An example I saw in school is that (if I remember correctly) you can fit the continental US, Europe, and China all inside Africa with some room to spare (and maybe a couple other large things I'm forgetting!)
Thanks for this! It's possible I'm misremembering and this was the map I saw in school, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are others like it out there that maybe are a bit closer to what I thought I recalled
”We and our 727 technology partners ask you to consent…”
I would bet the billionaires in Trump’s good boys club are in it for the pardons they need after justice realizes what is being done with everyone’s personal data.
Is this really a Mercator projection? It doesn't appear to maintain the invariant that lines of constant bearing are straight lines.
If I pick a point somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, the top point of Manhattan is somewhere near the top of the light colored area and the bottom point of Manhattan nearish the bottom of the light colored area. This means that if I draw straight lines on the the map from San Francisco to these two points, the angle between them is something like 30 degrees. They pass through very roughly the top and bottom of Nevada. But there's no line of constant bearing that passes from SF through the top of Nevada to the top of Manhattan while at the same time one that passes through the bottom of Nevada to the bottom of Manhattan.
This is all very wishy-washy, but it doesn't look right to me.
"Lines of constant bearing" (or "rhumb lines") depend on the choice of poles.
A rhumb line relative to true north looks straight on a standard Mercator projection, but can look like a spiral on another Mercator-style projection where the pole and center-point have been swapped.
I think it's just a play on the fact that mercator distorts distances significantly, rather than actually being accurate. It's a 3-second website you open, exhale in hilarity and close.
If you search for "90,0" and then use the change orientation button to put the south pole on the bottom of the screen you can recover the more familiar distorted map.
Other choices really do put into perspective how distorted this projection is.
EDIT: you can also click the "folded map icon" button and you see the coordinates transformed back into normal ones and shown on a map with X and Y corresponding to radius and azimuth from the centre. Extremely cool!
Mexico City is great for this because it points you to the central square. You can see the avenues spiraling out of the square, some of which follow the same routes as the avenues that lead to the city-island of prehispanic times (Calzada de Tlalpan, for example).
They're missing a trick here. The best view angle is to have "here" along the bottom edge so it looks like you're looking outward from above the centre point.
In a former life and trade, I used straight edged rulers to measure effectively on convex surfaces by simply tilting the edge forward rounding the convex surface, riding it along until I hit my mark and reading the value.
Remember that "The West Wing" episode where geographers petition the White House chief of staff to replace the Mercator projection with the more accurate and less Euro/US-centric Peters one? This one looks designed to stroke the Yuge ego of one Donald J Trump...
Yes, a great and educational episode, which is exactly why it's fiction. Although I would expect anyone working at the White House to have seen an actual globe. Well, perhaps not this White House.
Classic example is moving Greenland onto the US. Or Russia. Russia isn't talked about much in this case, but its dramatic how it changes.
https://www.thetruesize.com/