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Comment by A2017U1 | Hacker News Reader

A2017U1

One little thing my American expat friends always find strange: maps are centered "wrong". As in the US is located at the top left and Asia is on the right.

I'm quite sure this is the world standard map, but apparently many grew up only with one that has the states centered.

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That surprises me (as an American). Just about every map I’ve ever seen here, and all the ones used in school, have the Atlantic Ocean in the center and the US in the top left.

Actually I’d point out this annoys some Alaskans in my family, as that projection usually cuts part of Alaska off and leaves it dangling on the far right of the map. But we’re so euro-centric it just seems like the “correct” map even though it makes looking at part of our own country more difficult.

There isn't a standard map I'd say. Wherever you go, the "home continent" is typically centered. I was (naively) surprised the first time I went to USA long time ago and saw maps that had the Americas in the middle - but thinking about it, it made sense.

I'm confused, I grew up in the USA and for global maps the US was never centered. It was always on the left, like every map here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps_of_the_world , and Africa is in the middle. If the Americas were centered on a world map you'd have to cut Asia in half, with it being on both the far left and right. It makes a lot more sense to make the split in the middle of the Pacific ocean and that's how I've always seen it done, I can't even picture a world map with the Americas in the middle. Is this a misunderstanding?

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I was totally under the impression it would be the norm. Here is an example of a map: http://www.freeworldmaps.net/world/america-centric/physical-...

I think it was on west coast or Hawaii I saw those.

But what really made me think it's the norm was that the a Universal Pictures logo also has the Americas in middle and their intro ends with the Americas centered also: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KpNkgRv_8XE

Quite interesting.

Yeah, that's not typical and the reason is pretty much practical. If you center at or near the Greenwich Meridien, the edges of your map are more or less right between Alaska and Russia and go down the middle of the Pacific Ocean where there's very little land. Of course, one 2D map projection can't cover the whole earth effectively but centering a typical projection on 0/0 gives you something that works for most of the areas people are looking for on a world map.

The standard map has zero degrees in the center.

Yep, this is a good one.

When America is in the middle then Asia is broken in half.

With America off to the side the "edge" of the map is the International Date line, thus no land-mass is broken.

In Australia, I've seen maps with North America in the top right.

That's just because you guys are looking at it upside down :)

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