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The idea that retaining a map which distorting the sizes of countries is a Eurocentric conspiracy against equatorial countries was originally made by Peters when pushing his equal area projection in the 1970s and 80s

It's a pretty tendentious argument though, since in addition to it obviously not being the original intent, people don't draw the conclusion that Greenland is a mighty state, the US is subordinate to Canada and the Middle East is a small and inconsequential backwater from map projections, and if people did gauge power and wealth from map projections, the Mercator projection would actually understate the actual relative power and influence of Western Europe anyway (and Peters massively overstates arid underpopulated regions and is barely any better at putting India's sixth of the world population in context).

Plus of course, the Mercator projection is still better for local navigation anyway.

The maps I care about are Google Maps and Apple Maps and the maps used in school classrooms. If I were to zoom out all the way to world map view in Google/Apple Maps, clearly the intent isn't to do navigation but to get relative geographical position/size understanding of various land and water masses. For this, in this era, I would expect them to provide a different projections that are better suited for these purposes.

> The Mercator projection was adopted because it preserved bearing lines for marine navigation

Specifically, Mercator preserves angles, making it possible to plot courses on the map using a protractor. Attempting this on a map with a non-conformal projection would be a nightmare.

Yes, though only a tiny percentage of people who use Mercator have ever plotted a course using a protractor.

It’s called path dependence; same reason that the Space Shuttle boosters’ width is constrained by the width of two horses’ rear ends put side by side.

wat

Not the OP, but after a few web searches I can say he/she was alluding to this [1]:

> When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

I have no idea if that's the real story behind it or not, but it sounds plausible enough. And OP's more general allusion to path dependence [2] is even more interesting, even though less anecdotic.

[1] https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/viral-twitter-thread...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

The story is egregiously wrong.

In terms of track gauge (the distance between the two rails), the most common gauge nowadays is standard gauge, 4'8½" or 1435mm. This gauge was chosen by George Stephenson, who developed the first practical locomotive--and having developed the first practical locomotive, he was a strong influence on a lot of early railroad engineering choices. But standard gauge was far from standard--in the early 1800s, every railway chose its own gauge and gauge incompatibility was the norm. As the railway networks grew and interconnection was more important, there was a push to unifying on gauges, and even large networks of different gauges switched in the names of efficiency (the southern US, then on 5' gauge, switched over 11,000 mi on track on May 31, 1886).

As for why 4'8½" was favored over other gauges... well, it wasn't. Stephenson appears to have relied on compatibility with wagonways of the coal mines he worked with. But there was equally no standardization of widths there as there was with early railroad gauges--you end up with track gauges that range about 4'-6'. And from the operations of railroads, it does seem that optimal track gauge is around 5' anyways. So the real reason for 4'8½" gauge isn't "that's the width of two horse butts", it's "that's a reasonable gauge for putting a wagon on rails."

But, to be honest, none of that discussion actually matters. You see, what matters for the SSRBs is not the track gauge, it's the loading gauge--that's what determines the dimensions of stuff you stick on cars. Loading gauge is far less standardized than standard gauge--whereas the US, Europe, and the UK all share the same standard gauge, they have wildly different loading gauges. Whereas the US standardized on a 10'8" loading gauge, Europe generally runs on 10'4", and UK on a paltry 9'6".

Finally, if you look at the dimensions of the space shuttle's booster rockets, they are ~12'2" in diameter. Recall that the standard US loading gauge is 10'8"--a foot and a half shorter than their diameter. So clearly the booster isn't even based on the standard-shape-of-a-railroad car, although that doesn't preclude it from being based on the actual practicable loading gauge of any route.

Still, the last line ("The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.") is complete and utter hogwash. The tunnel (I'm guessing Moffat Tunnel?) is probably about 13' wide, which is... a far cry from "slightly wider" than the railroad track at 4'8½".

James Burke did enough space shuttle shots that there is no way he would have passed this story up on Connections if it were true.

The boosters can only be so wide because of the size of road and rails. The widths of which were based on wagons, which could have been pulled by two horses side by side.

https://astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html

What he's basically saying (I assume at least) is that we build things based on past engineering efforts. There's that one story about how train tracks are the size of a horse carriage during the roman empire era because of standardized size of roads at the time or something like that (too lazy to check it out).

If you need to use vehicles like trucks and cranes to carry ISS boosters over a highway to their launchpad, you will be constrained by standardized sizes that, after all, come from the size of two horses side by side (that dictated the size of carriages and hence that of roads that carry people, etc).

I'm guessing that is via train widths being based on horse carriages and modern shipping being based on train limitations?

That percentage was 100% at one stage, though, and has only dropped because the rest of the human race adopted maps drawn by those few.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is one of at least 3 comments on this thread you've added to elevate the dumb political argument and, intentionally or not, strangle any conversation we could have had about geography, navigation, topology, culture, or history. It's the opposite of curious conversation; it's hemlock for curiosity.

With loaded issues like racism, more baseless claims just make the problem worse. What we need is evidence, and unfortunately there is almost none in this HN discussion. I've learned nothing about the issue.

More broadly, systems can be discriminatory: Using the maps as an example, imagine if a projection made the US look tiny; I don't imagine it would sell well. But if one makes Africa appear tiny, the map may persist for a long time. That's how systems can be discriminatory and how we can decieve ourselves, without conscious intent. Also, there are plenty of people, especially in the past and also in the last few years, who have openly and aggressively expressed intent to discriminate based on race and similar factors, and we can add to that the more subtle expressions. We have plenty of evidence of widespread motive and we should expect many outcomes to match their stated intent.

Many people in minority groups have told me, for years, that a large number of people in the US will always deny racism, in every instance. They might say something acknowledging racism generally, but in every specific instance they actively reject it has happened and oppose any action. An argument can always be found (for anything, of course). It's politicized - it's not related to the facts or reason, every claim becomes a political battle that must be won. I didn't believe it at first, but it certainly has been born out, from my perspective. It's a situation that obstructs knowledge, bringing people together, and solutions, and not entirely incidentally: Politicizing any issue is an obvious way to make it similarly intractable (e.g., climate change). EDIT: Maybe it's like any innovation, such as in tech - people react with outrage to any change, as we know well on HN.

Which brings us back to facts: People can come up with a plausible argument for anything; hard facts are the scythe that cuts away the 99.9% that is nonsense; that's why science and courtrooms rely on them.

Have you thought that maybe the hard fact is that the map was made because it's useful and not because of racism?

This completely misses the first point the parent comment made.

Even if we agree that the map wasn’t _made_ with racist or discriminatory intent, and hand sound reasoning for existing as it did (preserving angles as another comment mentioned), it doesn’t mean that it’s continued use isn’t discriminatory.

The parent comment is explaining that it perhaps became ubiquitous because white/colonial powers happened to be over-represented in scale. And once it is ubiquitous, it can be tough to walk backwards to something like the tetrahedral projection in the OP because anyone who does so in, say, America, would be diminishing America’s physical presence on projection maps.

>that it perhaps became ubiquitous because white/colonial powers happened to be over-represented in scale.

Yes. Society at large got together and said "these maps make us look good, let's spread them around, we will have until 2022 until someone will unravel our master scheme".

> And once it is ubiquitous, it can be tough to walk backwards to something like the tetrahedral projection in the OP because anyone who does so in, say, America, would be diminishing America’s physical presence on projection maps.

Perhaps it's tough to walk back ubiquitous things for superficial reasons.

USA isn't "big" on a map and there's no one standing in the way of this great injustice unless you're thinking Canada Russia and Greenland control the world.

> People can come up with a plausible argument for anything

And I agree—and “maps are racist” is an example of that.

I should also add that it’s not cost-free to err on the side of seeing “hidden” racism. Studies show that people succeed when they have an internal locus of control. People who have an external locus of control—they believe their fate is decided by outside factors—are less likely to be successful. Revealing racism (even real racism) is thus in the immediate term bad for minorities because it reinforces beliefs that racism holds them back. It can only be good for them if it gets white people to reduce racist conduct by enough to offset that negative impact.

I think in reality, telling people that “maps are racist” (even if it was true!) won’t really change the primary behavior of white people by enough to outweigh the negative psychological impact on minorities. The author is probably hurting minorities by peddling this myth.

I agree on your first point, but not your second. In the fourth paragraph it says:

"Its purpose was to be used for maritime navigation and it served this purpose well since throughout the projection North is up and South is down, while local shapes and directions are maintained. So when using this projection on a map scaled for navigational use it's easier to find your way."

The "solution" presented in the article looks an absolute mess to me though. Surely the better answer is a globe (real or virtual)? Those have existed in schools and homes for almost as long as maps. My children grew up with a LeapFrog globe, and at a young age gould find every country on the planet, by country or capital name. Great fun and highly recommended.

Globes of size useful for navigation are too big to be convenient when actually navigating. You cannot flat pack globes. They’re just impractical for this purpose.

You're conflating two different topics. The article asserts (correctly) that the Mercator projection, while useful for navigation, distorts the globe at a macro scale when used for educational purposes. A globe solves that problem.

Ah, yes, sorry, I got confused by this thread. Yes, globes are great educational tool. I think it’s actually valuable to show all of globes, Mercator, and the weird equal area projections, just to teach about trade offs.

It's hard to look at a whole globe at once. It's also hard to have enough globes to see how political boundaries have changed over time. Flat projections are needed for educational purposes too.

>A globe solves that problem.

Great. Now try and draw a journey on a globe.

Of course you can - Amazon will do it for you

https://www.amazon.com/inflatable-globe/s?k=inflatable+globe

The article notes the fact that Mercator is better for ocean navigation, but fails to understand how that’s connected to its prevalence: the mapmakers were seafaring explorers.

Classrooms have globes. Insofar as the Mercator projection is widespread, however, a responsible teacher should explain the historical connection between ocean navigation and mapmaking. Not recount a totally manufactured example of racism.

> Classrooms have globes.

Do they? Not many IME, and not really used.

> a responsible teacher should explain the historical connection between ocean navigation and mapmaking

Says who? Is that in the cirriculum?

> a totally manufactured example of racism.

That it's totally totally manufactured is itself totally manufactured.

They used too, my classes did. I can see not anymore with cost cutting and relying on Google Maps.

But, there was a time where Google didn't exist, and a globe would be in the corner of the classroom w/ Maps that can be pulled down on the whiteboard/chalkboard (boy was that an exciting change!) that showed different maps, from Mercator maps to political USA maps and geographic USA maps.

Shocking, I know.

> Says who? Is that in the cirriculum?

Yes?

I mean, i guess different places have different curriculum, but this was certainly in my school's curriculum and it seems like the sort of basic knowledge that definitely should be.