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Comment by kerng | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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