The article seems to imply that people are primarily exposed to Mercator in school without discussing its shortcomings. However in my experience growing up in the 90s/00s, we discussed lots of different projections and their respective tradeoffs. It was drilled in pretty deep that the Mercator reflected shapes accurately, but not relative sizes. I also remember seeing Robinson projection far more than Mercator, though again we were reminded that it's not perfect either, and that any 2D projection will have its pros/cons.
I went to public school in Canada (NB) in the 1990s and 2000s and we also covered the topic quite well. Not only that, but we also had ready access to spinning globes we could look at and compare to projections.
I think as Canadians this topic is covered because the geography of our country is skewed considerably more than many other countries both due to the scale, and the land mass the lay near the poles.
If I recall correctly it was the discussion on the size of Baffin Island, which looks almost 2x larger than Madagascar on the Mercantile map, when Madagascar is in fact just over 10% larger than Baffin.
Also, that we have islands nobody gives a 2nd thought to that are the size of Spain! :)
Growing up in Poland, I don't think we encountered Mercator until much later when actually learning about various map projections. I think Mollweide projection is more widespread here for full Earth maps, and it reduces the stretching near poles effect.
The best projection is a globe. A nice medium sized globe that’s portable is great for teaching relationships between land and water as well as geography.
Trust me, in bad public education in the UK the map is simply presented. You cover the concept of how to draw the map but if the teacher used the word "protection" it causes eyes to gloss over...
Sounds like you had a good education my lucky friend and I hope it serves you well. I think the closest I saw was historical map putting Britain at the center of a big red empire before skipping several hundred years to cover Vietnam because the syllabus said we had to.
German here - It's my understanding that in the US, classes rotate through rooms assigned to subjects (e.g. you go to your next class to the geography room). In Germany, subjects rotate through classes (e.g. 9th grade would have an assigned room, and the geography teacher would show up for the next lesson).
So personally, I don't think I ever saw a geography teacher carry around a globe, nor talk about projections. I feel like I learned about it reading XKCD 10 years later.
> It's my understanding that in the US, classes rotate through rooms assigned to subjects (e.g. you go to your next class to the geography room).
This is true after 4th grade, but 1st through 4th usually have kids learning every regular subject from a single teacher in a single classroom. Of course there are many states and even more school districts, and it's very possible that some of them do it differently.
Ah yes, same here. At that age, though, we didn't have Geography, we simply had what I will call Science Class (for the Germans: This was Bavaria, so it's hilariously called "Heimat- und Sachunterricht" now), and I have no recollection what that covered. I think it was closer to how bees pollinate plants.
Elementary school (usually up through 5th grade) in the US usually has one classroom and one teacher for most subjects. All of my elementary school classrooms had at least one globe.
Yeah this is some old baby boomer trope about how bad the Mercator projection is, but it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom. Globes are a thing and the internet makes much of this discussion moot.
Until the "joke" of the flat earth got way out of hand and you realise that the internet is great at everything aside from context and this is something that isn't taught. Although I remember a professor screwing with us and changing a proof on Wikipedia to catch people out one term...
Not sure I'd agree. It was very public, very much reverted and very much a demonstration of the context of the internet. Not to mention a very easily verifiable proof, if people picked up the textbooks and noticed the subtle mistake.
> it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom
Try to buy a world map for a classroom. Search things like "world map for classroom", "large world map", "world map poster" in Amazon. Probably 95% of the maps returned for these search terms are Mercator, but there are a few that aren't. American elementary school teachers are generalists, they teach geography without having specialized knowledge of geography, much less map projections. If such a teacher is buying a world map for their classroom, they're very likely to pick a Mercator map simply because that's what most classroom sized maps use.
(Despite this, American children are not raised to think that Canada is powerful...)
that allows you to rotate the world before applying the Mercator projection. The “crazy looking” distortions make me realise just how distorted the usual projection itself is
It would be nice if there was a globe, with the center of the projection facing the user. Once you start rotating the map, it is really difficult to make sense of what is going on.
Other than that, it is really cool, and quite trippy to play with.
Ah for me the lack of sense of what’s going on is sort of the point of it. The rotated projections are just as right as the regular Mercator projection in an objective way, but it really doesn’t feel that way.
That was exactly what I thought too. I kept trying to make the map seem “normal” but no matter when I tried some thing was always blown so far out of perspective it was unrecognizable. Every projection is so far off that it just becomes comical. At that point it clicked that the Mercator projection is just as bad, I’ve just seen it before.
This is the best I could do, and it's pretty much just putting the vast empty expanses of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in the higher-distortion areas near the top and bottom.
That's very cool. I don't know if it is quite fair to the Mercator projection though because it mostly distorts the north and south poles which are conveniently not very populated.
see posted video. An actual globe is created from flat sheets of paper cut into strips and stuck on. Printing a curved surface on a flat plane is by definition a projection.
yes, it is and that is why they use small flat sections of paper to compose a globe. By doing that they minimize the distortions of flat maps to be point of being too small to matter.
Your "gotcha" about how globes are made is much ado about nothing.
Yes, but they don't just print out a Mercator map and glue that to the surface. They use a projection that is going to produce the final appearance that they're aiming for.
I never understood the obsession with Mercator projection in blog posts and the media. Is the US school system actually using world maps with Mercator projection, or what else is the reason that this topic is popping up again and again? The world maps I had been 'exposed to' during school (in the 80s!) used a projection which narrows towards the poles and looks a lot more 'realistic':
> I never understood the obsession with Mercator projection in blog posts and the media.
It’s because American universities and media in recent years strongly incentivize finding racial angles to every story or topic. “How we draw maps is racist” is low hanging fruit. Growing up in racist Virginia in the 1990s, we had globes and the flat wall maps—which still showed the Soviet Union—used an oval projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortelius_oval_projection
Or maybe it's just because you can build a site that corrects the Mercator distortions and see Kenya get as big as Greenland, or see Antarctica become the largest continent on the planet, and that's just super interesting?
The article is not about "maps are racist". The idea that Mercator has persisted, into an era where nobody needs a map projection to navigate, owing to racism isn't a new one. Your "in recent years" gives up the game here, since this argument was banal enough to be the centerpiece of a freaking West Wing episode 20 years ago.
It’s possible to write an article about distortions in the Mercator projection that doesn’t amount to “maps are racist.” But this isn’t that article. The bolded subheading alludes to the racism angle from the beginning. What does “digital ethics” have to do with this? What is the “potential for harm” the author is referring to? Are population density calculations wildly off? No, it’s a clear reference to the section in the middle of the article talking about “colonial preferences.” Finally, a remark about “tool colonization efforts” appears in the key takeaways at the end. And all that is unsubstantiated race baiting.
> I think you maybe need to give this stuff a rest.
No. This timeline sucks. You can’t read an article about maps without some asshole trying to virtue signal that he’s one of the good white people. It’s worse than hipster jeans and vocal frys combined. And it’s so insulting, as if anyone in India cares how big their country is on a map. You know who didn’t waste their time with shit like that: white people while they were busy colonizing everything.
I don't know if anyone in India cares what the maps look like, but I do care: despite having seen the West Wing episode in (checks notes) NINETEEN NINETY-NINE, I did not realize (1) there was a site I could go to that would apply the Mercator distortion to any country, or (2) you can draw a sinusoid from Pakistan, through the Mozambique Channel, around Cape Horn, and back up across the Pacific to Kamchatka that is a straight line if you're sailing it on a boat. Both are in the article, but you'd never know that to read your comments.
You and I both know that you've got a hang-up about, I don't know, wokeism? Progressivism? Antiracism? Whatever it is: I'm not disputing it. I'm not telling you you're wrong, or that you can't have whatever weird politics you've landed on. I'm telling you that bringing it up incessantly on every thread on Hacker News violates the guidelines, and helped wreck this thread, and you should stop.
Growing up in American schools, I saw this as well. I remember even asking the teacher why the map had multiple cutaways, and her explaining the distortion. I could be convinced that Mercator prevalence is a thing, if someone dug into map sales.
Yep, this looks super familiar to me. We also just had globes in our classrooms. Today's students probably use Google maps (or equivalent) which wouldn't have this problem anyways.
My brain wasn't rebooted by a map until I saw an "upside down" map with the North pole and South pole vertically flipped. People from the Southern hemisphere seem to think it puts them in a better perspective
I wonder if the Dymaxion map bits can be rearranged to create a more familiar map shape with the distortions mostly getting confined to oceans and unpopulated areas?
Yes, that was one of the concepts of it. The two most used arrangements are one interconnected body of water at the center, and the other one land mass at the center.
I remember our 4th grade class (US 1960's) doing a project where we too a printout of that Dymaxion map and constructed a "globe" with it. It was part of a series of geography lessons on different map projections. I guess my brain rebooted a lot then.
Every once in a while, I see some posts based on maps and projections. And I cannot get it when adults still discuss these stuff. I had my first atlas when I was a 4th grader and the projections were depicted in detail in the first 15-20 pages. It is easy and foundational that I assumed everybody was aware of this information. Instead people rediscovered the Earth on each blog post mentioning the exact same thing. Amazing.
Can the stickiness of the Mercator projection in the West be attributed to the fact that most of the West is in the regions of the projection that are most distorted, which allows Westerners to examine their own geography in more detail? A projection that made America and Europe comparatively hard to read would seem to have little staying power on school walls there.
And while a globe is obviously better, the orthogonal representation of North-South and East-West also allow for some easier instruction of some earth science topics - basically that the Earth rotates along the horizontal axis.
I believe this is what people actually mean when they talk about this.
Most of the other replies seem to be massively overreacting to a percieved overeaction, as if the message was "Gerardus Mercator was a Nazi!".
People distort maps all the time, often for good reasons. People notice when maps distort something they care about (like maps without New Zealand to people in New Zealand, or the BBC weather map enlarging London at the expense of the North of England and Scotland).
It's similar to early cameras not reproducing dark skin tones well until chocolate manufacturers complained about the way it made their product look, or the recent drama about automatic image cropping preferring the lighter skinned person in the photo.
No, the camera/computer is not a racist. No, the programmer is not a racist. But, it still reflects a society where a large fraction of the human beings on earth aren't given as much consideration as others. And that's racist.
2D maps all have different features and drawbacks. It’s like you’re saying that because our databases don’t offer all of consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, that it’s a reflection on how the technology sector as a whole doesn’t care about data. But it’s not that. Someone has to make a trade-off somewhere, because of math. 2D maps are inherently distortions.
I can't tell if you're intentionally missing my point.
If all the people making the trade-off, and all the people who pay the people making the trade-off and all the people who pay the ... etc. are one type of person, then you're going to make trade-offs that hurt other types of people.
Here's a list of examples for women:
> The US government did not adequately test the impact of a crash on a belt-restrained female dummy until 2012. Dummies for decades had been based on the average, 50th percentile male body.
Basically, if you flip it and it seems ridiculous, then it is ridiculous.
How long do you think crash testing with only a female 50th percentile dummy would have lasted before someone, recognizing that they themselves weren't represented would have said "wait a minute, we're ignoring half the population".
If you need a purely technical example: websites that require JS work fine for most people, but might fail catastrophically for people using screenreaders or privacy protecting addons. That trade-off might make sense if you forget about those people, and it's harder to forget about them if you, your team, your industry and your main audience mostly consists of those people.
THe whole argument about the negative affects of widespread use of Mercator projection for world maps has always struck me as way overblown. It's true, to be sure, that most Americans (which I use as an example. because I know them), have a distorted notion of the size of Africa, and to a lesser extent, South America, but in my experience, they equally underestimate the size of Russian and China. I think it has more to do with their certainty that the US is "really big and important" as countries go, than with mental burn-in of a warped geography from grade-school maps.
Given that almost all maps are now viewed on electronic devices, why bother using any projection? We can now show the entire earth with no distortion by letting users rotate a virtual globe. Zooming in and out has already solved the core problem of globes being bulky and undetailed relative to maps. I would argue that for laypeople use of projections is still largely a historical artifact that we haven't aged out of yet. There are only a relative handful of people who might actually navigate using the old ways, but in practice thats's just a failsafe for computer assisted planning which considers the true shape of the earth already.
As long as the screen you’re viewing it on is flat you’re going to need some kind of projection. If it’s a perspective or orthographic view of a centered sphere it will be some sort of polar projection.
Yeah but you can dynamically recalculate that projection as you want. That's like saying that a physical globe is still a kind of projection because you can only look at it from one side with your eyes.
I really loved this episode.
Especially when someone pointed out the fallacy of believing north = up and south = down, which is that way only because we live in a world where most map projections on a wall show north as up and south as down.
It doesn't look like that at all from outer space.
North being up hasn't always been the case; for quite some time, east was commonly up and west down; it's where the "orient" in "orientation" comes from.
Which side is up really depends on how you imagine the earth going around the sun. If you look at the earth from its side as it revolves around the sun and you choose to depict the earth moving counter clockwise, the north is up. If you consider the earth revolving around the sun clockwise, south is up. The earth is at an angle, of course, but that angle isn't enough to really change the definitions of up and down.
North being up makes logical sense when you consider that around 87% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere. We generally read top to bottom and the populated parts of the earth are often what we're really interested in.
There's also the choice of "north" that matters. There are many definitions for what constitutes as the north since the magnetic poles don't stay in a single place on the surface and the top/bottom of the spinning planet isn't anywhere near the magnetic poles. Then there's the north star moving as we move through the galaxy, making any north determined by celestial navigation questionable over time; currently Polaris is commonly used as the pole star, but on humanity's time scale that's a relatively recent (±1300 years) development.
I still have my globe on my desk :) No better physical tool to really represent the earth. I love that google maps added the globe view, this is much better than just showing a mercator map. Also always loved xplanet.
I had a globe as a kid, it had a topographical map when unlit and a political one when lit (with borders and country names). I have to say that it was a far superior teaching aid compared to any 2D map projection. For example, with a physical globe it's immediately apparent what's the deal with great circle routes.
Equal earth (https://equal-earth.com/) is a good well designed map. I printed the pacific ocean centered version and have it on my wall.
There is a lot of conspiratorial woo about this topic, but it is genuinely useful to get a sizes right at a starting point for thinking clearly about the world.
For example (orthogonal to the usual conspiracy talk), it's commonly thought that Russia is super important and unbelievably vast. But a good equal area map shows it's only a 1/3 bigger than Canada + Alaska (and considerably poorer).
Likewise we are much more likely to travel at the world scale by plane with great circle routes. The mercator map is actually a less accurate guide to that type of navigation.
That said it is still useful to have north be directly up and south, east and west be straight lines too. Hence google maps using an mercator-ish projection, to make the zoom from local navigation to the world size continue to preserve straight lines and angles. Mercator is overused but is useful.
The Mercator projection map was the map I was most exposed to in school and was on my bedroom wall at home when I was going to Elementary school. Later on when I went to college, I saw the Peters Projection map (and had that on the wall above my desk in my apartment. This map rebooted my brain in that it showed a more truthful representation of how large an area was in relation to other areas.
I do happen to think that the prevalence and persistence of the Mercator projection's use with its grossly distorted representations of northern hemisphere land regions encouraged distorted thinking about geopolitics. That the since the northern continents and their countries appear larger than southern countries, this also encouraged the mistaken belief that the north was more important than the south.
I like the map, and article. It does challenge you to look at the world differently and realise how little you actually know.
> The longer we use a tool without questioning it, the more of a truth it becomes no matter how wrong it is.
Comments like this do irk me though. Truth is not subjective, you cannot have more or less of it, and whether you use a tool has nothing to do with the underlying reality. Using a tool, in this case a map of the terrain, does not make it more or less truthful. A map can be more accurate, a better representation, a genuine attempt, but it cannot contain more truth. The truth is the terrain itself.
I'm a big fan of maps and have seen a lot of different projections but this is my first time seeing authagraph. I think not only does it do a good job of showing relative size, it also looks good - but I'm used to looking at 'unconventional' projections. The only issue with it is that it's a bit hard to gauge what is 'up' and what is 'down'. If you were showing me this projection for Mars then I would probably get lost.
I'm having trouble finding a nice large resolution image. Anyone found one?
Back when I was working for a company that was heavily into GIS, I wandered one day into map rendering code, trying to render _something or other_, and man, it was an ed-u-cation. Not in "yeah Mercator is not literally true" (this I thought was common knowledge) but also there there are a ton of different projections and ways to deal with said projections.
When ever I feel the need to know the "actual" size of a country, I turn to https://www.thetruesize.com which allows you to move countries around to better compare them. For instance, I have a pretty good idea of how big Sweden is, so moving Sweden around helps me visualize the size of something like Japan.
> We are not taught to question it, even by our teachers
Was I just unusually lucky? In grade school my teacher spent several weeks teaching us about different map projections, and how there are pros and cons, and none are perfect because the earth is round but maps are flat. And we even talked about how having north at the top is rather arbitrary, and having south at the top would work just as well.
We didn't learn about projections per-se, but more than one teacher brought a globe to class, just to show how arctic and antarctic areas are spread out on 2d maps, and to show the distorsion when trying to draw stuff on a sphere onto a 2d paper.
Here is another thought that may reboot OPs brain - not all schools in the world use Mercator projection for teaching. In my country we have used Robinson's projections if I remember correctly. Also students usually have no need for navigation precise projections, instead they need something that can be reasonably used for all countries of the globe and for the globe itself.
I understand the intention here but really, do people not see globes any more? All projections suffer from issues of some sort, and the globe is by far the best way to understand that. We were taught about this in grade school.
Even on a computer display, you can use Google Earth to replicate the effect.
The general concept that the post is trying to talk about (and has got slightly lost in the anti-anti-racism discussion) is: "the map is not the territory" aka "all models are wrong (but some are useful)"
Is it just me or does it seem like this is a problem that is disappearing with the prevalence of computers? I mean, the only time I can remember seeing a Mercator projection is in yet another HN "here is how bad Mercator is" articles.
Online maps have started to switch to other things when you zoom out, for the reasons discussed in the article, but the default, easy option in most cases is still Mercator(-ish).
Huh, I did not know that. OK, legit to bitch for sure.
Maybe it is me then because if I am looking at the Earth zoomed out, I always reach for google earth, and perhaps I just never notice it when zoomed in using it for directions.
This reminds of the dumb conspiracy stuff I used to see in my Facebook feed. Any 2D projection of a 3D surface is going to be distorted - there’s no way around it. If you want to see an accurate representation of the Earth, look at a globe.
Also, for an article that claims to change the world and reboot your brain, it should probably pick a topic that was covered in 2001 by The West Wing (which proposed a better alternative projection).
I think nobody needs a word map projected to a plane anymore. Local maps do not suffer noticably from distortion, and a world map can be represented as an interactive globe.
Having grown up with a world map over my bed, I'd say the overall benefit from seeing all those political borders was generally low. I stared at Antarctica a lot and was able to name most African countries; without further context however their names remained rather abstract.
More interesting concepts would be to emphasize population density, or other meaningful cultural and economic measurables that, short of a "brain reboot", would increase understanding of the world.
Probably makes sense these days but back in the 1500s when they were doing all the sailing, distorting the water might well have caused problems of a terminal nature, I think.
> Given that the people who claim ownership and ensure distribution of this map have historically been white and rich representatives of the countries in the northern hemisphere
This sounds like post hoc race baiting. The Mercator projection was devised in 1569, when Mediterranean countries like Spain, Portugal, and Italy were immensely powerful and pioneers in exploration. Many of the explorers who drew the first world maps came from those countries. If they cared about the relative size of the countries, why would they adopt a projection that makes Scandinavia look so much larger than Spain and Portugal and their holdings in Latin America?
In an effort to find a race angle, the article overlooks important history. The Mercator projection was adopted because it preserved bearing lines for marine navigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps. World maps were developed primarily by seafaring explorers, so this became the dominant projection, not just in Northern European countries, but pretty much everywhere.
The idea that retaining a map which distorting the sizes of countries is a Eurocentric conspiracy against equatorial countries was originally made by Peters when pushing his equal area projection in the 1970s and 80s
It's a pretty tendentious argument though, since in addition to it obviously not being the original intent, people don't draw the conclusion that Greenland is a mighty state, the US is subordinate to Canada and the Middle East is a small and inconsequential backwater from map projections, and if people did gauge power and wealth from map projections, the Mercator projection would actually understate the actual relative power and influence of Western Europe anyway (and Peters massively overstates arid underpopulated regions and is barely any better at putting India's sixth of the world population in context).
Plus of course, the Mercator projection is still better for local navigation anyway.
The maps I care about are Google Maps and Apple Maps and the maps used in school classrooms. If I were to zoom out all the way to world map view in Google/Apple Maps, clearly the intent isn't to do navigation but to get relative geographical position/size understanding of various land and water masses. For this, in this era, I would expect them to provide a different projections that are better suited for these purposes.
> The Mercator projection was adopted because it preserved bearing lines for marine navigation
Specifically, Mercator preserves angles, making it possible to plot courses on the map using a protractor. Attempting this on a map with a non-conformal projection would be a nightmare.
What he's basically saying (I assume at least) is that we build things based on past engineering efforts. There's that one story about how train tracks are the size of a horse carriage during the roman empire era because of standardized size of roads at the time or something like that (too lazy to check it out).
If you need to use vehicles like trucks and cranes to carry ISS boosters over a highway to their launchpad, you will be constrained by standardized sizes that, after all, come from the size of two horses side by side (that dictated the size of carriages and hence that of roads that carry people, etc).
Not the OP, but after a few web searches I can say he/she was alluding to this [1]:
> When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
I have no idea if that's the real story behind it or not, but it sounds plausible enough. And OP's more general allusion to path dependence [2] is even more interesting, even though less anecdotic.
In terms of track gauge (the distance between the two rails), the most common gauge nowadays is standard gauge, 4'8½" or 1435mm. This gauge was chosen by George Stephenson, who developed the first practical locomotive--and having developed the first practical locomotive, he was a strong influence on a lot of early railroad engineering choices. But standard gauge was far from standard--in the early 1800s, every railway chose its own gauge and gauge incompatibility was the norm. As the railway networks grew and interconnection was more important, there was a push to unifying on gauges, and even large networks of different gauges switched in the names of efficiency (the southern US, then on 5' gauge, switched over 11,000 mi on track on May 31, 1886).
As for why 4'8½" was favored over other gauges... well, it wasn't. Stephenson appears to have relied on compatibility with wagonways of the coal mines he worked with. But there was equally no standardization of widths there as there was with early railroad gauges--you end up with track gauges that range about 4'-6'. And from the operations of railroads, it does seem that optimal track gauge is around 5' anyways. So the real reason for 4'8½" gauge isn't "that's the width of two horse butts", it's "that's a reasonable gauge for putting a wagon on rails."
But, to be honest, none of that discussion actually matters. You see, what matters for the SSRBs is not the track gauge, it's the loading gauge--that's what determines the dimensions of stuff you stick on cars. Loading gauge is far less standardized than standard gauge--whereas the US, Europe, and the UK all share the same standard gauge, they have wildly different loading gauges. Whereas the US standardized on a 10'8" loading gauge, Europe generally runs on 10'4", and UK on a paltry 9'6".
Finally, if you look at the dimensions of the space shuttle's booster rockets, they are ~12'2" in diameter. Recall that the standard US loading gauge is 10'8"--a foot and a half shorter than their diameter. So clearly the booster isn't even based on the standard-shape-of-a-railroad car, although that doesn't preclude it from being based on the actual practicable loading gauge of any route.
Still, the last line ("The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.") is complete and utter hogwash. The tunnel (I'm guessing Moffat Tunnel?) is probably about 13' wide, which is... a far cry from "slightly wider" than the railroad track at 4'8½".
The boosters can only be so wide because of the size of road and rails. The widths of which were based on wagons, which could have been pulled by two horses side by side.
This is one of at least 3 comments on this thread you've added to elevate the dumb political argument and, intentionally or not, strangle any conversation we could have had about geography, navigation, topology, culture, or history. It's the opposite of curious conversation; it's hemlock for curiosity.
With loaded issues like racism, more baseless claims just make the problem worse. What we need is evidence, and unfortunately there is almost none in this HN discussion. I've learned nothing about the issue.
More broadly, systems can be discriminatory: Using the maps as an example, imagine if a projection made the US look tiny; I don't imagine it would sell well. But if one makes Africa appear tiny, the map may persist for a long time. That's how systems can be discriminatory and how we can decieve ourselves, without conscious intent. Also, there are plenty of people, especially in the past and also in the last few years, who have openly and aggressively expressed intent to discriminate based on race and similar factors, and we can add to that the more subtle expressions. We have plenty of evidence of widespread motive and we should expect many outcomes to match their stated intent.
Many people in minority groups have told me, for years, that a large number of people in the US will always deny racism, in every instance. They might say something acknowledging racism generally, but in every specific instance they actively reject it has happened and oppose any action. An argument can always be found (for anything, of course). It's politicized - it's not related to the facts or reason, every claim becomes a political battle that must be won. I didn't believe it at first, but it certainly has been born out, from my perspective. It's a situation that obstructs knowledge, bringing people together, and solutions, and not entirely incidentally: Politicizing any issue is an obvious way to make it similarly intractable (e.g., climate change). EDIT: Maybe it's like any innovation, such as in tech - people react with outrage to any change, as we know well on HN.
Which brings us back to facts: People can come up with a plausible argument for anything; hard facts are the scythe that cuts away the 99.9% that is nonsense; that's why science and courtrooms rely on them.
> People can come up with a plausible argument for anything
And I agree—and “maps are racist” is an example of that.
I should also add that it’s not cost-free to err on the side of seeing “hidden” racism. Studies show that people succeed when they have an internal locus of control. People who have an external locus of control—they believe their fate is decided by outside factors—are less likely to be successful. Revealing racism (even real racism) is thus in the immediate term bad for minorities because it reinforces beliefs that racism holds them back. It can only be good for them if it gets white people to reduce racist conduct by enough to offset that negative impact.
I think in reality, telling people that “maps are racist” (even if it was true!) won’t really change the primary behavior of white people by enough to outweigh the negative psychological impact on minorities. The author is probably hurting minorities by peddling this myth.
This completely misses the first point the parent comment made.
Even if we agree that the map wasn’t _made_ with racist or discriminatory intent, and hand sound reasoning for existing as it did (preserving angles as another comment mentioned), it doesn’t mean that it’s continued use isn’t discriminatory.
The parent comment is explaining that it perhaps became ubiquitous because white/colonial powers happened to be over-represented in scale. And once it is ubiquitous, it can be tough to walk backwards to something like the tetrahedral projection in the OP because anyone who does so in, say, America, would be diminishing America’s physical presence on projection maps.
>that it perhaps became ubiquitous because white/colonial powers happened to be over-represented in scale.
Yes. Society at large got together and said "these maps make us look good, let's spread them around, we will have until 2022 until someone will unravel our master scheme".
> And once it is ubiquitous, it can be tough to walk backwards to something like the tetrahedral projection in the OP because anyone who does so in, say, America, would be diminishing America’s physical presence on projection maps.
Perhaps it's tough to walk back ubiquitous things for superficial reasons.
USA isn't "big" on a map and there's no one standing in the way of this great injustice unless you're thinking Canada Russia and Greenland control the world.
I agree on your first point, but not your second. In the fourth paragraph it says:
"Its purpose was to be used for maritime navigation and it served this purpose well since throughout the projection North is up and South is down, while local shapes and directions are maintained. So when using this projection on a map scaled for navigational use it's easier to find your way."
The "solution" presented in the article looks an absolute mess to me though. Surely the better answer is a globe (real or virtual)? Those have existed in schools and homes for almost as long as maps. My children grew up with a LeapFrog globe, and at a young age gould find every country on the planet, by country or capital name. Great fun and highly recommended.
The article notes the fact that Mercator is better for ocean navigation, but fails to understand how that’s connected to its prevalence: the mapmakers were seafaring explorers.
Classrooms have globes. Insofar as the Mercator projection is widespread, however, a responsible teacher should explain the historical connection between ocean navigation and mapmaking. Not recount a totally manufactured example of racism.
They used too, my classes did. I can see not anymore with cost cutting and relying on Google Maps.
But, there was a time where Google didn't exist, and a globe would be in the corner of the classroom w/ Maps that can be pulled down on the whiteboard/chalkboard (boy was that an exciting change!) that showed different maps, from Mercator maps to political USA maps and geographic USA maps.
I mean, i guess different places have different curriculum, but this was certainly in my school's curriculum and it seems like the sort of basic knowledge that definitely should be.
Globes of size useful for navigation are too big to be convenient when actually navigating. You cannot flat pack globes. They’re just impractical for this purpose.
You're conflating two different topics. The article asserts (correctly) that the Mercator projection, while useful for navigation, distorts the globe at a macro scale when used for educational purposes. A globe solves that problem.
It's hard to look at a whole globe at once. It's also hard to have enough globes to see how political boundaries have changed over time. Flat projections are needed for educational purposes too.
Ah, yes, sorry, I got confused by this thread. Yes, globes are great educational tool. I think it’s actually valuable to show all of globes, Mercator, and the weird equal area projections, just to teach about trade offs.
The Mercator projection is popular for one very important reason: ease of navigation [1]. If you know nothing but your location on Earth you can sail, walk, fly, paddle wherever you want with a Mercator map and a compass.
Thats it.
Before fancy navigation aids this was huge. Sure, trade winds and great circles were important consideration. But, at the end of the day, if poop hit the fan (think Shackleton expedition) and all you had was a row boat, a compass and a sextant with 800 mi of South Atlantic to cross, you could still make it home.
But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves. Here I agree, as the author is clearly projecting his white savior complex
[1] the author doesn't even get right the reason why the Mercator excels for navigation: constant rhumb lines. You set your course and you'll get to your destination without needing to correct (a great circle requires constant correction). "Small features are preserved" what croc!
This comment repeats a point made prominently in the article itself, and draws out one detail of the post while ignoring the bulk of it, which includes a bunch of interesting stuff, like the somewhat mind-bending sinusoid from Pakistan to Kamchatka that represents a navigable straight sailing line. It derails any interesting or curious conversation we can have about map projections in order to elevate a tendentious political argument, and dismisses anything interesting about map projections as if "Mercator is useful for navigation" was somehow dispositive.
This isn't conversation so much as it is rhetorical arson.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
It's quite common to comment on a subset of the article, no? And given this point was prominently made in the article, that should be more reason to receive attention in the comment section.
I also see an interesting sibling thread developing, so further discussion has been instigated by this parent comment...
Perhaps we could approach the issue with intellectual curiosity, as HN asks us, instead of dismissing it (complete with a psychoanalysis of the author).
> But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves.
Obviously, what is being said is not that Gerardus Mercator designed, in the 1500s, a map with the express purpose of misrepresenting the relative size of places in order to further a 21st century geopolitical cause of eurocentrism. That would be a very stupid thing to say, and I'm sure you're not that stupid.
It is perfectly possible, however, that a map projection originally conceived for navigation is (unintentionally) a misrepresentation of the world that does further such an agenda of eurocentrism and does misrepresent e.g. the size of Africa, in a way that is unsuited for educational purposes.
I don't even understand the relevance of arguing "but it's so great for navigating if you're shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific", which is obviously a vanishingly small use-case of this map.
It's not about whether they think any particular white people are good or bad, it's about establishing themselves as the authority on who is good and who is bad.
Isn't that a bit paranoid? Do you have evidence for it? Such attacks are a great - and common - way of changing the topic from the merits of the issue.
I mean, the white people who colonized everyone often do themselves as benefactors. I don’t think it’s paranoid to ask what contemporary benefactors are getting out of it for themselves: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/
I’m from Bangladesh and my dad has a lot of beefs with the British, but I can’t say Mercator projection has ever come up as one of them. I heard it for the first time from white people. Who came up with the idea that the Mercator projection is racist? Who popularized it? Who gains power if minority kids learn that in schools and come to believe it’s true?
I think there is evidence to justify skepticism. When we came to this country, white people had nothing to say about Bangladeshi identity. That issue was owned by Bangladeshis themselves—through communities and what parents would tell their children. In the last decade or so, suddenly I’m hearing a lot about “brown” identity (we’ve been reduced to a color) from white people and white dominated institutions. And they really want me to be angry at/scared of other white people, which was never something my parents told me growing up. I don’t think I’m paranoid to ask where that’s coming from.
There is a dominant discourse that is cultural and inevitably ethnic. How is this going to work in a plantation earth corporate future? So dismantling this appears to have been decided.
Looking beyond existing cultural controls, what can replace it? If it is not strictly based on facts and reason (think along "the medium is the message") then control of medium grants societal control. At some point I think this will move on from historic grievances platform to some arbitrary 1984ish 'receive social instructions hour' sort of thing.
I too, btw, am an immigrant, born in Iran. And equally baffled as to what beyond the usual trope of incompetence can explain this sort of clearly orchestrated effort at inflaming social tension along every seam, ludicrously exaggerating the crimes of the dreaded White Man. Reminds me of the Monty Python skit in Life of Brian, discussing all the evils of the Romans. The whole thing is a strawman that you just know at some point will be robustly done away it, ushering in what? Possibly fascism. Certainly someone is insistent on making sure at some point things boil over.
I think that a lot of the purposeful exaggeration of these smokescreen like issues everywhere, are not necessarily with an ulterior motive, but in a banal sense, just to make things more interesting to read or make the person or company reporting about the issue, seem more interesting and just for fighting these made up paper monsters.
"suddenly I’m hearing a lot about “brown” identity (we’ve been reduced to a color) from white people and white dominated institutions"
Even here, you're committing the same fallacy by using the term "white people" which is promoted by the same people. There are no "white people". I presume you know something about European history. Try finding unity in that mess that could legitimize the notion of a coherent "white people". One "white" country subjugated the other. Much of the continent was never involved in any colonial endeavors, and it ignores the imperialism elsewhere in the world. "White people" almost smells like an attempt by former colonial powers to diffuse responsibility. They can't deny they were involved, but they can obfuscate it by unjustly spreading the blame across all of Europe, all Europeans. It's also a way to get ahead of the problem and to draw from victim cache by association. You see similar attempts by some to downplay German atrocities during WWII by exaggerating complicity in conquered countries.
But I agree with your general point and the right to your suspicion. There are political incentives to promote this kind of anti-intellectual stuff. All it does is reinforcement racist ideologies that e.g the Americans specialized in. It also results in division and conflict, something political regimes have long used to distract the people and keep the ire of the public away from the ruling class.
