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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

This clip is always hilarious to me. Smugly declares "it's where you've been living this whole time," as he stands in front of a projection that is just as flawed, as all projections are, as the Mercator. The only priority of that map projection is attempting to account for the accurate area of landmasses, sacrificing correct shape of landmasses, as well as a ton of navigational utility.

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.

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> as well as a ton of navigational utility

Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?

No I mean like when you open your maps application and want to go somewhere with GPS, latitude and longitude will be vertical and horizontal and proportionally spaced due to the map using a projection like Mercator...

A globe is not a map projection.

With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.

And that’s the tradeoff of using a globe, whereas the tradeoff of the Peters projection is that the map is distorted in various ways, and the tradeoff of Mercator is that the map is distorted in other ways.

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!

To be fair, the West Wing was pretentious in so many other ways that this is one of the few clips that borders on genuinely educational. Flawed? Yes. But it's not an educational show, it's a bizarre hyper-liberal hour-long lecture to the viewer where for some reason every single character talks like an over the hill Jewish man with the same verbal tics and expressions.

And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.

A globe IS a map projection. It's the projection of the surface of the planet onto a sphere.

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