UN backs new map showing Africa's true relative size with US alone in opposition | Hacker News Reader

UN backs new map showing Africa's true relative size with US alone in opposition

npr.org

19 pointsanticorporate19 comments

I'm neutral on the map. If it makes somebody happy, great.

Would've been a lot more interesting of they promoted a population map: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram

> Would've been a lot more interesting of they promoted a population map

why?

Watch the map animation at the top of the NPR article.

Notice how most of 'em don't even bother to show the deep interior of Antarctica.

If you aren't a geologist or similar - how much of the importance of a place is due to the people living there?

The UN represents the interests of people, not land.

so? people still need to use and visualize a map that isn't some strange abstraction. how useful is a population map when attempting to locate a small country to understand geography?

https://map-projections.net/compare.php?p1=equalearth&p2=rob...

Noted in the linked UN news source:

> Six countries – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine – abstained.

It would have been interesting if NPR had covered the diplomatic and economic considerations behind those countries abstaining, and no other right-wing nationalist regime siding with the US.

Reading the Wikipedia article on the Equal Earth projection it would seem the map used in the resolution indicates national boundaries.

And Wikipedia outlines in considerable detail why those boundaries are quite objectionable to a good number of nations in Europe. Quoting multiple UN Ambassadors on this resolution.

Vs. NPR found an angle that'd push their reader's buttons, and figured their job was done.

Glad I stopped donating to NPR in the early aughties.

Media organizations famously are able to do more in-depth reporting when you stop funding them...

Why don't they use the Mollweide projection instead?

Or Collignon!

> In a statement after the vote, Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, accused the United Nations of promoting an ideological agenda and distracting from more pressing issues.

> "Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility," the statement read.

I dunno, bro, "more accurate map" seems less "ideological" than "refuse to contemplate anything that could be perceived by the most fragile people alive as diminishing the US."

Sometimes it gets harder and harder to understand why certain things trigger these children.

They can't hear you over their loud and non-ideological renaming of Lake America.

Also, the great state of New America, located between Arizona and Texas. https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2096657477928448250

Might be a joke, might not. Who knows, with this crew

Is it a more accurate map? It more accurately represents the size of Africa but there are distortions in other places that aren't present in a Mercator projection.

To be fair you either produce a globe that faithfully reproduces the geoid (a sphere should do for most cases) or you'll always distort something on the map: angles, areas, distances. And then there's the question of the overall map shape: you can get away with less overall distortion at the price of partitioning the map into more pieces (as done e.g. by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map). The Mercator projection has the advantage, if indeed it is one, of being rectangular. To me, a shortcoming of the Equal Earth projection is that it makes places like Australia and Alaska look like they're somehow 'on the fringe'.

The old map's Africa looks just like Africa on my globe. I understand that the new Africa is bigger, but it no longer looks like the real shape of Africa on planet Earth.

When I look at a map - political or geographic - my primary observation is the shapes of the nations or landforms. Not the size.

Yes, contrary to reporting, the map doesn't represent Africa more accurately, but instead it represents regions near the poles more accurately to eliminate size distortion, at the expense of more shape distortion near the equator. But you aren't going to see many news outlets titling "UN backs new map showing Greenland's true relative size with US alone in opposition."

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