Hacker News Reader

Comment by supergreg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com