Mercator Projection. So many ways to try to represent a sphere on a flat 2D plane but none are perfect

https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-will-change-how-you-see-the-world-74967

And this “True Size” map is fun to play with.

TheTrueSize

Another thing we mostly have no clue about thanks to most of our maps is how massively large the Pacific ocean is.

Maybe the kms in Asia are larger than the ones in Africa. Since the metre is defined as the distance traveled by light in 1/299792458s, one can only conclude that light is slower in Asia. Because it's cold. It makes sense. Light is cold-blooded, maybe? See my next paper in Nature, idk.

Isn't there a flat map where the actual scale is kept intact? That fucker looks so weird when you've been taught the other one your whole life. It's like planetary dysmorphia.

Actually this is a bit misleading. If you check google maps you can see that those straight lines are not the shortest path between those points. Also, that's not the longest distance between 2 points in Russia.

The point still stands that these two distances are practically the same when they appear vastly different in a 2D projectio.

Edit: I might have placed the marker in Crimea. Sorry about that. The point still basically stands.

I wonder if there would be any way to try to quantify the cost of mistakes made by the simple impossibility of accurately projecting a round image onto a flat surface.

You know, people make dumb mistakes because they just forget a conversion or something. People also probably make dumb mistakes because they forget to mentally correct a Mercator projection.

I'm still annoyed that the default in Google Maps isn't a spherical mapping. You can set it to use a sphere if you're logged in, but that's not the default.

In the past, the only reason for a flat map was paper, but since it's now easy to project a 3d image on a 2d screen, there's no reason that online maps should ever use anything other than a sphere. Yet, Mercator is the default for Google Maps, which just confuses another generation of kids.

Greenland may look as big as all of Africa, but it's actually as big as Greenland.

Let me just put my two cents in for the Dymaxion Projection. It preserves size and shape, and it also shows how connected the land masses really are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

Every time I look at a real globe it always fucks with my head. Especially when I see just how massive Africa is.

Thsi reminds me of this site where you can overlay the borders of any country anywhere on earth and see how it compares. https://www.thetruesize.com/

The Mercator Projection strikes again... How big is Greenland?

Yes, we know about Mercator projections. As a kid I was convinced Greenland was huge though. Now it is big but not THAT big.

Also Australia is 4000km across. On these maps it looks about half that.