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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the obsession with Mercator projection in blog posts and the media. Is the US school system actually using world maps with Mercator projection, or what else is the reason that this topic is popping up again and again? The world maps I had been 'exposed to' during school (in the 80s!) used a projection which narrows towards the poles and looks a lot more 'realistic':

Basically like this:

https://www.mapsofindia.com/world-map/world-political-map-20...

...still a lot of distortion of course, but much better than traditional Mercator (which is 500 years old, so give the guy some slack).

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> I never understood the obsession with Mercator projection in blog posts and the media.

It’s because American universities and media in recent years strongly incentivize finding racial angles to every story or topic. “How we draw maps is racist” is low hanging fruit. Growing up in racist Virginia in the 1990s, we had globes and the flat wall maps—which still showed the Soviet Union—used an oval projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortelius_oval_projection

Or maybe it's just because you can build a site that corrects the Mercator distortions and see Kenya get as big as Greenland, or see Antarctica become the largest continent on the planet, and that's just super interesting?

The article is not about "maps are racist". The idea that Mercator has persisted, into an era where nobody needs a map projection to navigate, owing to racism isn't a new one. Your "in recent years" gives up the game here, since this argument was banal enough to be the centerpiece of a freaking West Wing episode 20 years ago.

I think you maybe need to give this stuff a rest.

> The article is not about "maps are racist".

It’s possible to write an article about distortions in the Mercator projection that doesn’t amount to “maps are racist.” But this isn’t that article. The bolded subheading alludes to the racism angle from the beginning. What does “digital ethics” have to do with this? What is the “potential for harm” the author is referring to? Are population density calculations wildly off? No, it’s a clear reference to the section in the middle of the article talking about “colonial preferences.” Finally, a remark about “tool colonization efforts” appears in the key takeaways at the end. And all that is unsubstantiated race baiting.

> I think you maybe need to give this stuff a rest.

No. This timeline sucks. You can’t read an article about maps without some asshole trying to virtue signal that he’s one of the good white people. It’s worse than hipster jeans and vocal frys combined. And it’s so insulting, as if anyone in India cares how big their country is on a map. You know who didn’t waste their time with shit like that: white people while they were busy colonizing everything.

I don't know if anyone in India cares what the maps look like, but I do care: despite having seen the West Wing episode in (checks notes) NINETEEN NINETY-NINE, I did not realize (1) there was a site I could go to that would apply the Mercator distortion to any country, or (2) you can draw a sinusoid from Pakistan, through the Mozambique Channel, around Cape Horn, and back up across the Pacific to Kamchatka that is a straight line if you're sailing it on a boat. Both are in the article, but you'd never know that to read your comments.

You and I both know that you've got a hang-up about, I don't know, wokeism? Progressivism? Antiracism? Whatever it is: I'm not disputing it. I'm not telling you you're wrong, or that you can't have whatever weird politics you've landed on. I'm telling you that bringing it up incessantly on every thread on Hacker News violates the guidelines, and helped wreck this thread, and you should stop.

Please stop.

Growing up in American schools, I saw this as well. I remember even asking the teacher why the map had multiple cutaways, and her explaining the distortion. I could be convinced that Mercator prevalence is a thing, if someone dug into map sales.

It’s just another example of modern virtue signaling. YT male evil. Got it. We know.

Yep, this looks super familiar to me. We also just had globes in our classrooms. Today's students probably use Google maps (or equivalent) which wouldn't have this problem anyways.

Have you ever zoomed all the way out on Google map

I would have thought national geographic maps are common in U.S classrooms? And I don't think they've ever used the Mercator.

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