Maps distort how we see the world
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes.
It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.”
It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.”
FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this).
I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)
That's not less stupid than the other statement. It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
Quite the opposite, no? It's like spending your whole life looking at only your evening shadow (Hello, Plato) and then seeing yourself in a good mirror and realising your actual height relative to the world around you for the first time.
That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?
Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
I would expect that revelations about population would be more worldview adjusting (Nigeria and Indonesia are so huge).
Importance should change depending on context.
Sure, you are definitely allowed to say that a certain metric (i.e. population size or density) has more practical applications and provides better signal for “blah blah”.
But I’m not discussing “blah blah”.
I commented that it was curious that someone would think size is so important that learning the true size of countries would change their world view. In that land mass isn’t usually very important for political or cultural significance (eg, Canada is huge and that doesn’t make it important, Russia is important not because of its size, etc etc).
If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting over it?
No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are huge.
Yes. That and population. Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.
> Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands expanded their landmass by creating their empires? Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands lost their power and influence when they lost their empires and landmass?
> Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
Yes along with other reasons - population, geographical location, etc.
But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small.
I mean you have to have natural resources and can’t be tiny, but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that. It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.
| name | gdp_pos | gdp | land_pos | land |
|----------------|---------|----------|----------|---------|
| United States | 1 | 26854599 | 4 | 9147593 |
| China | 2 | 19373586 | 3 | 9596961 |
| Japan | 3 | 4409738 | 62 | 377976 |
| Germany | 4 | 4308854 | 63 | 357114 |
| India | 5 | 3736882 | 7 | 3287263 |
| United Kingdom | 6 | 3158938 | 79 | 242495 |
| France | 7 | 2923489 | 49 | 543940 |
| Italy | 8 | 2169745 | 72 | 301339 |
| Canada | 9 | 2089672 | 2 | 9984670 |
| Brazil | 10 | 2081235 | 5 | 8515767 |
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.
It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger population and more natural resources. And more space to carry out economic activities with said people and resources.
Edit: I just queried Wolfram Alpha about this. It generated a plot for me, which shows what I expected. Check it out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=list+of+countries+with+...
Edit2: bonus feature, GPT-4 wrote me a script to plot this also, check it out: https://chat.openai.com/share/ffa45c61-8b7a-44e1-b757-041f31...
There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a little messy, but it's undeniably there.
The starting point for this discussion was about the relationship between a country's size and population and it's power and influence. The correlation between area and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful relationship.
Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize any patterns on a linear plot.
I also don't understand your point about the dispersion. The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said the correlation was 99%.
Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...
datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".
I've reproduced dwaltrib's results using World Bank data on 251 countries, and I get a Pearson's r of 0.82 and a p value of 5.6e-61 (!). I.e. a strong correlation, with high confidence. It makes sense too -- larger countries generally have more people, and more people generally generate more economic activity.
Code if you want to try yourself:
import pandas as pd
gdp = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_NY.GDP.MKTP.CD_DS2_en_csv_v2_5551501.csv").set_index("Country Name")
land_area = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_AG.LND.TOTL.K2_DS2_en_csv_v2_5552158.csv").set_index("Country Name")
gdp["GDP"] = gdp["2020"]
gdp["Land"] = land_area["2020"]
gdp = gdp.dropna(subset=["GDP", "Land"])
from scipy import stats
print(stats.pearsonr(gdp.Land, gdp.GDP))
#+RESULTS: : PearsonRResult(statistic=0.8151313879150333, pvalue=5.621180589722219e-61)
It is obviously true. The five permanent security council members are US, China, Russia, UK and France. US, China and Russia are obviously gigantic. UK is gigantic via its ties to Canada, Australia, NZ. After all the silly monarch of britain is the head of state of all these nations. And France has a gigantic empire still. Go check out their EEZ.
> but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
Germany and Japan aren't powerful. Powerful nations aren't occupied by a foreign power. Germany and Japan are extraordinarly weak. Their economic well being is entirely dependent on the generosity of another nation.
There is a reason why Germany and Japan tried to expand their territories in ww2. They failed and they have to live with the consequences.
> I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that.
Sure. Landmass by itself isn't everything. As I said, you have to factor in population, quality of land, ports, neighbors, etc.
> It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
You quoted "the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential."
Do you know what populous means? It's silly to quote something and not understand it.
Can you elaborate on that ?
Did you think bigger = better ?
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing that?
https://itsoktobewhite.quora.com/
On Quora, there’s a “group” sort of like a subreddit titled “It’s OK to be White”. There’s about 35k people who follow it. Their mission is to “uplift White cultures and oppose anti-White racism”.
Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn’t need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other people from that group come out of the woodworks to complain. These memes aren’t even posted in that group. And I wish I could say that it’s just these weirdos on Quora that act like this. But no. I’ve seen it on Instagram. On Facebook. I’ve heard it in real life. It’s a thing that bothers a certain demographic of people. While it’s not a “major” thing and shouldn’t matter, it’s still a thing that I tend to see often.
I see there’s miscommunication here though. I do agree with you that most people “don’t care”. That’s the phrase we have been using. What you are saying and what I also believe is that most people are “map agnostic” for lack of a better phrase. They don’t care in that sense. Like life is too short. It’s just a map.
But when I used the phrase “don’t care” and added underscores around it and the words “at all” in my comments yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and _negative_ opinions about not caring.
For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And the other language he used evoked that he was “flabbergasted” that people care about map distortions. (Do you see how this is a different definition of “don’t care”?)
The language he was using and the emotions involved “mirrored” the language and emotions that I see on Quora and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
You’re right. I don’t have any concrete data or surveys or experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain, etc.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a moron and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I did it again!)
That's the point of the post. The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed, considered or even mentioned outside very small cohorts because there is a specific shape of the world map that most people who are not map-heads or spherical projection experts take for guaranteed. Get a non-Mercator projection map and put it in your dinner room, and then see how many of your guests will comment about "so.. why is this map weird? It doesn't look right?" then tell them "every flat map projection distorts [...]"
> Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
Out of the millions of decorative world maps on walls, kids with maps to learn the world, world maps on the news, maps used in data visualization charts etc., non of those are using the map for "navigation" yet they still use Mercator projection simply because "that's the right shape of the world" regardless of what "right" means. Not because they evaluated the compromises of the different projections and figures "oh maybe someone will be lost at sea and only have access to our GDP per capita world map visualization, better use Mercator projection to preserve local angles and line up with compass headings"
This is actually a pretty cool conversation topic during dinner. I would take the opportunity to show off. It doesn't have to be a downside. "Hey, did you know that [interesting stuff]...?".
If your guests are the kind of people who get irritated instead of awed by cool explanations about the world, I admit then you have a problem.
It's far from common knowledge or a well known fact that the only reason the World Map looks the way it looks is just an arbitrary projection type that's picked for equally arbitrary reasons. Because as I mentioned, compass navigation is hardly the only map use-case. It may have originally started that way in the 1,200s or whatever, but today we use maps for all sorts of visualizations and other things. And the assumption that "Mercator projection" is the "right" shape of the world is held by most not because they have "size hang ups" but because it's just the way it is. Just like any assumption you hold that you never question because there is no reason to question it really.
1. It's very useful for sailing
2. European nations who were good at sailing created the age of empires (yes this was a bad thing)
3. These empires persisted until the end of WW2 (1945) or arguably even the Suez crisis (1956) at which point the American/Soviet world order began
Changing a map is changing everyone's internal worldview, and for obvious reason empires were not about to allow such a massive change unless they had a good reason[0] so It's really only been about 80 years and most of them we were at war with the Soviets, so when we thought about maps, we thought about if they were red or star spangled, not which projection.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just not at all surprised we have the "original" one.
0 - I could easily see an alternate history where e.g. the Spanish and/or Portugese use a different one if it makes them look "better" than the English, or vice versa. Now i'm curious of what projection could be 'anglo/iberi-maximal'
I lost it in the post. Whenever I hear the “crisis” part presented without the perfectly rational explanation I get frustrated and spend more time trying to figure out if this is a problem.
Saying “maps distort the way we see the world” is a problem unless you immediately follow it with “and that’s ok because…”
Otherwise we waste time on stuff like “eyeballs distort the way we see the world” when it’s true but not an issue at all.
Especially since the first paragraph mentions how countries closer to the equator tend to be poorer. As if that’s somehow relevant.
It does imply that poor countries around equator are bigger then they look like. That is it.
So what?
Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican Coalition are benign emperors :D
No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources. Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.
> Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.
Excuse me? Who is imposing what on whom now, and how?
Last time I checked, everyone is free to use whatever map projection they want, centered on whatever point of the globe they want. Or they can use an actual globe.
> has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...
Yeah, pretty sure I don't perceive Antarctica as some kind of superior super-nation. Or greenland, although I gotta say, it's a really cool place, especially during summer.
Yes. And if someone breaks your legs, you should totally be able to run a marathon after, say, 15 years. After all, they haven't broke your legs for a while.
History and national development doesn't work like that. A major handicap can still keep you back for centuries.
It's even more than a handicap relatively too. It's not just that you were held down (and the other side neutral): the handicap for you was at the same time an enrichment off your back for the other side.
Even more more so, since "independent nations" is mostly a facade for the busines as usual, of neocolonialism: the same shit, but somewhat more convert (bribing politicians, setting up banana-republic conditions, if needed bringing in the army, supporting this or that dictator into power, and so on, and using monetary policy and foreign aid to make sure they never stand on their legs).
And it's also not the topic of the discussion tbh. This is about the impact of the Mercator projection, and unless I get to see a peer reviewed study convincing me otherwise, my point stands.
The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article, unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...)
So bringing it up doesn’t contribute to the article and is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many other true but irrelevant facts.
I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little.
Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is linked to apparent size - Africa looks smaller then it is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then they are. When we talk about a problem affecting somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if only subconsciously.
[1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.NTAzNDg...
People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.
Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.
Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size.
With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely.
.
... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...
The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.
I question what percentage of those maps in reality are actually Mercator? I feel this is one of those strawman memes that mercator is everywhere, when in practice it feels relatively rare to actually encounter it.
https://www.nationsonline.org/maps/Political-World-Map-3360....
Also, using a (truncated) Mercator projection for a GDP per capita map (or any political map that isn't about land mass) is not a bad idea as its most notorious flaw becomes an advantage because coincidently, it tends to enlarge small countries and shrink large countries, which makes for a more readable map.
It enlarges the two biggest countries in the World (Russian and Canada) while shrinking central American and central African countries that aren't particularly big to say the least…
Not true. They're honestly discussed all the time to the point of becoming tiresome.
For others who haven't, here it is: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY
Although the projection it proclaims as superior, Gall-Peters, has grievous flaws of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
And I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. And I doubt I am rare here at all also.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532282
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787
And it was something we covered in school on the 80s.
It’s an interesting post but not really revelatory.
For example, I'd never noticed until today that so much of Scotland is actually west of England because Great Britain doesn't actually go straight-up north to south but is rather "tilted".
I also didn't know that Papua was so big, before today I wondered how could there be so much linguistic diversity in what I though was a medium sized island.
So I don't mind the geography trivia from time to time.
Even as a Brit this sometimes catches me out. I live near Bournemouth which is approx in the middle of the south coast of England. If I draw a straight line due North, it's only just inside Scotland. ALL of Scotland is west of London.
Unrelatedly, the other amusing fact is that when the ISS goes overhead (256 miles high at perigee), it is much closer to me than Glasgow (450 miles away).
The point of any article isn't just its factual content; it's the hidden message from the way it's said. I don't know if you intended to say it the way you did when you started off with the comment about poverty in the first two sentences, but by doing so, you set the tone for the rest of your article. (You also didn't expand on that tidbit so it kind of leaves your audience wondering why you mentioned it.)
I like the rest of the article though.
The comment about poverty was compatible with believing it was deliberate and evil, careless, or excusable but unfortunate.
Why do you presuppose that others infer & arrive at the same interpretations you do? Isn't your own form of generalization from the subjective inferences made from your own individual mind, to the thoughts of others, presumptuous?
I'm getting tired of the progressive tendency to read offence, bigotry, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. into every little word & minutiae of nuance uttered by others. It's on the verge of induced pareidolia for outrage & victimhood.
Do you reside or hail from one of the aforementioned countries, or are you merely "signal boosting" and getting outraged on their behalf?
No, you're just being stupid.
This isn't a new issue. There's an episode of The West Wing about the evils of the Mercator projection. It aired 22 years ago.
When you write an essay doing nothing more than repeating a several-decades-old cliche, people are going to assume you don't have anything to say other than the content of the cliche they heard decades ago. And they will be right.
However it contributes to a misunderstanding that may in some way favor richer countries, and that could be a reason why nobody's trying very hard to focus kids' exposure on more accurate maps.
The mechanism I'm alluding to is a sense that "this place is very big, and so it's reasonable that it controls more than other places." It's not a highly-developed intellectual analysis, but more of a gut-level conception that informs casual interpretation of news and events.
It was called out multiple times in my geography glasses in the 80s that the flat contiguous map was wrong and we spent lots of time looking at globes and North or South Pole centered maps.
Nobody is being oppressed or underrepresented by this projection. This isn’t an episode of the west wing.
And?
The trade-offs between longpolling and websockets are rarely discussed outside of very small cohorts. The tradeoff between wankel-engines and piston-based motors are rarely discussed. The tradeoffs between oak and pearwood are rarely discussed.
That's why our society has division of labor and people becoming experts in their topics.
And I am pretty sure experts on cartography have discussed the different merits and tradeoffs and converged on Mercator for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't care. It works, I can use it, and as long as no one can point out a tangible problem with it, I see no reason to worry about it. Same as the cartographer doesn't need to know or care why I decided that the chatapp he installed uses longpolling to communicate with the backend instead of a websocket. Same as I don't need to know or care why the carpenter who made my desk used oak instead of pear or rosewood.
And seeing countries as smaller or bigger than they are isn't a problem in my eyes. I can reasonably expect an educated person to know that maps are 3D->2D projections and are thus distorted. If I want to know the exact size, I can always look it up. I don't have a more or less favourable view of a country or its people based on the countries apparent size on a map.
That’s a fun hypothesis, but is there actually data supporting (1) that “a vast majority” of westerners misperceive country size in this way, and (2) that specifically such a perception causes them to consider foreigners to be unimportant?
Although implicit bias exists, studies show its impact on the real world is much smaller than commonly believed.
And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed study, or similarly supported source for this statement.
Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the world.
I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft" sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any effects, much less design a viable study that demonstrates causation.
I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly convincing unless we lived in a universe where people told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding people in other countries?"
Actually 90%!
Something that jumps out at me with the size is that the arctic regions are often viewed as huge and massive. However, when viewed with their true size, it greatly highlights just how fragile they are.
If you've ever played Risk, the Amero-Eurocentrism is extreme.
https://cdn.matthewhaeck.com/content/images/2015/02/risk.jpg
https://freeprintableaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/risk-...
North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa. Europe: 7 territories, as large as Africa. USA: 3 territories, Canada: 5, Australia: 2 China, India, Brazil which are all very large: 1
This time the reason why Europeans must hate and destroy themselves is … spins the wheel … that maps are flat and the planet is not.
European people and culture all over that planet is very mentally sick and self-destructive. Any individual person that exhibited even slightly as mentally ill mentalities as Europeans, we would immediately seek help for them.
Mercator is UX optimized for naval navigation. Besides street navigation (where projection is irrelevant) I would posit that most people use maps for human geography reasons- what countries are next to Senegal, what kind of border does Thailand have with Malaysia, etc.
In the use case of understanding geopolitical borders Mercator isn’t optimized for that.
Asking why people are dissatisfied with mercator is like asking why my grandma is dissatisfied with the command line interface on the Linux laptop I got her. Doesn’t she know it’s the best for programmers??
Why are we trading off the accuracy of political borders for navigating by rhumb lines?
I personally feel like a better projection would be one that basically ignored or distorted the oceans. On google maps there’s no reasons why the proportions of the Atlantic or Pacific would be relevant.
So do you mean that the length and orientation of the borders is the least distorted with the Mercator projection?
I’m actually not sure how a different projection would distort a country’s border. But for example I’m not putting a ruler against my screen and I don’t know if I need to know if a border is oriented North or not.
Mostly my point is, are we rendering maps for real users’ use cases or backwards rationalizing the status quo? Besides the level of effort that would be involved in changing it, can’t think of any real defense of the use Mercator projection itself in its current context.
Some other comments references street maps that are grids, so a non-mercator projection would bend a grid of streets- this makes sense- but again, the main critique is around the relative size of countries- i.e. the look of the map tiles only when zoomed out sufficiently far. Maybe this is the main UX hurdle- in google maps to change the projection above some level of zoom.
I want relative size of everything to be mostly correct. But I could take Africa being 5-10% smaller simply because of its relative size.
All while the East and West of Cities to be accurate. i.e ALL of continental South America lies east of the state of Michigan.
They're not complaining about what they can use for themselves.
They are complaining about what is in mainstream use (in schools, websites, books, documentaries, and so on) and thus what kinds of perception people get.
Just use another projection? Mercator is everywhere, nothing else.
And yes, size of countries is important too (eg. how people fear Russia because it seems large and discount the importance of Africa because it's next to the equator).
What an exaggeration. Mercator may be the most common, but Winkel and Alders are both commonly encountered in the United States.
People are naturally hung up on it because why use a projection which is useful for navigation in a world history class or as a background image in a news cast or as a decoration on the wall?
"If size is your thing, use some other projection!" This is basically exactly what the people "hung up" on the Mercator projection are saying! We should be using other projections! It seems a totally reasonable thing to point out to me.
Are world history classes favoring Mercator? Are newscasts using Mercator in background images? Are wall maps using primarily Mercator? (These may have differing answers!)
As a kid I often encountered oval‐shaped world maps which obviously weren’t Mercator (most likely Robinson or Winkel tripel). And road maps of the United States had curved borders, not straight borders, so those obviously weren’t Mercator either (possibly Alders). And I had globes both at home and at school. So while Mercator is certainly common, and it’s worth explaining tradeoffs in map projection especially in an educational context, I question whether it’s actually as universal as people here are saying.
> We should be using other projections!
Are we not?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_project...
* It was the first widespread projection because of its practical use for nautical navigation (where it is still the best projection available), so it was easy for map makers to sell for non-nautical uses, even after "better" projections became available. And inertia is a hard thing to overcome for something considered somewhat inconsequential.
* Mercator and its cousin Web Mercator are extremely simple and fast to calculate relative to other projections. Compare the formula for Web Mercator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection#Formul...) to Equal Earth, an excellent compromise projection for general use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection#Formula...). Web Mercator is very easy to generate and serve tiled maps out of, Equal Earth and the like require somewhat non-trivial engineering to make serving those maps at scale to users in a web browser economical and quick.
* Preserving angles is legitimately important still for large scale (very zoomed in) road maps. Projections which preserve size can cause things like 90 degree road intersections to render at very strange angles which confuses drivers. Mercator and Web Mercator are therefore excellent choices of projection for local road navigation, which is by far the most common use of maps today for most people.
I strongly recommend folks interested in map projections to read this from Mapbox: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections. Google Maps now has similar features, but both companies relied on Mercator for many years with good reasons before technology caught up and better solutions became available.
The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While [Mercator] distorts a “zoomed-out view” of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc… so we’re sticking with this projection for now.
Sourced from https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/map-and-reality-distort..., but there are other citations of the same quote as well.
Stereographic projection(of the half sphere where the origin and destination lies on) solves the geodesic issue, and it's different from the Meractor
Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".
Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...
For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!
They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:
https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...
It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.
I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.
Then you changed it to who designed the maps.
In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.
Make up your mind?
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.
You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.
[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
Your starting point or any other point?
He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.
Everything was a bit complicated in that region in the medieval period. In the C16, you immediately come up short with the concept of "Germany".
Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the XX century.
My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define one's identity.
If you want to avoid YouTube, here's just the video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/szn691fdcgvxwh8/map_proj...
edit: updated YouTube link to include the full version
They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.
A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!" Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe projection when you zoom out far enough.
This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at parties.
With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.
Which is why that West Wing clip is, frankly, pretentious, because it doesn’t discuss the negatives of Peters, wrongly implies that it’s “the” correct way to view the world, and makes no mention of other major projections, or even a globe.
Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers, which is typically great for the continental US, but I probably wouldn’t use it so much if I regularly made maps of other places!
And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.
Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?
There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there.
But it’s still a fun observation.
I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym:
It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
Obviously if you're traveling out from and back to one place over and over, the most sensible thing to do is to put that place near map center. It makes it easy to see all the other places in relation to your home, because how they relate to your home is what's relevant to you. Those are the distances and routes you want to be the most clear. When taking a sphere and mapping it to a rectangle there is no way to not do this - somewhere has to be the middle so you might as well choose somewhere practical.
Sagan like many others often sells morality porn - the feeling of "I know better than those ignorant less moral ones". A lot of entertainment is like this these days.
We live in Europe where the default map is Atlantic-centric so I wanted to make sure he got a different perspective.
At best you could argue it puts humans relatively close to the center, but the geocentric model also operates with a smaller solar system.
And the implied “closer to the center is better” is not justified. E.g. Dante literally puts the devil in the middle of the universe.
Depends on the projection you use and its parameters. The "Web Mercator is racist" meme is just lazy.
One way around the issue is rendering a globe on a screen. Google maps does this when you zoom out far enough. By the same token, if you're using a screen, it's possible to dynamically reproject a map based on whatever is centered.
It is lazy, but here's a good reason to not use Web Mercator: Unlike regular Mercator, Web Mercator is not conformal. Mercator preserves shape locally, but Web Mercator distorts shapes by +/- 1%-ish depending on latitude. Web Mercator doesn't do the thing that makes Mercator a good projection.
Does that +/- 1%-ish actually matter? Maybe, I dunno. It annoys me though.
This isn't a way around the issue because the screen is two-dimensional so you are still showing a projection of the globe. I think Google uses the perspective projection when you zoom out enough.
Reprojecting on-the-fly is a way around it. Yes, you're still projecting to two dimensions but it drives home the point that the area of a landmass is relative depending on what the user is looking at. Something like: https://observablehq.com/d/539403a9237e737d
And, anyone who has traveled internationally much at all is well aware that, say, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than it looks on a world map - because we fly, for the most part, great circle routes, and flight times give you a very good measure of how far things are. First time you look at a flight to Sydney, the size of the Pacific Ocean, relative to the North Atlantic, pretty much hits you over the head.
So, while I find articles like this kinda fun for a couple of minutes (what strange comparison will this author pull out of their hat to make the point that flat maps distort world persectives?), it's mostly for entertainment value. There really isn't much to see.
Another interesting effect maps have on worldview that was not mentioned is the placement of North at the top (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/why-is...). The fact that in the South of Egypt was referred to as "Upper Egypt" has confused me to no end, since "clearly" it's the bottom part (roughly corresponding to middle part of the current country). This is an interesting example where an important geological feature trumps the maps.
See these interesting answers to get more information about the terms Upper/Lower Egypt: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47165/did-egypti...
I’m not convinced. Historically, Arabic and Egyptian maps had south on the top (https://muslimheritage.com/maps/)
I suspect that north-as-top orientations were strongly influenced by the invention / importation of the magnetic compass.
<https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58426/why-north-always-m...>
The cool thing is that you can pan the map in the different projections, which isn't possible with most maps: most tend to be static images.
I've had to adjust slide-ware for use in the Indian subcontinent.
A different kind of "distortion" but very real.
Projections can be complicated. I value mapping tools which let you re-center a global map off 0° Longitude. I also value maps which manage to fit all of the Pac-rim island economies into some kind of view: No way is land mass or distance to scale, to usefully show this region.
If you believe maps, Hawaii is almost as big as Alaska and just offshore of the Catalina Islands. It also seems to have a very squared-off moat, maybe its a border wall...
It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...
Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.
It uses fewer major triangular sections, has a more regular pattern to it, and best of all tries to keep the equator more or less horizontal.
Never mind New Zealand and Australia...
Never mind that the whole post-USSR Asia is on the same level as some African countries...
It must be those damn maps.
But yea Mercator isn't the problem.
The fact that the industrial revolution occurred far away from the equator supports the notion that the tropics are not conducive to progress/wealth. Granted it's a small sample size. Hard to re-run history dozens of time to get more data unfortunately.
After the industrial revolution, Europeans proceeded to colonize much of the planet, such as both Americas, but it wasn't Venezuela or Ecuador that became a global superpower.
Within the Eastern hemisphere, Japan, Korea, China seem to have done better at progress and wealth as compared to Southeast Asia. Granted Singapore and Hong Kong have done well lately, but maybe because of a/c - https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
> Are these maps chosen for good reasons and these distortions are a side-effect, or are they purposefully deceitful? Are there better maps we could choose? I’ll explore this in the premium article this week. Subscribe to read it!
Ah, I see. It's just bait to drive subscriptions. You can read for free on Wikipedia about why the Mercator projection is useful for navigation.
What is wrong with people that they assume there is some evil cabal of mustache-twisting villains who deliberately make misleading maps?
Responding to the title itself, if you think "Maps Distort How We See the World" you should see what not having a map does!
A friend asked, cleverly aware of the distance involved, if the flight went east or west -- because if you have Flat Map Brain, that's what you default to, right?
The answer is "neither."
The route went mostly north from Houston, crossed Canada and began trending south (without turning!) over / around Iceland; we approached Dubai from the north, more or less.
I remember the flight back home going over Iran, but it was at least a decade ago and regional tensions may have made them change that. This site
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE211
shows them avoiding Iranian airspace now, but the flight path seems otherwise about the same.
I'd imagine your flight would've avoided Russia, afaik even before the war they were obnoxious about who can fly over them/how much it would cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U
The path suggested by that position absolutely implies flight over Russian territory, but obviously I have no data beyond that. It seems unlikely that an airliner would, like, zigzag around; n.b. that I was on Emirates, not a US carrier, and Russia (and other countries) probably doesn't treat them like they would an airline run out of a NATO country.
Or, at least, probably didn't in 2012. No idea what the rules are now.
EDIT: I found this article which notes that, at least as of a year ago, Emirates was flying TO Russia, so presumably flights through Russian airspace en route to other places were okay as well before the war.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/emirates-...
Yeah Emirates didn't join in the sanctions, so they can still fly to, and over Russia. A few weeks ago there was an Air India that was flying from India to the US over Russia, and had to make an emergency landing in Russia, there were concerns whether they'd be allowed to import a replacement engine into Russia because the sanctions.
I got to 53, I think. Only once did a TA say it was an inappropriate choice and, yeah, it was. I used an arctic planar projection to map a part of southern Ontario. It was so comically skewed.
By the end I had actually learned something: my perception of what was “correct” was largely biased from growing up with Mercator and Albers maps. While some options are more ideal than others given the context, there’s a _lot_ of useful alternatives than what we all picture in our heads.
A little off-topic from projections, but I just returned from a trip to Seoul a few days ago, and I found a simplified subway map to be so much easier to use than Google Maps' more realistic-but-less-relevant map. Subway map design has always intrigued me in that it ignores so much in terms of position and proportion, but at the same time can relay the needed information so much more clearly.
Something different about having an actual ball in your hands.
Weird; testing on a Mac with Firefox it loads fine.
Anything interesting in the console?
On the failing one, I see some HTTP/3 400 results from "earth-pa.clients6.google.com" before it goes into an infinite-spinner state. On the working profile, those requests succeed. Turned off uBlock and such, still no dice. Maybe some weird thing relating to having a logged-in gmail account on that profile? No idea, really.
But clearly not OS/driver related, since it works in the other profile.
Same on the other profile.
Good to know about, though (:
If you're on Linux, maybe check your drivers, or do webgl.force-enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled ?
Indeed, Russian textbooks would rather use Gauss-Krueger with its backgammon board appearance than Mercator. I believe that variations of Kavrayskiy VII projection were very common.
On the other hand they used projections which skip displaying Pacific ocean entirely, because who needs that?
I've seen a few attepts to make this claim appear as if it were real. Like the image in the article, it's just a perspective projection from a low altitude.
If you actually grab a globe, you'll see there is no way to cut it in half with only water on one side. If there were a way to do that, we could save a lot of money on globes by just not making that half.
If you're closer, you can definitely see less land. The "perspective projection" is correct.
Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to get Google Maps to always start up in the 3d sphere mode. Half the time in firefox it just reverts back to a flat map.
<https://earth.nullschool.net/>
(There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)
maps give us our only ability to see "the world". Can you imagine what you would think the world looked like as our ancestors did in the world before accurate maps? you think the mercator projection is problematic, I got news for you.
You cannot have both area fidelity and shape fidelity to represent countries on a map.
If you want area fidelity, the Gall-Peters [1] projection and the Peters world map [2] (1952) by Arno Peters are the way to visualize countries, whereas common maps focus on shape-fidelity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Peters?useskin=vector [2] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-world-peters-p...
I bought this small one for my desk (16$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/gyroglobe-antique – every so often I rotate it slightly so that I'm staring at a different part of the globe when I look below my monitor.
I bought this one for the dining room (50$): https://www.waypointgeographic.com/p/little-adventurer-globe – the kids can spin it around whenever we talk about a country.
Hobo-Dyer[2] is also an interesting projection.
[1] https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-worl... (just an example; you can find others)
It completely changed not only how I viewed the geography of the city but also the socio-political history of it. I would definitely recommend anyone to do the same, or with other areas they're familiar with, with LSD or not. It's fascincating to realise how much the map has shaped your view of the places you know.
It’s 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a virtual globe.
Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you’re not likely going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...
Pretty sure I recently learned that fish actually mostly stick to shores and there's little to no migration across open ocean, so they might actually draw that very differently! It was an article about evolution or biodiversity and coastlines, and the article described how genes are transmitted globally despite having separate continents (iirc the waters are shallow enough near the north pole and around oceania to form one long line along all shores), but I can't remember it well enough to find it again. Tried checking it elsewhere but all the relevant-sounding Wikipedia articles don't seem to talk about the ratio of deep sea animals to near-shore animals. Can anyone else confirm or refute this?
In other words, if all maps are distortions, is the one we're using actually the one we should be using?
1. I don't really like this word, as it implies that there is a real shape of the world and that every other perspective is somehow wrong.
Either that or a pathway to some Evil Conspiracy XD
Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps.
Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred around Antarctica: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...
Besides, 90% of the world population lives above the equator, so if there is a slight bias towards making the northern hemisphere more easily viewable, that's entirely justifiable. That includes 1.4 billion people living in India, another 1.4 billion living in China, etc.
For a more distorted way to see the world, try: http://andersk.mit.edu/euler-spiral-projection/
My parents have a map of bird migrations and there are some birds that have migratory routes that feel "disjoint" when looking at other projections.
Another example is World map of prehistoric human migrations https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehist...
I have known about the distortions of the Mercator projection since LBJ was president, and about ever ten or fifteen years someone feels compelled to announce it as news.
It starts:
> Maps twist our perception of the world.
> Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer—seem smaller than they are.
This is obviously not true for all map projections. It is famously true for the Mercator projection, which we see a lot because it's the best projection for navigation, and that's the main thing we use maps for in our everyday lives. It's probably true for some other map projections, but definitely not for all.
The article doesn't even mention the name Mercator until its second half.
The Mercator family is "the best" map family for those who navigate by rhumb lines.
I strongly doubt a significant proportion of people on earth navigate by rhumb lines in this day and age, particularly given the vast numbers of GPS enabled devices.
I stressed family, of course, as there is a continuum of Mercator projection maps .. The (specific) Mercator Projection that wall hangs and everbody discusses whenever this comes up is just one of many and whose parameters were chosen to weight the Northern Hemisphere for the benefit of US-Euro traders.
Imagine using a zoomed-in version of Winkel-Tripel to navigate the west coast of the US; that would be pretty terrible.
Of course today with computerised navigation, we don't really have to use a flat projection at all; it would be even more accurate to calculate every view directly from a globe. Have your own custom projection based on where you are.
But if you're going to use a flat map projection for navigation, Mercator is it. Or something Mercatory, at least; centering on Greenwich and having north up is less relevant, although deviating from the latter would probably confuse a lot of people.
And outside of navigation, we really shouldn't ever be using Mercator. I'm not sure if that happens. When I was in school, I remember we had a Goode-Homolosine map on the wall, which is an excellent choice for that. Every map projection has its purposes that it's good at, and those it's not. But especially with the ubiquity of Google Maps, it's not surprising that people get more exposure to Mercator.
For you, perhaps.
As a professional geographer since ~ 1980 (ish) I did enjoy the NZMG (1949) that remained in use until 2001 - it was centred down the mean common spine of the North and South Islands and minimised distortion across the entirety of the New Zealand land and waters [1]. It was one of only three (IIRC) complex-number polynomial expansion projections in common use - but they're ideal for certain land form shapes.
I've seen a lot of local ellipsoid+datum+projection mapping systems globally - I was doing global geophysical mapping during the transition to WGS84 and got into the weeds wrt transforms between that and the 300+ mapping systems commonly in use about the globe prior to todays uniformity.
Pilots, of course, use aeronautical charts based on LCC (Lambert conformal conic projection) as straight lines there approximate Great Circle routes, satellite agencies use variations on the projections of John P. Snyder [2].
I'd humbly suggest that if you honestly believe that the Mercator family is the be all and end all for navigation then perhaps you're in need of further reading [2].
[1] https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...
But those local map projections only work for that region. As soon as you want seamless transitions to other regions, these local projections don't work so well anymore.
Great collection of illustrations.
This is why I am hugely in support of increased immigration into Canada, housing crisis aside (it'll resolve over time)
You should compare the populated area, not the entire landmass. That there exist vast unpopulated frozen tundras nominally within Canadian borders does not hinder public transport any more than Siberia hindered building the Moscow metro.
I forget where I read this phrase first, but: every flight in this corridor is a policy failure.
I suspect the US has a few states that are willing to help.
Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
Canada and the US are lacking in good public transit because as a society we've made the choice to build for cars and not build for people. Almost everything about our built environment is optimized for cars and the result is sprawl. The cause is our public policies, building regulations, and zoning.
It has nothing to do with the size of the country, because people don't try to commute across the country, just like people who live in Paris generally don't commute to Berlin every day. The vast majority of travel is local and occasionally regional.
Funny thing is that Canada used to have that public transit infrastructure, from big cities even into tiny little towns. The country was built on it!
We eventually ripped it up because it turns out people liked driving cars more. And I posit that they still do. If the will was there, it could be rebuilt, but it turns out moaning is a lot easier.
And fuck all the suffering along the way? Honestly Canada needs to address that before it can even begin to start thinking about more immigration. Canada is not even vaguely equipped to handle more people as it stands now.
Anyway, I've personally experienced the shock of the true size of Africa. Younger me only had a few flights to Spain under my belt and then went on an adventurous trip to South Africa. I figured it would just be a few hours more. How wrong I was.
We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.
(Edit: now I see TFA mentioned it, just not by name)
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
I agree.
I will use it as an example of how data visualization can distort.
I often wonder if similar things happen with tabular data, but we just can't "see" it so clearly.
Google Maps on the Web defaults to this; so does Apple Maps.
The only thing that can possibly represent all purposes simultaneously is the world itself.
Accordingly, every map is also a compromise.
-- George E. P. Box, in "Science and Statistics" (1976) <https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writi...> (PDF)
See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong>
Box apparently expanded on the notion in Box, G. E. P. (1979), "Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building", in Launer, R. L.; Wilkinson, G. N. (eds.), Robustness in Statistics, Academic Press, pp. 201–236, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-438150-6.50018-2, ISBN 9781483263366.
Full text online at <https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/224156357/skogen_etal_2021_meps....> (PDF)
A lot of British people, especially when being smug and nationalist online, speak about how their tiny island took over so many other big places.
I never asked a Frenchman and obviously it's in bad form to ask the Germans...
The Scandis ""benefit"" the most from the distortion but never really had empire apart from in the neighboring areas, so I don't know if they ever think about it.
Whenever I see one of those "the Earth from space" photos, I always think, "Wow, Africa is really big."
Even recognizing that it is “natural” given our use of compasses, one would think we can be more playful showing earth with different “up” orientation.