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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Technically nice, but could be called a violation of the principle of least surprise that countries change in size as you drag.

Why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection ?

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I think that's the point? It's trying to display the difference between the most commonly used projection and the actual relative sizes of territories.

(Forgive me if my snark detectors are misfiring, and have an xkcd)

https://xkcd.com/977/

Gall-Peters is not a pleasant map. If you want equal area, try Eckert IV.

Or get a globe.

Doesn't help. You would need a globe with an "inner" map and an outer mostly transperent sphere that can be freely moved and display a country in a semitransparent manner. That way you can move the countries to compare over each other. And now might still want to freely rotate the upper one of them to get the best visualization.

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...

Not pleasant for another reason than Peters being a communist praising the achievements of the USSR?

I haven't studied the subject in detail, because an unsolvable problem is... eh... unsolvable. A quick web search did not bring up anything to compare those 2 (or others suggested here) on a quick glimpse.

Yes. It looks ugly.

But that projection would also lead to countries changing shape when dragging them around, would it not?

Right. So maybe the best comparison could be done by not dragging one country, but selecting 2 (or another small number) and having them "fly" over each other or next to each in an "ideal" projection for this country. For most but the huge countries distortions should not be that big. The problem is the world map. Distortions will always be big somewhwere if you want to see 180 countries on the same map. But at the same time nobody wants to compare 180 countries.

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