 2012. No idea what the rules are now.
EDIT: I found this article which notes that, at least as of a year ago, Emirates was flying TO Russia, so presumably flights through Russian airspace en route to other places were okay as well before the war.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-...
Well, zig-zags happen, almost all airlines avoided flying over Ukraine after the MH17 shootdown, and no flights fly straight from point to point like what gcmap.com would show, they follow "roads", e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks . It's also possible they'd avoid Russia if the detour costs less than the overfly fee.
Yeah Emirates didn't join in the sanctions, so they can still fly to, and over Russia. A few weeks ago there was an Air India that was flying from India to the US over Russia, and had to make an emergency landing in Russia, there were concerns whether they'd be allowed to import a replacement engine into Russia because the sanctions.
I studied geography in undergrad and grad school. At the beginning a friend and I decided upon a challenge to use as many different projections as possible for labs and reports.
I got to 53, I think. Only once did a TA say it was an inappropriate choice and, yeah, it was. I used an arctic planar projection to map a part of southern Ontario. It was so comically skewed.
By the end I had actually learned something: my perception of what was “correct” was largely biased from growing up with Mercator and Albers maps. While some options are more ideal than others given the context, there’s a _lot_ of useful alternatives than what we all picture in our heads.
The gif at the top was very interesting. The shrinking of the North America and Russia were really surprising to me, as I had always looked at them as much more significant land masses.
A little off-topic from projections, but I just returned from a trip to Seoul a few days ago, and I found a simplified subway map to be so much easier to use than Google Maps' more realistic-but-less-relevant map. Subway map design has always intrigued me in that it ignores so much in terms of position and proportion, but at the same time can relay the needed information so much more clearly.
Every kid should have a globe to understand countries and distortion better.
They all do.[1]
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.
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 ?
> that page failing to load for me (Firefox)
Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine.
Anything interesting in the console?
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.
Just the defaults, with regard to that; so I think not? I see in about:config: "privacy.resistFingerprinting=false".
Same on the other profile.
Good to know about, though (:
now I wonder if it’s easier to have a globe or internet access
Every adult should have a globe which secretly can be opened to find a bottle of whiskey!
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?
The claim that "when you look at the Pacific Ocean on a globe, you only see water" is incorrect.
I've seen a few attepts to make this claim appear as if it were real. Like the image in the article, it's just a perspective projection from a low altitude.
If you actually grab a globe, you'll see there is no way to cut it in half with only water on one side. If there were a way to do that, we could save a lot of money on globes by just not making that half.
Right, but when you look at a globe, you're actually seeing less than half of it, unless it is small enough or you are far enough.
If you're closer, you can definitely see less land. The "perspective projection" is correct.
You mostly see water.
This is a very Hawaii phobic point of view
I really hate these mercator articles. This one is particularly egregious because it takes a potentially interesting subject and just ignores every detail. No mention that they are talking only about one specific map projection. No mention of it by name even. No mention of what trade offs projections must make. No exploration of other projections. No mention of historically why we commonly use this one, or what others could be appropriate. Obsession with area above all else as if what area a country occupies on a map is important. No support for this view either, map area is implied to be all important. General implication that it's some kind of colonialist sneer at Africa. One could just as easily write an article about how unfair it is that Africa gets to be at the centre of the map, again without explaining why on earth that matters.
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.
It'd be pretty cool if they can show the map in the Mercator projection with a center the user can choose, as well as which way is up...
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
<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.)
> Maps distort how we see the world
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.
Had this same thought. Our own eyeballs distort how we see the world.
Fun article. Surprised it doesn't mention the Peters projection map.
You cannot have both area fidelity and shape fidelity to represent countries on a map.
If you want area fidelity, the Gall-Peters [1] projection and the Peters world map [2] (1952) by Arno Peters are the way to visualize countries, whereas common maps focus on shape-fidelity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector [2] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-p...
There are plenty of other equal-area map projections. Several of them are less shape-distorting than the Peters projection. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection. Peters did a great job of publicity, as witness the common but completely false idea that the Peters projection is "the way" to make an equal-area plane map, but there's nothing particularly great about the projection itself.
I bought a couple globes in the last year and am glad I did.
I bought this small one for my desk (16$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique – every so often I rotate it slightly so that I'm staring at a different part of the globe when I look below my monitor.
I bought this one for the dining room (50$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe – the kids can spin it around whenever we talk about a country.
I have a poster of a South-up map[1], which is fun to look at and wiggle those expectations in my mind from time to time.
Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection.
[1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others)
Makes me wonder why South isn't intuitively "up" for folks in the Southern Hemisphere.
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.
Save reason they observe Yule at midsummer.
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.
Use a globe.
It’s 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a virtual globe.
Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you’re not likely going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...
Well, if you define up and down as the axis perpendicular to the ecliptic, there is an up and down in the solar system.
Kinda? It's still arbitrary which one we think of as "up" and which we think of as "down," though, right?
Regarding "How would fish draw a map?" (image: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... since there's no heading to link to)
Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article described how genes are transmitted globally despite having separate continents (iirc the waters are shallow enough near the north pole and around oceania to form one long line along all shores), but I can't remember it well enough to find it again. Tried checking it elsewhere but all the relevant-sounding Wikipedia articles don't seem to talk about the ratio of deep sea animals to near-shore animals. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?
You've linked the wrong image (off by one); that one is the sarcastic depiction of the “international community”.
Oh crap, thanks for letting me know. Didn't see it in time for the edit window though :( if only HN had notifications or just lets you edit, y'know, your own posts
It's a comprehensive telling of something that's becoming more commonly known. There's little sinister intent, more a giving readers information to conclude themselves. Some countries, Japan and USA come to mind, put themselves at the centre of 'their' world maps. Also, the distorted headshot is incredibly demonstrative. And seeing how much different sizes appear if you alter the orientation.
This article misses what I think is actually the bigger "distortion"[1]: the idea that an externalized, view of Earth as an object in space should be the default way of visualizing our place in the universe. This is itself a distortion based on a long, long lineage of philosophical-religious ideas on how the world is constructed and how human beings fit into it. It seems to me that we could construct any number of other maps that are either more truthful, more useful, or more in-line with human thriving (eudaimonia) [2].
In other words, if all maps are distortions, is the one we're using actually the one we should be using?
1. I don't really like this word, as it implies that there is a real shape of the world and that every other perspective is somehow wrong.
Mildly interesting then I got to then end and saw the "come back next week for my premium on article on WHY" and couldn't help feeling this was basically just a content mill article full of factoids trying to get you to give some random guy on the internet money.
Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD
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.
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...
This is dumb. Every elementary school classroom has a globe. We see how big the countries are on globes routinely.
Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many more maps online.
Especially the southern hemisphere, as their head is normally above the globe
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.
Kids are short. Australians turn maps so they are south side up anyway.
Obligatory xkcd, with on-topic alt-text: https://xkcd.com/977/
For a more distorted way to see the world, try: http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/
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.
Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...
It's actually less distorted in some ways :)
May I suggest a term for this sort of article: "mapsplaining".
I have known about the distortions of the Mercator projection since LBJ was president, and about ever ten or fifteen years someone feels compelled to announce it as news.
With the advent of the paperless office, the increasing ubiquity of screens, and the steady progress in 3D rendering performance – there will soon be little need for 2D map projections. We just render the Earth as a sphere and do some perspective projection.
Screens are still flat, so it would still be a 2d projection.
Yes, but 3D perspective projection is what our eyes do anyway, so there are no unnatural distortions. Paintings and video games use it to create realistic images of 3D space.
Great article, with one big problem: it's guilty of the exact issue it tries to address: assuming specific map projections as the default.
It starts:
> Maps twist our perception of the world.
> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer—seem smaller than they are.
This is obviously not true for all map projections. It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. It's probably true for some other map projections, but definitely not for all.
The article doesn't even mention the name Mercator until its second half.
> It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives.
The Mercator family is "the best" map family for those who navigate by rhumb lines.
I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given the vast numbers of GPS enabled devices.
I stressed family, of course, as there is a continuum of Mercator projection maps .. The (specific) Mercator Projection that wall hangs and everbody discusses whenever this comes up is just one of many and whose parameters were chosen to weight the Northern Hemisphere for the benefit of US-Euro traders.
We don't navigate by rhumb lines, we navigate by directions and local shapes, and those are the important things that stay the same in Mercator. If some angles on the map are smaller than they should be while others are larger, that's confusing. Mercator keeps this consistent.
Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty terrible.
Of course today with computerised navigation, we don't really have to use a flat projection at all; it would be even more accurate to calculate every view directly from a globe. Have your own custom projection based on where you are.
But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it. Or something Mercatory, at least; centering on Greenwich and having north up is less relevant, although deviating from the latter would probably confuse a lot of people.
And outside of navigation, we really shouldn't ever be using Mercator. I'm not sure if that happens. When I was in school, I remember we had a Goode-Homolosine map on the wall, which is an excellent choice for that. Every map projection has its purposes that it's good at, and those it's not. But especially with the ubiquity of Google Maps, it's not surprising that people get more exposure to Mercator.
> But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it.
For you, perhaps.
As a professional geographer since ~ 1980 (ish) I did enjoy the NZMG (1949) that remained in use until 2001 - it was centred down the mean common spine of the North and South Islands and minimised distortion across the entirety of the New Zealand land and waters [1]. It was one of only three (IIRC) complex-number polynomial expansion projections in common use - but they're ideal for certain land form shapes.
I've seen a lot of local ellipsoid+datum+projection mapping systems globally - I was doing global geophysical mapping during the transition to WGS84 and got into the weeds wrt transforms between that and the 300+ mapping systems commonly in use about the globe prior to todays uniformity.
Pilots, of course, use aeronautical charts based on LCC (Lambert conformal conic projection) as straight lines there approximate Great Circle routes, satellite agencies use variations on the projections of John P. Snyder [2].
I'd humbly suggest that if you honestly believe that the Mercator family is the be all and end all for navigation then perhaps you're in need of further reading [2].
[1] https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...
You're right. For local navigation, local projections are of course best. I was stuck on the unspoken assumption of using a global map projection. When dealing with local maps, there's absolutely no reason to do that.
But those local map projections only work for that region. As soon as you want seamless transitions to other regions, these local projections don't work so well anymore.
Unrelated but I love that "The True Size of Africa" diagram lists area in "m km^2", also known as "Mm^2". It's interesting that there are some SI prefix and unit combinations that are just not used.
Dude, that is wild! I mean, I know about the distortion but still watching Indonesia span that width is crazy. Or the bits about Brazil's Northernmost and Easternmost, or China's Westernmost.
Great collection of illustrations.
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)
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.
The size of Canada really isn’t a valid excuse for Canada’s poor public transit, nor is Canada’s population.
Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
> 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.
> 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.
> housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
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.
Never said that there is no suffering along the way. It is terrible and we've made mistakes, but there's only so much scope I can fit into a comment!
Look at this map, it tells another story: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjeXxfbXkAg30EZ.png
> This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada
I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
NB: Canada is 40 millions, not thousands. Likewise Europe (variously defined) is 700 million.
I'm from the Netherlands and just saw our tiny land shrink even further. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this swampy river delta actual land.
Anyway, I've personally experienced the shock of the true size of Africa. Younger me only had a few flights to Spain under my belt and then went on an adventurous trip to South Africa. I figured it would just be a few hours more. How wrong I was.
Distorts nothing, it gives a particular view of the world. All our views of the world are highly localised by the very nature of our existence.
We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.
My current favourite alternative projection is Spilhaus, eg https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/wp-content/uploads/Map-P...
(Edit: now I see TFA mentioned it, just not by name)
Is this the same Pueyo who shaped Covid response through “the hammer and the dance”? People still consider this guy relevant?!?
Somehow I'm reminded of these "How Big Africa[/Texas] Really Is" memes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2365729-relative-map-sizes-h...
See also: "Long Chile"
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
Maps distort how we see the world: This is the world of perception and representation - it's all "distorted." But most useful representations, like the Mercator, are "lies that make us realize the truth" [or some facet thereof].
> We should be wary of flattening balls!
I agree.
I have a globe. But even that doesn't show the true distortion, which is that the Earth is wrinkled. For example, Korea is mountainous and so its actual surface area is much greater than its apparent surface area when looking at either a map or a globe.
A nice addition to this page would be the fact that Maine is the US state closest to Africa.
Extremely well put-together article. Contains many examples I've seen in disparate sources before.
I will use it as an example of how data visualization can distort.
I often wonder if similar things happen with tabular data, but we just can't "see" it so clearly.
The true size is excellent way to views these and is a major source for this article https://www.thetruesize.com/
Is there a phenomenon that describes why I feel a sense of unease when I see the other maps? Seeing the various projections and changes of those maps left me _very_ uncomfortable and I'm not sure why.
So, just use an orthographic projection and concede that projecting a globe onto a flat surface with boundaries is a futile affair.
Google Maps on the Web defaults to this; so does Apple Maps.
The closer to Ecuador the less higher entropy so not having focus on productive work but maybe just enjoy the sun. Also because of heat people tend to be more violent.
All maps are created with selective purpose.
The only thing that can possibly represent all purposes simultaneously is the world itself.
Accordingly, every map is also a compromise.
More generally: All models are wrong, but some are useful.
-- George E. P. Box, in "Science and Statistics" (1976) <https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writi...> (PDF)
See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong>
Box apparently expanded on the notion in Box, G. E. P. (1979), "Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building", in Launer, R. L.; Wilkinson, G. N. (eds.), Robustness in Statistics, Academic Press, pp. 201–236, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-438150-6.50018-2, ISBN 9781483263366.
Full text online at <https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps....> (PDF)
A hot take perhaps but now I'm curious -- Is this an American/New World/Big-Ass-Country (I could see Russia/China caring) phenomenon?
A lot of British people, especially when being smug and nationalist online, speak about how their tiny island took over so many other big places.
I never asked a Frenchman and obviously it's in bad form to ask the Germans...
The Scandis ""benefit"" the most from the distortion but never really had empire apart from in the neighboring areas, so I don't know if they ever think about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies?wprov... Everybody tried to take over the world in that era. Hell, the Scots had Panama at one point.
I'm not doing the math, but assuming it's correct, that's really impressive. It's all on perspective!
The only distortion is your idea that there's something that is not only an approximation.
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When I was in Google Maps, a popular interview question was "what's your favorite projection? (don't say Mercator)" I didn't get asked that one, fortunately.
Whenever I see one of those "the Earth from space" photos, I always think, "Wow, Africa is really big."
Good luck using a compass and using a projection other than mercator.
"The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski
To me a more interesting thing is that we always show “north” as “up” or at the “top”.
Even recognizing that it is “natural” given our use of compasses, one would think we can be more playful showing earth with different “up” orientation.
“The map is not the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski
Shame I had to get this far to see this quote. It should be in the original article!
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this is such an important point that rich countries don't want to spread that much.
my brain in hurting!
Wow. Mind blown
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