
Mercator Puzzle - fferen
http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledrag.html
======
sethbannon
This reminds me of this great segment from the West Wing:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM>

~~~
hartror
Seriously, I need to watch West Wing I think someone posts an awesome and
politically relevant clip on HN once a month (that I see and watch).

~~~
DCoder
Yes, The West Wing is worth watching in its entirety.

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pavlov
As a Finn, I'm thankful for Mercator's contribution to improving Finnish self-
esteem. It's an insignificant corner of Europe with less people than most
Chinese cities nobody has ever heard of, but at least it looks big on the map!

~~~
icodestuff
I had no idea how small Finland was... Not that much bigger than some of those
small African equatorial countries.

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zokier
Does anyone know why Google insists on Mercator projection? I guess that it
makes the implementation bit simpler, but on the other hand you'd imagine that
if anyone then Google would have the resources to use some more reasonable
projection for greater good.

~~~
jemfinch
I _think_ this is an externally visible link:
[http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/A2ygEJ5eG...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/A2ygEJ5eG-o/discussion)
. It's the answer I received when I filed an internal bug on this.

"Hi John - Thanks for the feedback. Maps uses Mercator because it preserves
angles. The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in
high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map
the way they do in reality. While this distorts a 'zoomed-out view' of the
map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The
majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses,
directions, etc... so we're sticking with this projection for now."

~~~
a3_nm
Not sure if this makes sense, but couldn't they have different projections for
different zoom levels?

~~~
jasondavies
Yes, e.g.
[http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/demos/CompositeMapProject...](http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/demos/CompositeMapProjection/)

~~~
opinali
I see a huge, annoying jump into and out of Mercator.

~~~
vanderZwan
A bit of tweening animation should be able to fix that though.

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trafficlight
I wish it randomized the puzzle pieces every time. And there should be a
timer.

~~~
bramus
Same here ... So I created a dynamic version myself:
<http://bramus.github.com/mercator-puzzle-redux/> :-)

~~~
dirkk0
fantastic! thank you!

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fossuser
Solution: <http://i.imgur.com/Odujjao.png>

In case you're stuck on a piece.

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kenbot
Bloody Mercator. Confusing generations of Australian schoolchildren since
...always. "But you said we were the biggest island!"

~~~
rplnt
We've been always taught that Greenland is the biggest island. If we'd allow
Australia to compete, we as well might include Eurasia :)

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ColinWright
Fantastic. As a bonus side-effect, people never believe me when I tell them
Australia is bigger than Europe, and this will let them play and see it for
themselves.

~~~
mbq
Actually, Australia is smaller than Europe (in means of the area) -- its
7.7M(km^2) to 10.2M(km^2).

~~~
ColinWright
Depends on what you think of as the boundaries of Europe - the area quoted
includes areas of land that many people I speak with don't include.

It's easiest just to let people overlay the map.

 _Added in edit: Europe does in fact extend a lot further North-East than
people think, and when you include that area - yes - Europe is bigger. The
actual overlay still surprises people._

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sxp
It's crazy how much Mercator distorts the globe. I was playing around with
various map projections via WebGL shaders [1] and the size problems really
stand out when the map is recentered. With modern digital maps, we should
really stop using old projections that were designed to work on limited paper
maps.

[1] <http://sxp.me/maps/> (Select equirectangular as the projection and drag
the crosshairs to recenter.)

~~~
archangel_one
It's not really that it's old and out of date; it makes a different set of
tradeoffs to other projections, and so typically looks better over small areas
but isn't appropriate for a world map since the distortion becomes extreme
near the poles.

~~~
Millennium
This. There are a couple of different things people use maps for, but the
biggest two are finding out where things are and figuring out routes between
two things. Mercator throws the needle all the way toward finding routes
between two things, and it is very, very good at that, but this comes at the
expense of distorting exact locations and sizes of things.

Perhaps a compromise is possible, whereby Mercator is used when plotting
routes between things but some other projection is used when you're looking
for isolated points. Let each projection do what it does best.

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artursapek
The morphing of those SVG shapes is mystifying.

~~~
ajays
That's the Mercator transform for ya.

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jessriedel
Slight bug: if you bring the piece low enough, the color invert.

~~~
delinka
That's quite amusing. I see the problem: when the shape distorts enough to
connect its boundaries across the south pole, the outside becomes the inside.

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bobdylan1
This I like. But why does moving the pieces up and down produce a sort of
cylinder?

~~~
DCoder
Because that's how the Mercator projection distorts object size:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection#Distortion>

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drbig
I would really like to see it with random selection of countries every time
your reload the page - and then to see it in primary schools during geography
lessons - that would be a killer!

~~~
Samuel_Michon
There's an educational game like that, 'Stack the countries'. It's loads of
fun. (Available for iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZzzw4ohq-o>

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stack-the-
countries/id407838...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stack-the-
countries/id407838198?mt=8)

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asaarinen
Just in case somebody's interested, here's a related experiment we made to
generate and display map tiles in a "google earth-style" projection using CSS
transforms:

<https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map>

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niggler
There's a touch issue:

When you successfully match a country, the shape turns green. However you can
move the shape once out of its position. It remains green after the move but
you can't move it again (future attempts to move the green item are treated as
panning the map)

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Whitespace
I'm partially ashamed to admit that I got all of them but one: a piece that
had straight eastern and southern sides. It looked like a Canadian or
Australian state/territory (large and having flat edges), but I couldn't place
it.

Also I had a hard time placing Brazil.

~~~
adamnemecek
It was Mauritania. But I also zoomed in after like half of them so that's
kinda cheating.

~~~
delinka
Meh, if the map supports zooming, I don't consider it cheating. I didn't even
try to zoom, but I'd have used zoom had I been aware. Now the guy above that
looked at the page source-- he's cheating. ;-)

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SCAQTony
That was boss, "only" took me a 30-minutes! Well done and great for learning
geography.

~~~
lmm
Seriously 30 minutes? Is this an American thing? To my mind almost all of them
were obvious from the shapes alone (the one with straight edges wasn't, but
the very fact that its borders are straight lines tell you there's only a few
parts of the world it could be in).

~~~
dmckeon
Straight line border segments for nations seem to correlate well with borders
determined by treaties between colonial powers.

Dragging all the red outlines to the equator was a big help.

Initial placement of red outlines in oceans might make the goal more obvious
from the initial view.

A "satellite POV" might be interesting (same click&drag UI spins the
earth/repositions the POV). The red outlines could then be placed in the empty
corners.

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aubergene
D3 has an amazing projection system for creating SVG maps from GeoJSON.

<https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Projections>

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halter73
Imagine how much harder this would be if you also had to rotate.

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205guy
I have been wishing for a long time to have an outline feature in Google maps
(or any map tool for that matter). I always want to compare the size of things
(partly because of the distortion of the projection), say is the city of SF
larger or smaller than NYC? I was stoked when Google added city boundaries, so
that means they know them. Now there just needs to be a way to select a city,
state/province/department/whatever, or country and drag it somewhere.

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guard-of-terra
The sad thing is that the set of countries is always the same.

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crap_cone
answers in the sauce :

var answers = { australia: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(-45.379453600000005, 110.69313639999996), new
google.maps.LatLng(-8.571888000000001, 155.16969360000007)), southAfrica: new
google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-36.73497648232876,
13.33984375), new google.maps.LatLng(-21.010097985940735, 35.87890625)),
greenland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(57.9905285,
-75.1942745), new google.maps.LatLng(83.97751860000001, -9.709575500000028)),
finland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(59.21319690000001, 19.53808950000007), new
google.maps.LatLng(70.7889305, 31.90050659999997)), mongolia: new
google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(40.74287280000001,
86.85821429999999), new google.maps.LatLng(52.641200000000005,
121.12602760000004)), thailand: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(3.9541530000000003, 95.39209260000007), new
google.maps.LatLng(21.477918000000003, 106.6929963)), peru: new
google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-19.255824000000004,
-82.93600620000001), new google.maps.LatLng(1.5, -67.99965480000003)), brazil:
new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-35.42974050000001,
-74.69401470000003), new google.maps.LatLng(6.5, -33.06445550000001)),
iceland: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(62.758218600000006, -25.764343499999995), new
google.maps.LatLng(67.1959161, -11.481647000000066)), drcongo: new
google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-15.448980381203414,
9.3359375), new google.maps.LatLng(7.485096269212087, 36.015625)), ukraine:
new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(43.456458529383056,
20.234375), new google.maps.LatLng(53.29973879045674, 42.34375)), madagascar:
new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(-26.898128422978452,
39.5703125), new google.maps.LatLng(-10.366188047247464, 55.3515625)),
saudiArabia: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(14.77959730788355, 33.41796875), new
google.maps.LatLng(33.68098354643421, 57.28515625)), mexico: new
google.maps.LatLngBounds( new google.maps.LatLng(11.700047540913861,
-119.90234375), new google.maps.LatLng(34.264084202839264,
-83.65234374999994)), mauritania: new google.maps.LatLngBounds( new
google.maps.LatLng(12.387690937704622, -18.7890625), new
google.maps.LatLng(29.336753501211746, -2.3046875)) };

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dirkk0
And I was reminded of this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuZYhFtSZsY>

@puzzle: great idea!

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tzury
I cheated at 8/15.

Viewed source and got all rest of countries names.

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stcredzero
Got it. Zooming is essential on a tablet, because of the "my fat finger is in
front of my eyes" problem, which I've solved, by the way. As it is, you have
to zoom in to be able to see and drag.

(I took down the solution. If someone knows their way around VNC, it will get
posted faster.)

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kabell
This is an awesome UI concept that could be used to demonstrate other kinds of
projections, too. It would be awesome to see similar apps related to
perspective transformations, rectilinear vs. fisheye lenses, tilt-shift
lenses, panorama stitching, etc.

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thewisedude
Fantastic! I learnt something new today. I did not know that the world was
projected using Mercator projection and the how that played a role in
distortion of the land size.

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porker
I really enjoyed this! Like a good jigsaw puzzle only better...

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smackfu
When this first came around, I was surprised how big Greenland is after all.
It's not a small island, it's as big as the entire US East Coast.

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Lambdanaut
I like that the piece for Australia starts above Greenland. That really puts
everything into perspective right away.

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hayksaakian
This freaks out on the latest chrome android beta. Wonky flashing over parts
of the map. Nexus 7

~~~
tantalor
<https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-samples/issues/entry>

~~~
hayksaakian
Wasn't sure if it was just me/chrome or everyone.

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martinced
Wonderful: just spent quite some time playing it.

It would be amazingly lovely if you could also display simultaneously other
mappings than the Mercator one. Say a sphere in 3D in the upper right corner,
with the "figures" moving / showing on both mappings.

It's interesting to see that if you take the eight biggest countries by size
(well, ok, Antartica ain't a country), they all are very placed in term of
GDP:

Russia: 10th (GDP), 1 (size) Antartica: ---, 2 (size) Canada: 11 (GDP), 3
(size) China: 2 (GDP), 4 (size) U.S.A.: 1st (GDP), 5 (size) Brazil: 6 (GDP), 6
(size) Australia: 12 (GDP), 7 (size) India: 9 (GDP), 8 (size)

You then have Argentina and Kazakhstan lacking quite a bit behind:

Argentina: 26 (GDP), 9 (size) Kazakhstan: 49 (GDP), 10 (size)

