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Comment by RamblingCTO | Hacker News Reader

The comments overwhelmingly say: mercator isn't really in use. So what is this weird "decolonization" push then? Virtue signalling? I see it a lot from US-based people nowadays. Seems like a weird fetish as a European.

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Web Mercator is easily the most used projection, now and in all of history.

Yep. All online maps, google, apple, bing, osm, it's all transverse mercator. Only google earth actually runs a full globe.

I was under the impression that they had a globe only when zoomed out, then transitions to web Mercator as you zoom in. Is it not the case? FYI Apple Maps also shows a globe

The article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.

...which seems to have been an entirely US-centric debate (especially when it was brought up again in the late 2010s), which explains why Europeans seem kinda baffled by the discussion. But projections that preserve size much better than Mercator were common in education systems outside the US long before the 1970s - mostly a projection closer to Robinson which is a compromise between preserving relative size without distorting shape too much, while still mapped on a common (but not rectangular) 2D area.

I mean Peters himself was German.

But my point is the "decolonization" bit. Fine, we work towards more accurate maps. Everbody (except the US government haha) wants that I guess. It's the identity politics part that still baffles me.

True, but he mainly seemed to have made a splash in the US with the colonialism angle. I don't think there was much of an outrage in either direction in Germany about that topic in the 1970s. I guess most people just shrugged and moved on because popular map projections already did balance relative size vs shape long before the 70s, and Peters-Gall was just a variation and not all that different to what was already established.

It’s silly that the UN chose to prioritize equal area over all other aspects of a map projection, but if we must use an equal‐area projection, I’m glad they chose this one. Gall–Peters is just hideous and it’s awful that it’s as widely adopted as it is. I hope Equal Earth replaces Gall–Peters everywhere.

I don't think this is a US only thing. Even in India, where I'm from, everyone I've spoken to or know tends to like this change.

Yeah but does the Indian education system actually use Mercator projection on their wall maps and geography learning material? E.g. how much is the average Indian citizen actually confronted with highly distorted map projections in their daily life (unless their professional job is involved with navigating ships of course where Mercator projections makes sense).

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.

It's from longer ago than that. There was a West Wing "big block of cheese" episode that made it out to be a white supremacy issue, when the map is really just a useful map for navigation.

At least from my own experience, the map used the most throughout school was the Mercator projection.

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.

Are you saying that as a kid, you never had a globe in your geography classroom?

Seriously?

I mean, of course we were shown a globe "once". My father had one at home too, though tucked away under a mountain of files and other things in his gigantic cabinet.

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.

Good Lord! I can only suggest that your education system was in a state of failure.

I mean, most nations aren't as rich as the "West" + East Asia.

I come from a small town, but I still managed to do fine for myself.

not sure if this was sarcastic, but it's pretty common like this in austria, and if there are problems with the education system then this isn't one of them

> As the resolution itself states: "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation."

Beyond parody.

US angry US no big

US biggest! US #1!

US no change size much when switching from Marcator to any of the others. So no. US cavemen not it.

It actually shrank a bit in size (especially Alaska).

This is side by side comparison (old vs new map):

newworldsize.com/old-vs-new/united-states/

It may not have changed size, but other countries have gotten bigger. Especially "shithole countries". If other countries get bigger and the US does not, by virtue of US thought processes, the US has gotten smaller because it could have gotten bigger and it did not. USA #1 means USA gets all the things first, regardless of their value.

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