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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] dividefuel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skocznymroczny|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob_c|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] triyambakam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tagbert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michalc|3 years ago|reply
http://projections.charemza.name/
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
[+] [-] wodenokoto|3 years ago|reply
Other than that, it is really cool, and quite trippy to play with.
[+] [-] IshKebab|3 years ago|reply
You should add other projections for comparison!
[+] [-] micheljansen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitchc|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flohofwoe|3 years ago|reply
Basically like this:
https://www.mapsofindia.com/world-map/world-political-map-20...
...still a lot of distortion of course, but much better than traditional Mercator (which is 500 years old, so give the guy some slack).
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] thatjoeoverthr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guskel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] campbel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tephra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-up_map_orientation
[+] [-] emptyparadise|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tagbert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undersuit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] feldrim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipnon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] walnutclosefarm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wikitopian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummypaint|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameshart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrika|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI?t=44
[+] [-] devnull255|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReactiveJelly|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection
[+] [-] andix|3 years ago|reply
And for the digital kids nowadays, there are apps which show a 3d globe. Google Maps can do that too.
[+] [-] kryptiskt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddhhyy|3 years ago|reply
Map Projections: https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/70047422/report.pdf
and the more comprehensive Map Projections: A Working Manual: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395
[+] [-] joshe|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devnull255|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] verisimi|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] belinder|3 years ago|reply
I'm having trouble finding a nice large resolution image. Anyone found one?