No, they were just used mainly for navigation. The reason why the Mercator projection was popular for so long is that its angles correspond to compass points and you navigate by a trivial algorithm:
1. Draw a line to your destination on the map and determine its angle with the north, say 25 degrees north-east.
2. Set your course at 25 degrees north-east and keep it constant. Your will arrive to your destination by a rhumb line [1], which is only slightly less efficient than a great circle.
Yeah, projections are always wrong and misleading in some ways and it’s certainly important to point that out – but the Mercator projection has certain properties that are desirable for navigation but also properties that are completely undesirable for how many maps are typically used today. All that navigational stuff? Completely irrelevant for all typical use cases nowadays. Distortions of sizes? Quite relevant for typical use cases.
Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good.
Umm no. You can also mislead yourself by using a slide rule to measure lengths, but that doesn't make the slide rule wrong.
It is not an argument for Mercator projection maps to appear as the canonical Earth map in textbooks, on classroom walls, or anywhere else where education is concerned.
Mercator preserves shape and direction at the expense of size. Peters preserves size and direction at the expense of shape. Peirce Quincuncial preserves shape and size at the expense of direction. Here's a transverse Peirce Quincuncial map I generated: http://frammish.org/tpq.jpg
Many other projections try to combine these, like the Miller projection maintains direction but strikes a balance between shape and size, getting neither one right, but neither is horribly wrong either. The Winkel Tripel projection tries to balance all three attributes.
I wonder if there is some sort of theorem that describes which fidelities you can get out of a flat projection of the surface of a sphere. For example, a projection could have accurate area ratios or accurately reflect point to point distances but not both.
I'm not sure any of this is really accurate. Go read the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection#...
tl;dr:
-Peters wasn't novel. An identical projection was created a century earlier (that's why it's called Gall-Peters).
-Peters made completely BS claims about his projection.
-Cartographers had already been using plenty of projections beyond Mercator for a long time and they knew very well that it had problems.
By the way, I'm pretty sure the xkcd about projections has a punchline and hover text that is directly related to the information above.
Don't the mean "in some spheres"? ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
If you are interested in a size-accurate map, you can't get much better than that.
I've always wondered, however; why not increase the density of faces (or vertices?) from an icosahedron, and have an even less distorted map? What would the monstrosity look like?...
In the limit, you could get something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection, but with infinitely many lobes. And that is a _could_: you can add branches like in Dymaxion wherever you feel like it.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_2003_animation_sm...
Wait, I got it.
Let's call them globes.
Wow. That question is annoying enough when the subject is a large university. I can't believe you were asked that.
CE sucks.
http://calabarboy.com/2010/10/11/the-true-size-of-africa-kai...
At the time, the Economist also redid the exercise starting with an equal-area projection: http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartograph...
they list 9.629M for USA, Google says 9.827M. Alaska, according to Google = 1.718M.
WAT?
Sahara desert: 3.629 million sq miles (9.4 million km²) Canada: 3.855 million sq miles (9.985 million km²)
Personally I'd prefer a map that emphasizes that the world is actually a sphere, rather than a rectangle. I also have a soft spot for Dymaxion, although I don't use Dvorak.
I might take up the project of posting the relevant wikipedia links as stories, and in turn linking those in the comments of all shoddily written blog posts, in the hope of righting these wrongs.
But this whole "true size" is true in measure, but I'm not really comfortable with people using it to push their agenda
Yes, Africa is big, and?
Big countries (yes, Africa is not a country) are usually on the wrong side of the stick. Maybe the USA has the most usable land, but it's still costly for them
Asia is gigantic, where's its population? Concentrated into tiny spaces! Japan, Indonesia, a narrow stretch of India.
http://humangeography.wikispaces.com/file/view/ChinaIndiaPop...
Obviously not the best for navigation, but considered the best compromise for viewing the entire Earth in two dimensions.
If only. Mercator projection is still quite widespread. Try google image search of world map.
Personally I really like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It's basically a net that you can print of and fold together.
It means that geographically, Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world. And not much else.
I did not like the picture showing various countries contained within Africa. Why is Alaska not considered part of the "US"?
Several times while driving North through mid-western States I've been startled to realize how much land is north of the US border in Canada. I knew Canada was larger than the US, but I didn't comprehend the scale of that country.
I've seen this behavior previously (it's becoming more common) and I reward it the same way each time: closing the site and putting it on my proxy's blocklist.
