The Spilhaus Projection: A world map according to fish | Hacker News Reader

The Spilhaus Projection: A world map according to fish

southernwoodenboatsailing.com

151 pointszynovex18 comments

A friend of mine created something similar using a numerical optimization based approach to minimize distortion. He also made the artistic choice to split the water between Australia and Asia to get even lower distortion. See Elastic II here:

https://kunimune.blog/2023/12/29/introducing-the-elastic-pro...

Elastic II is very neat by preserving drainage basins. But Antarctica looks really distorted, in a way that doesn't seem necessary? Could that be fixed somehow?

(Very) little bits of past discussion. Others?

The Spilhaus World Ocean Map in a Square (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36498614 - June 2023 (2 comments)

A far-sighted Minnesota scientist pointed America toward the future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35756976 - April 2023 (2 comments)

A world map that’s all about oceans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816910 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)

This article has a well-researched history and many versions of the map:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/756bcae18d304a1eac140f1...

According to saltwater fish... What about all of the freshwater fish?

Cool map though!

Freshwater fish have multiple, much smaller maps which have no connection to each other.

It is one of the most mind boggling thing to me how many animal species can survive with such convoluted life cycles. Fish do find their way into weird places. I've heard that fish egg stick to waterfowl feet.

Not to mention that no fish would have any insight into at least whatever is within visible distance from the shore surface. An accurate version of such a map would highlight an interesting perspective of how humans also lack the ability to perceive, comprehend, or even accept things they either physically or psychologically cannot perceive or do not wish to perceive and accept it.

More importantly, I imagine a 2D map would not be useful for fish: there is much more space to represent when you can also swim up and down.

the fish need more data:

- depths https://www.horizont.net/news/media/8/Die-Schaup-des-jeweil-...

- and temperature https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/...

and salinity

Are rivers 2d or 1d?

4d when they flow

I may be very easy to amuse but but Spilhaus projection for compact Hausdorff space (the surface of the Earth) tickled my drying bones.

Seems the landmasses are indeed housing off all that spilled water.

Humor aside, the first thing it reminded me of is the Quincunx projection. There all the landmass is at the centre and is housed off by the oceans. And you can tile Euclidean space with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection

Is there or could there be an equivalent centered on the north geographic pole? I'm aware of Polar Stereographic Projections and similar but they don't unify the oceans the way the Spilhaus does.

That is an awesome map

Nice reminder, that every eel in austria came from the caribic by looking at a path in this map.

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