Mercator: Extreme

Not the same idea, but the same category. You can Drag countries to different places on the Mercator projection to see how they warp and change size.

Classic example is moving Greenland onto the US. Or Russia. Russia isn't talked about much in this case, but its dramatic how it changes.

https://www.thetruesize.com/

Is this really a Mercator projection? It doesn't appear to maintain the invariant that lines of constant bearing are straight lines.

If I pick a point somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, the top point of Manhattan is somewhere near the top of the light colored area and the bottom point of Manhattan nearish the bottom of the light colored area. This means that if I draw straight lines on the the map from San Francisco to these two points, the angle between them is something like 30 degrees. They pass through very roughly the top and bottom of Nevada. But there's no line of constant bearing that passes from SF through the top of Nevada to the top of Manhattan while at the same time one that passes through the bottom of Nevada to the bottom of Manhattan.

This is all very wishy-washy, but it doesn't look right to me.

If you search for "90,0" and then use the change orientation button to put the south pole on the bottom of the screen you can recover the more familiar distorted map.

Other choices really do put into perspective how distorted this projection is.

I made something along these lines a while back too: https://projections.charemza.name/

This reminds me of "The View of the World from 9th Avenue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

It looks especially cool if you switch the overlay to "Google Satellite". You can see the different scale levels a bit better.

https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/#a473b325@55.86116,...

EDIT: you can also click the "folded map icon" button and you see the coordinates transformed back into normal ones and shown on a map with X and Y corresponding to radius and azimuth from the centre. Extremely cool!

Mexico City is great for this because it points you to the central square. You can see the avenues spiraling out of the square, some of which follow the same routes as the avenues that lead to the city-island of prehispanic times (Calzada de Tlalpan, for example).

They're missing a trick here. The best view angle is to have "here" along the bottom edge so it looks like you're looking outward from above the centre point.

A Show HN thread in 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840059

Anyone know how I could convert this to an HD image? Interested in seeing if I can frame it centered on my house.

Reminds me of bad map projection #45: Exterior Kansas[1].

[1]: https://xkcd.com/2951/

A globe is always the best projection. Unfortunately it fell out of fashion to have one on your desk.

Incidentally a friend just shared this with me earlier today : https://www.thetruesize.com/

Would be interesting to see comparisons between this and very old historical maps, I bet some are not far off.

Essentially the plot of The Inverted World.

Brilliant fun. Do change the layers and orientation, to play with the suggested locations!

Finally! I’m a kid of the 80s and I’ve been waiting for this for so long! Thank you!

I honestly wonder why I find this so skin-crawling and unsettling. Something about the distortion of a familiar shape.

This is basically how my mind works. Mind projection.

my head hurts

This is information that a specific Earth community must not access, it will cause flat out chaos!

Remember that "The West Wing" episode where geographers petition the White House chief of staff to replace the Mercator projection with the more accurate and less Euro/US-centric Peters one? This one looks designed to stroke the Yuge ego of one Donald J Trump...