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Comment by ludwigschubert | Hacker News Reader

While interesting, I'm not sure the actual map as pictured is a "good design":

One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps. Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users.

The proposed design thus has too low a land area to map area ratio to be very useful.

The projection itself would be useful as a digital map (with zooming and panning) or as an icon, though.

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> One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps.

...which would be indeed useful if your country and its neighbors are on the opposite side of the Earth from the Pacific. If your country and most of its important trade partners are sitting right around the Pacific, the "strength" is now shortcoming.

Frankly, I didn't know so many people would claim that a world map centered around Europe has some inherent virtue, instead of being the result of local convenience (nothing wrong with that). This is the same kind of feel-good story as "Fahrenheit is superior because 0 and 100 are at human level."

I live in Australia, and having a map that centres on the Pacific so that Chile is in relation to us... is not very useful. Our political, social, cultural, and economic ties have very little to do with South America. The Pacific Ocean almost literally takes up half the planet. A general-purpose map can benefit from diminishing its importance (after all, are the seas ever any other colour than a simple plain light blue on these?). The benefit of a Euro/Afrocentric map is that the split goes down the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and there's only a couple of countries there, whose tiny islands are rarely shown on maps anyway.

This equal-area map dramatically distorts the shapes of the landmasses, and they're the very thing the map is there to show. Brazil is pregnant; Australia has a tumour; China is smaller than Australia, instead of being 25% larger; Saudi Arabia is as big as India; so on and so forth. The projection lines on the map do not match up with how humans see things - this is not a map for humans to use, since the only way to make sense of it in a practical way is to interpret it with a tool.

But map should be accurate in the first place. It's not like you can just ignore things you don't want to see there just because they are naturally to big and take up too much space

I get what you're saying, and you are right, of course.

I'm trying to think of this not from a prescriptive position, though, but thinking of "why do people like Mercator". And I believe that people like the perceived efficiency of Mercator, in the sense that you can make a world map that fills more of its area with land mass.

Or, addressing your comment more pointedly: yes, yes you can. You can ignore the Pacific Ocean on a world map most of the time. :D

Actually humans can do that. We orient ourselves using landmarks. If you look at theme park maps, ski resort maps, maps of tourist areas downtown produced by local organizations, subway maps....

All of them are wildly inaccurate in terms of proportions and distances. But notice - almost all are oriented to people not very familiar with that area. Certain big monuments may be left out (the highway that runs by water park, the big electric station across the street etc.

Harry Beck invented the schematic map in 1931 for the London Underground (the worlds first underground railway). At first it wasn't widely accepted as a good idea (because it distorted relative distances) but over time has become a design icon and repeated elsewhere.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150720-the-london-undergr...

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/...

A decorative toy map like this doesn't have to be accurate. Yes, you can ignore things for convenience. If I make a map that ignores the Pacific so I can focus on landmasses, it doesn't make the actual Pacific disappear. So yes, you can absolutely ignore things you don't want.

The article mentions the map "aims to create maps that represent all land masses and seas as accurately as possible."

What does it mean, "as accurately as possible"? Is that stretched-out Brazil accurate? Or that shrunk China? Pretty sure a lot of areas of this map aren't very accurate.

Do you think it may be your bias based on your entire lifetime of looking at Mercator projections? The purpose of this project is to make it an accurate representation. The observations you make are precisely why this made was made.

This was made to keep areas proportional to reality but the shapes are clearly distorted.

I specifically chose countries that are close to equator, because they are not distorted on Mercator very much.

The question is: why "areas" are more accurate than distances/angles in a map?

So: this map has very good properties in some sense, very bad in others.

That's simply it. Mercator won mindshare because it was most useful for people who needed maps to do their jobs. If I'm setting a course for some destination I don't really care what the land area of Greenland is, I want to know the correct heading.

This map may solve some imaginary problem of public perception, but at the cost of losing valuable information easily gleaned from other maps,like northern and southern hemisphere, which places share the same latitude, which places share the same longitude. These are physical distinctions which matter.

They're accurate insofar as they match up correctly with the map's own grid lines (which are also horribly distorted to our eyes)

That's a good point.

I guess I am trying to say that a map that accurately represents the area of seas is potentially not what everyday map users want from a world map.

But I see that they optimized for that instead of my vague sense of usability. :-)

>One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps. Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users.

Totally agreed!!! To say nothing about totally irrelevant places like Africa.

I've written up some of the other advantages of the Mercator projection that you've missed, here:

http://imgur.com/a/bsRD9

In short, it's the best and most useful design and nobody other than maaaaaybe some planetary geologist should possibly concern themselves with something as irrelevant as objective reality.

Normally, I don't use maps to compare the size of continents. That's what tables and lists are for. I use them to see where geographical areas are relative to one another. Others have other needs, depending on what they do with their lives.

I think you bring a nasty tone to the conversation, and you bring straw men and appeals to emotion with a rehearsed disregard for the practical issues others work with.

The comment I quoted was incredibly dismissive with "it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users".

In my personal opinion - and I'm not that big of a map expert - the reason Mercator projection is popular is because it makes the United States as well as Europe bigger and more prominent, and shrinks areas its users care less about. It has nothing to do in my opinion with showing where geographic areas are relative to one another, as you state. If that were the actual issue, don't you think distortion of the oceans would be a big issue? After all, that determines where these locations are relative to one another. If you look at any more modern projection (including a view like this - https://i.redd.it/iqoed05vvfux.png ) you will see that the aspect you say the projection is good for (showing where areas are relative to each other) is better-served by those more modern projections. So it can't be the reason you state.

In fact what I parodied isn't a straw man argument at all: it is the fundamental reason (in my opinion) that the Mercator projection was, and is, popular.

You don't know this, but the reason for the "nasty" tone is because until I edited it to be very, very clear in its current form, my draft read to me like I was actually making the argument! (Because people do think that way.) I had to make it 'nasty' because edited even very slightly, it no longer sounds like a parody or satire, it sounds completely earnest. Hope you can understand my perspective on this and why I chose to share it the way I did. With a little imagination, you could see that if I edited it only slightly, it would be taken to be a genuine defense of the Mercator projection for the actual reasons I stated. I wanted to avoid that.

Love how "nasty" is coming into use as a denunciation aimed at the presenter of inconvenient facts.

"Nasty tone." "Nasty woman." :)

I understand. The projection you link to here is the one I keep in my living room.

About satire and/or parody: I would try to master the form first, as well as finding out where it's effective. 'Allo 'allo and Candide are in my opinion brilliant examples. In a rational discussion it easily appears a bit like mockery, or "did you stop beating your wife".

As for the comment you replied to: I find it very credible that these things aren't so important to everyday map users. The Mercator projection does have its advantages for some applications. Other projections for other applications. Putting a sphere on a rectangular piece of paper will involve tradeoffs.

The sheer utility of a suitable projection far outweighs any notions of trying to put any particular nation or continent - for most people.

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