I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth
I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.
And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.
Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.
Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:
Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.
For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.
I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.
No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!
> what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator
Are you insane? Why should one? Is it because if you see a projection you are cognitively impacted? Well, get scholarized, and you will stop getting subconscious suggestions from unintended appearances.
Meanwhile, we will prefer orthogonal axes projections for all the cases where they work well.
By the way: in the territories I know, Mercator is just one of the projections used in texts and schools.
I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.
Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.
It's a GA resolution. Vanuatu gets the same vote as India. No actually consequential global decisions could ever be made this way, so it's no wonder it's mostly used for symbolic votes like this one.
It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.
The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.
Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Besides size, there's distance. Like it's kinda annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are. I'd be fine with this change if they weren't making it some kind of DEI for Africa. They're just fixing a misleading map.
I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.
> Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals
I'm sure the guns trained on people trying to cross the Berlin wall to the west was just a "symbol", or the nuclear tests to prove that superpowers could kill everyone, or the people who died during the space race to send someone to the Moon. Olympics, sure whatever.
Yes, a nonbinding UN resolution that does a stupid thing that no one has to care about is a symbol, just one no one cares about because its nonbinding.
To some people the Berlin Wall was an immediate and terrible factor in their lives. But to most people in the world, it was a symbol of oppression rather than a physical manifestation of it.
Except the part where had to lift an old mainframe from that frozen shithole with a helicopter under fire. And like 10 different proxy wars that are still going on.
The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.
Not sure why UN is taken seriously today. Isn't that a club of corrupt drunkards who meet from time to time to fart in their chairs and spout nonsense?
Well, unfortunately it's clubs of corrupt drunkards farting in chairs all the way down to 9-member housing association. The difference is in how much power each club is allowed to have and advertise at any given moment.
I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth
Very nice!
I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.
And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.
Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.
Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:
Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.
For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.
[0] https://www.mapfight.xyz/
Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.
No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.
Somebody who does not represent anybody "agreed" - not us.
I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.
No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!
To say that "the world agreed" on something based on a General Assembly resolution is an interesting claim, if rather bold.
"The world" is not represented by the UN General Assembly. Did you vote for your representative?
The UN does not dictate which map you or your government or your school or Google uses.
I didn't vote for a foreign minister of my country, but his job is to represent my country, including in UN. This is fine.
Representing a 3D sphere-like surface on a 2d plane definitionally requires compromise.
Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...
Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.
> what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator
Are you insane? Why should one? Is it because if you see a projection you are cognitively impacted? Well, get scholarized, and you will stop getting subconscious suggestions from unintended appearances.
Meanwhile, we will prefer orthogonal axes projections for all the cases where they work well.
By the way: in the territories I know, Mercator is just one of the projections used in texts and schools.
Why? Mercator is useful and familiar to billions of people.
“Robinson projection” makes me think of Canadian fasteners.
I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.
I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.
Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.
It's a GA resolution. Vanuatu gets the same vote as India. No actually consequential global decisions could ever be made this way, so it's no wonder it's mostly used for symbolic votes like this one.
https://xkcd.com/977/
I have a Waterman on my wall :)
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It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.
Time to rename Mercator the “Map of America”.
The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.
For a while, France had its own prime meridian with 0 degrees passing of course through Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian
Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.
What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
Trump didn't unilaterally decide what the rest of the world calls two bodies of water, only the US
>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.
> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
> many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?
Besides size, there's distance. Like it's kinda annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are. I'd be fine with this change if they weren't making it some kind of DEI for Africa. They're just fixing a misleading map.
I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
> This has clearly influenced geopolitics
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Of course they were lying the entire time.
>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?
Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.
> Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals
I'm sure the guns trained on people trying to cross the Berlin wall to the west was just a "symbol", or the nuclear tests to prove that superpowers could kill everyone, or the people who died during the space race to send someone to the Moon. Olympics, sure whatever.
Yes, a nonbinding UN resolution that does a stupid thing that no one has to care about is a symbol, just one no one cares about because its nonbinding.
To some people the Berlin Wall was an immediate and terrible factor in their lives. But to most people in the world, it was a symbol of oppression rather than a physical manifestation of it.
Except the part where had to lift an old mainframe from that frozen shithole with a helicopter under fire. And like 10 different proxy wars that are still going on.
Nazi were big on symbols. And very good in their use of them for propaganda. Yes, they played role in getting support for their project.
And allies were engaged in that too.
The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.
The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/977/
Oh, it's not often we get an entire category of XKCD comics: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Bad_Map_...
I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...
"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.
why the /s?
https://mapdesign.icaci.org/2014/02/mapcarte-38365-mcarthurs...
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Not sure why UN is taken seriously today. Isn't that a club of corrupt drunkards who meet from time to time to fart in their chairs and spout nonsense?
Well, unfortunately it's clubs of corrupt drunkards farting in chairs all the way down to 9-member housing association. The difference is in how much power each club is allowed to have and advertise at any given moment.
Who is taking it seriously? The unipolarists clearly don't, and the multipolarists have been busy building alternatives for the past couple decades.