The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
not-ship.com
not-ship.com
They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface.
And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.
This would be an easier problem to solve if Flat Earthers were right. (semi-/s)
Huh? Are you a Flat Earth believer? We can literally see the countries from space. The problem wasn't that we don't know how big they are but that, as your parent explains, it is not possible to have a flat map which accurately depicts a (roughly) spherical terrain. A flat map has to be "wrong" in some sense and this change picks a map which made a trade off that favours accurate size (e.g. ratio between size of Greenland and Africa)
Louis XIV famously said "You have cost me more territory than all my enemies" when he received a more accurate map of France in 1682 (the Cassini map), showing its size was ~20% smaller than previously calculated.
Like Greenland vs Africa, come on man!! This must be a joke (and still lasted 457 years).
Why?
Because it is not used just for marine navigation. It is mostly used for everything related to maps and apps with maps.
Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.
99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.
This in turns influences how you think about history, population density, travel times, etc.
That's not right. Imagine heading due West, and keeping your compass pointing West every step anywhere not on the equator. That traces out a longitude line, not a great circle.
Just open Google Maps and see.
It's not fair to make a false map a standard being used for everything.
https://newworldsize.com/old-vs-new/compare/africa-vs-greenl...
And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.
Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.
Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Solid logic, mate.
I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.
I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.
You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.
That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.
At the cost of distorting shapes and distances.
> compared to Mercator
The UN resolution compared Equal Earth to Mercator, a comparison Equal Earth easily wins in many circumstances. But the comparison should not be to Mercator, but to other widely used projections that do a better job of minimizing distortions generally, such as Winkel Tripel.
The UN resolution is explicit that Equal Earth was chosen specifically for “social justice”–type reasons.
Because if you have a specific application then you choose the correct projection for the application.
But if you're just showing a world map, then what's important?
For the UN I'd say relative land mass size is a pretty relevant measure since that's where people live, and where environmental policy takes effect at the level of nation states it deals with.
And it's also the change you can actually pass in a highly subjective area: a slightly different projection no one wants to vote for isn't a viable option in the first place.
This is a correction to that.
Wow, is this even a genuine question?
I can use a world scale map to illustrate or explain some geographic point I make in a presentation. I can use it as a quick reminder of the geography related to some current news, etc.
If the mariners want to continue using Mercator, who's stopping them?
As far as the news usecase goes I also don't really see how checking world maps would be applicable outside the news in question being consumed as entertainment, where my previous point on entertainment boiling down to personal pleasure and being fungible still stands.
> their (almost certainly wrong) intuition
So because some people can't use some information well, we should deny that information to all?
> I also don't really see how checking world maps would be applicable outside the news in question being consumed as entertainment,
Is this even an argument? I do not consume news purely for entertainment, neither do those in my circle
The argument isn't that using information is bad, it's that world scale maps are so shit at conveying usable information that there is no point in picking one projection over another (or any really) outside niche settings like sailing. Better to just use other non-map representations of the relevant information at that point.
> I do not consume news purely for entertainment, neither do those in my circle
Here my point was not that all news is entertainment, but rather that news one needs to reference a world scale map to make sense of in all likelihood isn't impacting anywhere near where one is living, nor near anyone amongst family or friends living abroad (hopefully one would remember the closest relevant neighbours), so those pieces are basically entertainment for the masses. (The assumption being that local impact to where the media is would be what's highlighted if there is some, hence the non-need for checking world scale maps in the event that the piece of news is impactful to the individual. So the pieces one feels like checking where on the globe are actually happening, one is in all likelihood checking because one is personally amused by finding out, not because it is useful beyond emotional gratification. And again no projections one could choose from would change the non-impact on the actions/decisions of the consumer of that piece of news.)
And they are from "other parts of world" namely Afrika. The only country that objectrd, for purely culture war reasons was Amerika.
It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.
But still, it's not a red flag in this particular example.
> Mercator useful for sailing
This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.
That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.
Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the metre. Alas, that's all water under the bridge by now.
If you want to do navigation in SI units, the UTM projections (see sibling thread) typically do positioning in metres inside each grid square.
full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.
Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.
How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).
Etymology vs dictionary, I suppose.
It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.
It was adopted by the US military between WWI and WWII, and similar projections were adopted by other militaries around the same time, because earlier (non-conformal) map projections led to dramatic errors when they were used for artillery targeting.
The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.
That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.
K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."
From my side of the world (Europe), this whole "Mercator projection is associated with colonialism" drama seems to have originated a couple of years ago in the US and was mostly amplified by artificial social media outrage.
When I first discovered that Greenland and Canada were not really that big during one of my many wikipedia tours as a kid, I was incredibly disappointed.
Seriously?
But 99% of the time, a kid would see the world via maps in books, notebooks, projected onto the board, etc.
And we didn't have a "geography classroom". We had one classroom for a set number of kids - like 8A, 8B, etc. (where "8" is the class/grade). The teachers would come in and go as per the period. The kids stayed right where they were.
I come from a small town, but I still managed to do fine for myself.
US biggest! US #1!
This is side by side comparison (old vs new map):
newworldsize.com/old-vs-new/united-states/
Beyond parody.
At least in Germany (and both former East and West) it certainly isn't in use since at least the 1950s (and probably much earlier), but instead a projection type that maps land masses closer to their actual relative sizes. Mercator is extremely rare and only used in very specialized professional maps (e.g. for navigation), but certainly not as the popular map projection in education.
Also don't schools use physical globes anymore?
This whole drama sounds like it's about a century late to the party tbh.
Here is the UK in Africa: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTAyODQ3Nzg.NTkyNDI2Nw*...
Note of course this includes Scotland! The traditional English are basically a dot.
All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.
If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.
And I wouldn't call 29.6 <> 21.3 a little smaller, Africa is 39% bigger than North America.
Just drag South America or Australia onto Africa and tell me it changed more than a few percent in size. Barely perceptible.
North America is not 21.3 but 24.7e^6 m^3 according to google, so the ratio is 4:3. Asia to Africa is 3:2
Arable in your stats just means cultivated, it isn't a measure of the natural productivity. People in Africa work poorer lands due to necessity.
North America has more non-desert land than Africa and produces 3x as much food. Asia nearly 10x food production. Europe 2x. Antarctica has no non-desert land and Australia has very little. Asia has the most by a long way. This lines up pretty well with each continent's historical economic significance.
Regarding 'small Africa' conspiracy - I have never not been told that Africa is a huge continent. Documentaries, podcasts, TED talks, movies, Top Gear, books, atlases (they all have multiple projections btw), globes, video games. Five weeks in a balloon? I may have consumed well over 100 hours of media romanticizing the vast scale of Africa. Colonialists had no reason to conceal it either - selling big Africa investment (exploitation) opportunities was their business model
This is a Mandela effect moment for me. Or maybe it's an American education thing?
Because the resolution specifically talks about the supposed injustice Mercator has perpetrated upon Africa over the centuries, and loudly trumpets that adopting Equal Earth is an act of reparation toward Africa.
“Noting the proclamation by the African Union of 2025 as the year of “Justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations”, and decision Assembly/AU/Dec.942 (XXXIX), adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union in February 2026 in Addis Ababa, endorsing the period 2026–2035 as a decade of action dedicated to justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations,”
“Noting with satisfaction the adoption by the African Union of the Equal Earth cartographic projection, which more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa,”
“Convinced that correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation, understood as promoting accurate geographical knowledge, as well as historical truth, education and awareness-raising, and promotes mutual understanding among peoples,”
“Affirms that cartographic distortions of continental sizes inherited from history have cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic impacts and constitute historical biases, the correction of which will promote recognition, justice and development, particularly with regard to the African continent;”
“Recognizes that the Mercator projection, widely used around the world, particularly distorts, from the perspective of area representation, continental masses located far from the equator, resulting in a proportional shrinkage of Africa and other regions;”
Centuries of injustice!
Good god. I simply fail to understand such a choice of words.
Don't worry; Americans assume as a matter of course that England includes Scotland. Your internal political divisions are of interest only to you.
The widget also appears to include Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, Americans probably wouldn't expect.
Mercator is far more globally evenhanded in that regard, being a cylindrical projection.
The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.Featuring all 244 American States!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...
In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.
Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.
"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."
We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.
The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.
However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".
Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"
There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.
The causality you gloss over seems to be more important than the causality you'd like us to focus on. The ships came first.
Empire -> need for chronometers -> chronometers.
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner:
And fun fact, Ghana is the country closest to point where the prime meridian intersects the equator.
No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!
Also, the UN voted to use this map for itself and suggested (!) that others should use it. It never said that everyone has to use that map. It actually said that this voting is "non-binding".
The key term some people never learned in school is "direct democracy" vs. "indirect democracy".
Even many clubs, e.g. in Germany the ADAC, have systems where people vote for an assembly (or, in politics: a parliament). And then the assembly vote fot ehri CO (or, in politics, for their chancellor). Now, it can happen that this chancellor together with 26 other head of states is a member of the Europen Council (EUCO, one of the 7 bodies of the EU, what btw most people all the time intermingle). And that this EUCO now votes on their president.
In your logic, this presidency of the EUCO is then null and void. Because not directly elected by citizens of the EU.
In my logic, I realize that this position is removed from the people, but it still done by a democratic process. A multi-stage process, but still democratic. And that it still has some bearing.
Asking for the whole world population having an election on e.g. the UN Secretary General --- under the implication that only this would give representation --- is bogus.
I implied instead that there is a crisis in representation.
(...You could be German and you have not noticed, in spite of all the vocal effort in the North? That and all the other similar signals clearly affecting current history.)
An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not.
Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1], and Crimea is depicted as outside of Ukraine.
I have no idea if there are other hidden yet important changes, since there is hardly any commentary apart from size and shape.
[1] https://ukraine-war-analytics.com/history/international-reco...
As best I can tell the Ukrainian ambassador saw the example map made by the Equal Earth creator in 2014 with its somewhat questionable choice in colouring Crimea and saw an opportunity for virtue signalling. Or maybe he really thought the vote was about that specific political map from 2014.
Will countries actually change their map projections? That has yet to be seen. Maybe they will, maybe they won't That has yet to be seen.
Other map projections (we have hundreds!) compromise on other things to improve on others. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections
So yes, we definitely NEED compromise and not some strongman that says, due to limited knowledge "it is how it is, forever".
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...
Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.
Equal Earth is basically Robinson with a more straightforward formula and accurate areas.
Equal earth also has its uses, it's a neat and clean map, but has more distortion in shape, which might be undesirable.
I have a Waterman on my wall :)
The UN has only one mapping application - to equitably portray the world's country boundaries. In the larger space of potential maps, this is pretty niche. As a result, they need a niche projection.
Nautical charts use Mercator projection, but aviation charts typically use the Lambert conformal conic projection (LCC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert_conformal_conic_projec...
To quote the article: "Pilots use aeronautical charts based on LCC because a straight line ... approximates a great-circle route between endpoints for typical flight distances"
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.
This is straight up wrong.
The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense.
They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things or serious things, it will reduce conflict. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Obviously world peace hasn't been achieved. It probably never will be. Nonetheless, that is the goal of the UN. They want to try to fix conflicts.
In contrast the EU is (partially) a supernational organisation: in some fields the EU holds formal power over what happens in the member nations (because the member nations changed their national law to give EU that power).
But from a practical perspective you are mostly right, although i think its important not to underestimate the soft power the UN has on behind the scenes things, which people significantly under estimate.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Of course they were lying the entire time.
What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?
Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).
It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.
* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...
The vote was because the US is an intransigent rogue state at this point, and it doesn’t want to accept any outside influence whatsoever.
My teachers had to remind students so many times that the size for Greenland was just way off but it was hard for that to sink in for a kid used to seeing it every single day.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
I'm sure the guns trained on people trying to cross the Berlin wall to the west was just a "symbol", or the nuclear tests to prove that superpowers could kill everyone, or the people who died during the space race to send someone to the Moon. Olympics, sure whatever.
Yes, a nonbinding UN resolution that does a stupid thing that no one has to care about is a symbol, just one no one cares about because its nonbinding.
And allies were engaged in that too.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
That also happens to be broadly what you would get looking straight down at the earth from above that point, which seems like it would also be the least confusing option.
The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.
Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!
Fortunately Google Earth is still a sphere not a cyllinder.
Well better really. It is a cylindrical projection, so it's more like "Mercator before it's unrolled".
A version of it including political borders my desktop wallpaper for a long time, until I decided to not change default wallpaper on my new devices anymore.
It's also good for knowing how much daylight you get somewhere or whether someone there is likely to be awake right now.
The former is correlated with distance from the Equator (and knowledge of the seasons) but surely other than Dymaxion all the maps we care about do have an Equator and North->South ?
The latter is correlated with Longitude, and again other than Dymaxion surely all these maps will be the same in that respect ?
Particularly in practice with Artificial Light humans tend to live by the clock, which is thus dependent on local "time zones" and not strictly East-West position.
This is the left doing what they always do: finding supposed victims and oppressors, and acting (loudly and publicly) as white knight saviours.
Doesn't matter if the victims asked for their help or not, or even if the issue is real. This is a performative act of virtue by the left. Nothing more.
The UN is 1-country-1-vote, which means Western liberal market economies are in the minority. As an organisation it structurally favours the economic-distributional and collectivist economies.
The New International Economic Order (UNGA, 1974), the New World Information and Communication Order at UNESCO, the 2024 Global Principles for Information Integrity and the Global Digital Compact are ideological, and all about global redistribution of wealth and international control of media flows.
The UN is not an organisation that exists to promote the values of freedom and equality of opportunity that underpin constitutions like the US.
Just, oh of course, like an orange peel!
Based on some quick search the atlas I used in school in Germany mostly used winkel-tripel projection (or the eckert IV). Does my memory remember the map accurate enough to determine that now? Hell no.
Mercator is still preferred for navigation because it preserves angles (that's why Google Maps uses it). Neither Robinson nor Equal Earth are great for preserving angles.
I think it's appropriate for the United Nations to adopt a map that seeks to preserve landmass sizes over Mercator which is only useful for navigation. I think Robinson is a compromise that doesn't perfectly maintain angles nor accurately reflects sizes but lands somewhere between the two "extremes"
The article is just strawmaning our past, as is fashionable. Ironically the same author published an article warning against misinformation just a week prior: https://www.not-ship.com/normalize-debunking-each-other/
Tell me you've never done any serious navigation off a map or chart without telling me...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emblem_of_the_United...
It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant.
On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
It doesn't shock me that the US voted against it. I am surprised that others voted for it, and diminished themselves.
If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.
If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.
Yet, it was clearly very important for the governments of the formerly smaller countries to be shown to be larger on the official UN map. Otherwise, why bother with a vote?
I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.
Both kids in Europe and Africa will actually end up with a more correct idea of how large both their continents are.
They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important. It was certainly not a Mercator projection by the way, Greenland was still a reasonable size on that map on the wall in the classroom).
Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.
I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.
Maps are extremely powerful signs because they implicitly claim to organize the physical world. Consider, for example, the reference viewpoint of a map regardless of other features.
The first time you see a map centered on another continent makes you realize that your vision of the world, where some parts are peripheral, is relative. Even if that fact is obvious.
I don't know exactly what the effects of a change of projection are, but I know they exist.
This explains why the UN is making such an otherwise stupid resolution from a mathematical point of view.
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
(I.e., all the webpages with a rotating globe with "News" spelled around it in the fashion of the animated Universal logo, embedded as an animated GIF [GIF89a].)
The “north is up” convention isn’t a real thing.
Ancient mediterranean maps often were South up, as well as maps of Islamic cartoghraphers.
There were also Roman road maps which were entirely schematic, more like our modern public transport maps (e.g. such maps only cared about how locations were connected by roads and their distances, but not about any geographical mapping)
This is also why the contrasting term is "Occident" (meaning "falling"), but that word is less well known today.
Or buy a globe FFS.
That project was always silly really.
That the USA is turning into the number #1 rogue country is also problematic. Trump is damaging everything here.
Only in the minds of the far left is "Trump damaging everything", or is the US "the #1 rogue country"
Personally I support reindustrialisation, reinstating secure borders, and taking down totalitarian regimes that killed thousands of innocent people
I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...
[1] https://geospatialstuff.com/posts/2025/05/16/xkcd-bad-projec...
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.
I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!
Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".
Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.
> I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Certainly “equal” is a perfectly normal word used normally in all sorts of circumstances, including equal‐area map projections. That said, while I wouldn’t call it “baggage,” it’s impossible to separate the Equal Earth projection from the context in which it was created: the previous most notorious equal‐area projection, Gall–Peters, was heavily pushed (both when it was popularized in the 1970s and when it regained a surge of popularity in the 2010s/2020s) by promoting the idea that use of non‐equal‐area projections causes westerners to subconsciously internalize feelings of superiority over the poor oppressed Global South based on the distorted size of their home countries on a map. This idea is, shall we say, controversial and not universally accepted. But if you read the original UN resolution that was voted on, it’s clear that the UN representatives believe it (or say they believe it, anyway).
In that context, it seems absolutely clear that the name “Equal Earth” was a very intentional double entendre by the authors of the projection. I don’t fault the authors for coming up with such a catchy name, but I feel strongly it’s important to push back against the false idea that establishing use of equal‐area projections is some meaningful act of restorative social justice.