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[-] veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

This is like that one American Dallas county commissioner, William Price, getting offended it's called Black Hole.

The notion that projections perpetuate some racial agenda is exactly the pseudo-intellectual victimhood that takes away oxygen in the room for actual issues to be addressed.

[-] FE80@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

This is truly the concern of our time.

[-] ysjet@lemmy.world 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I'm going to be honest, this just looks utterly useless for any country that isn't south africa, and ESPECIALLY useless for any country in the northern hemisphere.

Like, yes, sure, you've made all the country's areas roughly equal, but also every single country that isn't south africa is a distorted, warped mess that looks nothing like its actual shape.

Look at parts of europe- every country is a COMPLETELY USELESS shape. Three quarters of them have been turned into diagonal lines. How the fuck is that useful? Europe is the worst area in that regard, but by no means the only one.

It makes it literally useless as a map.

[-] Dearth@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago

Every country looks distorted and warped based on your lifetime of experience looking at mercator projection. Every country looks warped and distorted when compared to globes. We learn geography on a flat surface which is inherently distorted because we live on a round surface

[-] ysjet@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

Actually, fun fact, the entire point of the Mercator projection is that it DOES maintain shapes/angles, just not scale. It's a nautical map, it's for sailing. That's why when you look at a mercator map and a globe, the countries look about the same, just potentially different sizes- because that's literally the point of it.

[-] Hugin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Not exactly it distorts shapes a lot. However if you pick point A on a coast and point B on a different coast the angle of the line is the heading you should sail to go from point A to point B.

So yeah very useful as a nautical map if you want to navigate from place to place. Not accurate in shape though.

[-] devnev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago

Who actually uses it as a map though? It's usually only seen briefly in apps, or in various symbols, or on a classroom wall. As a symbol, having the rights sizes would be a significant improvement. In an app, people will zoom in anyway, so at least they'd passively see the correct proportions when zooming out, instead of getting a false impression. In a classroom, it would seem all that more importantly to not give false impressions to kids.

[-] ysjet@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

The problem with that is that it gives a completely incorrect idea of what an individual country looks like, in a way that gives a false impression to kids about what the countries even look like. Suddenly they have to look at one map, and recognize a country, and then look at a zoomed in, more accurate map, and recognize it in a completely different shape. To be frank, most people's geography knowledge is already bad enough- doubling the amount of shapes they need to learn is basically a non-starter.

For classroom instruction, a globe should be being used anyway- that's the gold standard. Why go through all the work and effort of introducing a worse solution, that doubles the amount of studying, and is made completely useless when it can be replaced by a $10 globe?

[-] devnev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Is learning the shapes of countries really all that important? I would have thought by the time the shape matters, you're looking at/learning the details of the country, at which point you're not looking at a map of the entire world anymore anyway.

[-] ysjet@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Yes? The shapes of countries- and their relation to other countries around them- is literally the most important part of learning geography in some respects, because of how much that shape is influenced by- and has been influenced by- the surroundings, the socioeconomic and sociopolitical history, etc etc.

[-] Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

We should encourage the use of more globes to represent world maps.

Like, seriously. Almost all maps are viewed on a computer screen, all computers easily have the ability to display a sphere and rotate it

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

Kinda hard to fit a globe inside a school book, or any book

[-] Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's kinda easy to have globes in school though. Doesn't need one per student.

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[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 122 points 3 days ago
[-] Star 2 points 1 day ago

Damn the Goode called me tf out

I feel like it's missing a style I don't know the name of but can describe. Basically a map made up of 4-6 parts depending on it they want the north and south poles wherein it shows the earth at 4 different point roughly broken up by continents, Europe and Africa, Asia and parts of Oceania, Oceania, and North and South America.

[-] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 18 points 3 days ago

Robinson always looked the best to me

[-] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

What brand are your running shoes?

[-] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Brooks…the most basic of basic bitch running shoes…..

[-] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

Dymaxion.

Waterman is nice and all, but I don't like the way it splits Australia and New Zealand, or how it puts Antarctica in a separate bit like Alaska in USA maps.

Dymaxion offers a nice continuous view of all the continents, and can still be folded into a sufficiently spherical globe-like thingy.

It'd be nice to have an alternative version that made the oceans continuous, though, for people who like ships and stuff.

[-] blackjam_alex@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago
[-] RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 17 points 2 days ago

1000041971

I've heard they're very comfortable but they do look weird

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

As a Dvorak user, why not dymaxion

[-] Opisek@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Dvorak users, assemble!

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[-] kopasz7@sh.itjust.works 84 points 3 days ago

“It’s [the Mercator projection] the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

No matter how we cut it though, all 2D projections will have some kind of distortion. They opted to preserve area, while the Mercator preserves angles. Arguably it is less important today to preserve angles, as we have automatic navigation systems. There are some alternatives that also preserve the area: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/The-Equal-Earth-compared-to-similar-equal-area-pseudocylindrical-projections.png

[-] QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days ago

Right. What people need to understand that any globe put on a flat surface will be distorted. Their proposal is just as distorted as the Mercator, just in area vs angles as you stated.

[-] Texas_Hangover@lemmy.radio 7 points 2 days ago

Its a good thing you came along to reiterate that.

[-] mika_mika@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Just fyi this 2D projection is also distorted just in angles instead of area.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 3 days ago

It's not a damn campaign. Activists never seem to be good at nuance.

[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

Gerrymappering.

[-] Fleur_@aussie.zone 4 points 2 days ago

Me when someone calls my pp smol

[-] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 days ago
[-] kureta@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

Me too! Also the Waterman Butterfly.

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[-] Scott_of_the_Arctic@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Ok come up with something that's better and just as practical.

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 8 points 2 days ago

They did. They are specifically advocating for the Equal Earth projection.

[-] Scott_of_the_Arctic@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

I mean everything is approximately to scale i guess, but the further east or west you get from Europe/Africa the more bent things get. Including the area that 75% of the worlds population live.

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 8 points 2 days ago

Well yeah, every map projection has to mis-represent something. In this case they're arguing that presenting area is more important than presenting angles. Outside of long-distance travel on ships and planes, which are not using general-purpose world maps, nobody is navigating with a world map, so I think that they're probably right here. It seems more important to me to understand the relative size of Africa to other landmasses than it is to know that the Korean peninsula is actually a few degrees off of being straight north of Borneo

[-] Anti_Iridium@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago
[-] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

It was very much a real discussion back then as well. The writers didn’t invent this argument.

People have been complaining about maps in general since we first started making them. The Gall-Peters projection that they mentioned traces its origins back to 1855 when James Gall first introduced the concept.

In the 1970’s, Arno Peters made this projection well known. He specifically argued the point the show makes: other maps distort our perception of the world and it fosters problems with how we treat some countries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection

[-] Anti_Iridium@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

I was honestly not aware. Learn something new every day!

[-] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

You’re welcome, enjoy your odd new fact :D

Stuff like this is why I really enjoy The West Wing. It often has interesting real world arguments that it plays out smartly. A bit too optimistic in our current political climate, but still fun to watch.

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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
336 points (100.0% liked)

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