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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> stretching effects of a flat map

Of the Mercator projection! There are many other projections that can be (and are) used to make a flat map, that preserve area.

Edit: This is surely the most anodyne comment I ever wrote to get downvoted.

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If people are interested in the aforementioned other projections, this was a fun article. Stay to the end and check out the AuthaGraph projection! I def need to order one of those for the wall

https://geoawesomeness.com/best-map-projection/

Do the AuthaGraph inventors ever mention the dymaxion projection? I always felt creeped out that the two maps are so similar, yet no one ever talks about the dymaxion projection. As far as I can tell the AuthaGraph people have neither confirmed nor denied knowing about the dymaxion projection.

They seem pretty distinct to me. The Dymaxion projection preserves shape as well as area.

http://www.authagraph.com/projects/description/%E3%80%90%E4%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

Oh wow. I never noticed. I thought authagraph just stretched out the seas to make the map rectangular. I can see now they are different.

I found Hajime Narukawa's website and he actually has a several posts explaining various dymaxion technologies. Link confirmed!

http://narukawa-lab.jp/archives/dymaxion-map/

Google Maps at least renders the map as a sphere on all zoom levels by now, if I'm not mistaken. So one place less to get confused about the shape and size of things.

No thread about Mercator projection without this argument. Preserving area not a use case in every context. You may need a projection that preserve relative position, perspective etc.

smh It really isn't an obvious thing either. lots of folks think greenland is as big as south america only because they don't understand the map stretches at the poles and they also don't know there are other projections.

What you said is true and non-obvious. I can only wonder if the downvotes you received are from people who don't agree with you and if that's the case, either they don't understand what downvotes are for or dunning-kruger has taken over hacker news.

On mobile, upvote and downvote buttons are so close together, sometimes I spend a few seconds voting and unvoting, just to make sure I didn't accidentally downvote. That's a possibility too.

Given both the radical and reactionary positions surrounding the Mercator projection I doubt it was accidental downvoting.

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