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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.

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. (-:

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Honestly it's so difficult to find a map that satisfies all of one's requirements for teaching kids if you're a bit rigorous.

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's why I got my kids $1 inflatable globes. You can see the poles just fine.

I really like oblique projections. Have you seen this neat one from Kerkovits - A Low-Distortion Oblique Map Projection of the World’s Landmasses (2024)?

https://files.catbox.moe/k11gqq.avif

Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.

You might get a kick out of the AuthaGraph projection, if you haven't seen it before (although Antarctica may be a smidge distorted relative to dymaxion)

The standard Dymaxion projection centers on the North Pole, which doesn’t address the whole issue of favoring the northern hemisphere.

Both the world's population (with 88% to 12%) and landmass (with 68% to 32%) favor the northern hemisphere, so it makes sense to favor it in a general map as well.

How australians see it? Is north up or bottom?

Australians are mostly the descendants of British colonists (and prisoners) - the most successful colonizers in history - so the answer is what you might expect.

> 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.

"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"

Solid logic, mate.

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