Assuming there's a place for more Big Balls in federal government?
Are Americans afraid of Canada or Greenland because it appears quite large on a Mercator map? Are we more likely to send aid to Asia because it is in fact a larger continent than Africa?
You think voters will increase support for Africa (whatever that means) if their perceived size of the continent is increased?
Noted very stable genius Donald Trump: "I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"
It's not totally implausible that the grossly oversized depiction of Greenland on Mercator (it's shown as being larger than the US) actually had some impact on his asinine desire to annex Greenland.
Every world map must trade off between different types of distortion. There's no principled reason to demand a map perfectly respect relative area at the expense of other characteristics.
Personally for general world maps I typically prefer so-called ‘compromise’ pseudocylindrical projections such as Robinson, which try to minimise all types of distortion as much as possible, but even the much-maligned Mercator has its place.
I’m not objecting to the Equal Earth projection, which is a perfectly respectable contribution to the pseudocylindrical repertoire, but to the language this site is using to promote it.
Not the best visualization I should say.
The colors could have been better used to highlight the difference IMO.
For the northern landmasses, Greenland for example, the smaller outline is the equal-earth-projection, and the larger outline is the conventional Mercator projection. That's all there is to it.
I am be surprised at the number of maps we look at today given that often we are looking at digital screens that could display an interactive globe as easily as a distorted old map.
Meerkartor was developed to project a 3D GLOBE onto a flat surface.
We already have non-meerkartor projections such as the classic globe that should be found in every class-room, and modern digital variations such as Google Earth.
And the meerkartor projections we do use:
In USA, the meerkartor projection centers on the USA.
In europe, the meerkartor projection centers on Europe.
And in asia, guess where the center is?
Why can't Africa just start using their own projection too, with their preferences?
And you can definitely do that because a large proportion of maps sold in Asia do actually have Asia more or less in the middle.
As I understand it, Mercator mostly preserves relative distances between continents, at the expense of distorting continent shape & size. This is useful for ocean-based trade route calculation, which was a major concern when Mercator was introduced.
Most regions these days have a standard projection they use that best represents their country and modern GIS software can trivially reproject data in whatever format your project is using.
For example, in NZ, New Zealand Transverse Mercator is normally used. We used to use New Zealand Map Grid, which better represents our country, but the govt decided to switch the official one to better integrate with overseas data & software. Modern software allows you to trivially use either though.
Tl;Dr: map projections matter, but different ones are better for different purposes in different places. The African Union can use whatever they want, and everyone else can use what is most useful for their maps. No need for everyone to use the same system when we can use both.
"But you can't do that." "Why not?" "Because it's freaking me out."
Such an entertaining show.
Reason for being seems to be more or less "square accurate-area maps are ugly".
