
Five world map styles - fraqed
https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-will-change-how-you-see-the-world-74967
======
andrepd
Eh, too much talk about how map projections are the tools of the evil
colonialists/developed nations. The Mercator projection became widespread
because "of its ability to represent lines of constant course as straight
segments that conserve the angles with the meridians", not because it
exaggerates areas towards the poles for political European supremacy reasons.
North is consistently depicted as up (not only in European maps but around the
world) probably because the stars including the north star Polaris are "up"
from our point of view. Maps are centered in the GMT meridian because the
Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on earth and thus the most logical point
for the break.

No need to make _everything_ a struggle about "race". Make scientific
arguments or credible social arguments, but don't just assume off the bat
everything is " _problematic_ " and make even patently scientific decisions
attributable to malice and oppression. It doesn't help.

~~~
bharath28
I concur. Of the maps proposed, other than maybe the Peter's projection
version, i don't see any practical value for wide option of any of the other
maps. Peter's projection is interesting because it correctly depicts the
relative sizes of nations and gives better perspective to things most people
think about (for example, how large Africa really is). Reading too much into
things like the grand meridian was chosen because of colonial supremacy is
pointless. Yes sure it was, but it works and the cost to switch is too high.
Any other arbitrary place we choose as reference will have the same problems
in the future.

------
niftich
Azimuthal equidistant projections are really something else, especially in
this globalized age of air travel. For example, did you know Sydney, Seattle,
and Rio de Janeiro are all about 12000 km from Dubai in three different, but
beautifully evenly spaced directions [1]?

And that plotting the different combinations of these city pairs from Seattle
[2], Sydney [3], and Rio [4] gets almost the same result, except that the
shortest distance between Australia and South America is about 1500 km longer
and crosses over Antarctica?

[1] [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DXB-SYD%0D%0ADXB-
SEA%0D%0ADXB-G...](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DXB-SYD%0D%0ADXB-SEA%0D%0ADXB-
GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km) [2] [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-SYD%0D%0ASEA-
DXB%0D%0ASEA-G...](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-SYD%0D%0ASEA-DXB%0D%0ASEA-
GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km) [3] [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-SEA%0D%0ASYD-
DXB%0D%0ASYD-G...](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SYD-SEA%0D%0ASYD-DXB%0D%0ASYD-
GIG&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km) [4] [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GIG-SEA%0D%0AGIG-
DXB%0D%0AGIG-S...](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=GIG-SEA%0D%0AGIG-DXB%0D%0AGIG-
SYD&MS=bm&MP=a&DU=km)

~~~
madcaptenor
In other words, Dubai, Seattle, Sydney, and Rio are approximately the vertices
of a regular tetrahedron on the surface of the earth (with the Rio to Sydney
edge being a bit longer than the others).

It would be interesting (although entirely useless) to know if there are other
quartets of cities like that. It seems like it would be hard enough to find
four equidistant points on the surface of the earth that are all on land...

~~~
niftich
Michigan artist David Barr (1940-2015) created the 'Four Corners Project' [1]
exhibited at the Smithsonian, where he inscribed a regular tetrahedron into a
transparent globe. In choosing his points, he used his personal criteria:

1: Each of the 4 areas needed to be untouched by western technology

2: One of the points had to be on Easter Island

3: Each of the 4 positions needed to be on land

His effort was written about in a 1982 issue of InfoWorld magazine [2], and
the mathematical background is fascinatingly detailed in the paper _'
Mathematical Geography and Global Art: The Mathematics of David Barr's "Four
Corners Project"'_ by Sandra L. Arlinghaus and John D. Nystuen [3].

On a different website, Sandra Arlinghaus further details [4] David Barr and
John D. Nystuen's math and even includes a link to a still-working .kml
generator for Google Earth [5] that can be used to help with this task.

[1] [http://boingboing.net/2016/03/29/the-amazing-4-corners-
proje...](http://boingboing.net/2016/03/29/the-amazing-4-corners-project.html)
[2]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=DjAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=DjAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12)
[3] [http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/monog01/fullte...](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/monog01/fulltext.pdf) [4]
[http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.ht...](http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.html)
[5] [http://montalk.net/coordinates.htm](http://montalk.net/coordinates.htm)

~~~
madcaptenor
There's at least one more distinct set of dry-land points, in Canada, Chile,
Kenya, and Australia, which was found by Gram Zeppi in a Quora answer:
[https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-determine-whether-there-
are...](https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-determine-whether-there-are-four-
points-on-dry-land-forming-a-regular-tetrahedron-inscribed-in-the-Earth) . An
approximate map, using Nairobi, Santiago, Brisbane, and Yellowknife (Canada)
as the points: [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=nbo-scl-bne-nbo,+yzf-
nbo,+yzf-s...](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=nbo-scl-bne-nbo,+yzf-nbo,+yzf-
scl,+yzf-bne) . (My interest is a bit different from Barr's, in that I'm
trying to get the points to be _near_ civilization, not far from it.)

------
hectorr
South up is fine. This article lost me when they suggested east up, west up,
or "any compass bearing". That's not how planets work.

Anyways, VR/AR globes will solve these problems pretty quickly.

~~~
mkj
Why do you imagine a solar system is horizontal not vertical? I think West or
East could probably work - looking at a rising or setting sun direction.

~~~
Coincoin
Because as ground based bipedal animals, we move and live along a horizontal
plane.

~~~
bharath28
That would still hold true in an east-up map.. We are projecting out of the
plane of the map when we stand up/walk..

Separate note - while i get that north-up is just a convention and a mental
construct, the south-up map really threw me off. As i was staring into the
map, I felt the urge to turn my monitor around and had the same visceral need
to set things right as i would upside down on a roller-coaster. This caught me
completely by surprise because i was expecting to just make a mental note that
this was a new convention i could get used to. Instead i "felt" uncomfortable
- did this happen to anyone else?

~~~
Coincoin
Sorry, I was replying to why we perceive the solar system as a horizontal
plane.

~~~
bharath28
Ah, I see now.

------
m1el
No mention of Dymaxion map?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map)
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_p...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Fuller_projection_rotated.svg)
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Map-
of-h...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Map-of-human-
migrations.jpg)

------
Yizahi
All of these articles imply that Mercator projection is widely used at least
somewhere. Is it true though? In Ex-USSR majority of maps are(were)
proportional, probably Robinson projection, in schools and in daily life.

~~~
atomwaffel
It's used in what's arguably the most used map of our time, Google Maps (as
well as most other interactive maps).

~~~
Robotbeat
And using something like Gall-Peters for an online map would be absolutely
terrible except for mid-latitude countries (like North America). On a zoomable
map, it's important to keep relative north-south and east-west distances very
close to the same when zoomed in.

~~~
mikeash
Seems to me that online maps should render the Earth as a sphere (or, heck, a
properly shaped spheroid) centered on the viewport, where scrolling around
rotates the sphere. This will look flat when zoomed in, will look accurate
when zoomed out, and won't have any weird distortions of area or direction.
I'm sure Google Maps didn't do it this way originally because it wasn't
feasible when your minimum target was IE5 running on Windows 98, or whatever,
but it surely could be done now.

~~~
jackcarter
Google Maps does do this in "Earth" mode (formerly "Satellite").

~~~
mikeash
Nice! Is that new? If we could just get a Maps version of that view, it would
be perfect.

~~~
Robotbeat
I think it's best not to do it as a sphere as you suggest, as that would make
it not feasible to use on low resource devices. Also, wouldn't work as well
with the tiling approach.

------
pitt1980
why is China so large in the voter turnout map?

I realize I actually know very little about the political process in China

are there regular elections there? what are they voting on? I perceive that
you're not voting for any politicians from opposition parties to the official
communist party, am I wrong? are you voting on who gets to control the party
apparatus within the communist party? who is that vote actually open to?

~~~
jbob2000
They elect congress members, but there's only one party.

There's more than a billion people in China. If 10% of them turn out to vote,
then that's already more than the turnout for the 2016 presidential election.

~~~
pitt1980
what does it take to become a congressional candidate? Do you need party
approval? How wide is the Overton Window that a candidate can exist in?

------
fdupoo
Boston public schools recently announced that they will shift to using world
maps based on the Peters projection,

Why not teach them both maps, or, rather, teach them that it's hard to
represent the world in 2D space. O.o get them looking at maps from all angles
and configurations.

------
nippples
I'm starting to develop an instinctive "roll eyes up" reaction to whenever I
see the expression "problematic" written unironically.

I'm all for better map projections, but there's zero need for the author's
moral grandstanding in the article.

------
gpvos
[https://xkcd.com/977/](https://xkcd.com/977/) has better ones.

~~~
Robotbeat
Yeah. Frakking "Peters" (sic) projection. It's Gall-Peters, and it's still
terrible.

By the way, most online maps (such as Google Maps) use a variant of Mercator,
because otherwise shapes and north-south vs east-west distances (when you're
zoomed in) are highly distorted.

I think Mercator and Gall-Peters type projections are both just about equally
as bad for global views. Africa and other equatorial areas are heavily
distorted whereas mid-latitude areas are fairly accurate, so it's just as
US/Eurocentric as Mercator.

The projections which compromise shape distortion and size distortion are
pretty good, like Winkel-Tripel. I think I prefer the projections that
preserve both shape and size while ripping the map along oceans. Like
Dymaxion.

------
apexalpha
tl;dr: buy a globe.

~~~
gnodar
Is there a globe I can buy that allows me to rotate on any axis? So if I want
to put south on top, I can, and vice versa.

~~~
b3lvedere
Sure: [http://tiny.cc/j7l5jy](http://tiny.cc/j7l5jy)

~~~
mynewtb
Unobfuscated link: [https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Inflatable-inch-
Gl...](https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Inflatable-inch-
Globe/dp/B0009K3116/)

------
ekianjo
this is old.

------
0wl3x
any title with the word 'change' in it suggesting that after reading the
article is going to have a marked impact on my life usually has the direct
opposite effect. I thought a clickbait wasn't really a thing on HN?

