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Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion (theguardian.com)
Students attending Boston public schools are now getting a more accurate depiction of the world after the school district rolled out a new standard map of the world that show North America and Europe much smaller than Africa and South America. From a report on The Guardian: In an age of "fake news" and "alternative facts", city authorities are confident their new map offers something closer to the geographical truth than that of traditional school maps, and hope it can serve an example to schools across the nation and even the world. For almost 500 years, the Mercator projection has been the norm for maps of the world, ubiquitous in atlases, pinned on peeling school walls. Gerardus Mercator, a renowned Flemish cartographer, devised his map in 1569, principally to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans. An exaggeration of the whole northern hemisphere, his depiction made North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa. He also placed western Europe in the middle of his map. Mercator's distortions affect continents as well as nations. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller.
To be fair, Mercator's projection - whether it had any kind of agenda in favor of minimizing Africa or not - ran up against some serious geography and geometry problems. Africa is the largest continent that crosses the equator, and a large amount of its land mass is relatively close to the equator. By comparison, North America does not traverse the equator at all, nor does Europe, Asia, or Australia. As it was pointed out in the summary, Greenland appears near the size of Africa in this projection but that reflects the projection itself more than anything.
As we were all (hopefully) taught in school, any map projection will be a compromise. After all, we're trying to take the surface of a round object and display it on a flat surface.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
https://xkcd.com/977/
This PC crap is bullshit.
We learned about maps and their inherent distortions in fucking _middle_ school, again in high school. Referenced the globes sitting in every classroom.
Granting the dim bulbs didn't get it, but they won't get it now.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
to lay the reasoning on "fake news" sounds stupid.
https://xkcd.com/977/
Geography has included the different projection styles for years. How is this new? This is just re-introducing curricula that was removed and calling it 'decollonization'?
On the Mercator projection. straight lines map to great circles, useful for navigation. I would argue the the 0 meridian location in Greenwich, overemphasizes the centrality, and cultural relevance of Africa compared to America
You must have some type of distortion when projecting a map of a globe on a flat plane.
The school has just decided that it wants one type of distortion instead of another.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Now Alaska is the size of Texas
No flat map of the world is more or less accurate than any other. All of them are wrong. And the north hemisphere is distorted in exactly the same way that the south hemisphere is.
If you're attending a half-decent school, notice the globe, and do use it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Tune into realDonaldTrump's twitter feed coming 3.. 2.. 1..
In the new map proportions seem to be off again: Asia should be roughly 50% larger than Africa, it certainly is not. I guess everyone has his/her own alternative facts.
So what about Asia? Biggest of them all? Is that also smaller on this new, slightly PC-ish projection?
Any attempt to project a 3D figure onto a 2D surface is bound to be distorted. Rather than distort things one way or the other (Did anyone notice how Africa now looks bigger than Asia?), how about we use a model of the earth that is 3D - I think they're called Globes.
We don't even have to use a real globe for students to crowd around. Teachers could now use a fairly cheap projector and 3D globe-modeling software (like https://www.echalk.co.uk/Science/physics/solarSystem/InteractiveEarth/interactiveEarth.html ) to compare sizes and study about the earth.
how about a plain old globe !?
Yeah, okay. Just don't flip it upside-down like they did on West Wing. We're used to reading maps in a certain direction relative to the magnetic field.
Most kids still couldn't find Somali or Greece.
https://xkcd.com/977/
It's so obvious that they're just projecting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is the problem with the whole definition -
The Mercator projection is ACCURATE for it's data view (to better display trade routes).
So long as the information itself isn't false it's just a different view facet of the data set.
My school system didn't use the Mercator maps but they weren't "accurate" either because they balanced out all the land masses so they were all VISIBLE so the various geographies and cities could be pointed out during lectures.
So let me get this straight, Africa and South America have that much more land and natural resources than the first world countries - and still can't do nearly as well in terms of development and wealth? That would tend to make one even more dismissive of cultures on those larger landmasses that cannot pull it together.
The end result over some time is that assumptions will be made that people from those regions are simply not as smart. That's sad because it's more a matter of poor governance than intelligence, but what can you do when you present such a grim picture?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article ends with:
“The Mercator projection showed the spread and power of Christianity and is standard,” she said. “But it is not the real world at all. What the Boston public schools are doing is extremely important and should be adopted across the whole of the US and beyond.”
Beyond the US even! Perhaps beyond the US other maps have already been adopted for this reason? I know that when I was in high school decades ago, our world map was not a Mercator projection for exactly this reason.
If those educators had been looking over the border they would have implemented this around the turn of this century.
The following is a direct quote from the article:
The result goes a long way to rewriting the historical and socio-political message of the Mercator map, which exaggerates the size of imperialist powers.
"This is the start of a three-year effort to decolonize the curriculum in our public schools," said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of opportunity and achievement gaps for Boston public schools.
Although there is nothing wrong with introducing students to the Peters projection rather the Mercator projection, the political motivations of this change worry me. What do they have planned for the rest of their "three-year effort" at decolonization?
I agree; Mercator's projection is not deliberately designed to minimize Africa. That is incidental. But, nevertheless, it is a side effect. As a kid, I was always puzzled as to why Australia is a continent, but Greenland not, when on the map Greenland is clearly larger.
I'm a fan of the Lambert cylindrical equal-area projection, which seems to be geometrically very clear and straightforward, although it has a odd (pi to 1) aspect ratio.
And, of course, the obligatory xkcd.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You could just buy them globes.... the only 100% accurate projection.
Any globe you buy these days is a cardboard or plastic sphere usually with printed strips glued to the sphere. Are these accurate considering they are actually on a sphere and thus shouldn't suffer from spherical to flat distortion?
And if a physical globe is accurate, why can't they just take all the strips they would normally glue onto the globe and lay them out flat, even if the seams don't line up when flat?
I saw the projection they are advancing and it looks really distorted compared to an actual globe. Whether it's a good projection or not, but of all the dozens of possible projections it looked like it was picked because it makes Africa look much larger, as if that alone would make people stop being racist.
Which one looks closer to nasa maps? I wonder.
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484
To say the mercator projection is oppressing people whose ancestors came from continents that look bigger compared to a different projection diminishes the sensitivity people have about allegations of actual racism.
The general population doesn't trust much of the news for this reason.
To me, the earth is round, but I sympathize with the flat earthers in the NBA because the experts and authorities are too busy pushing their agenda to bring us much awareness of what is going on.
Well... at least there's no black bars on the sides...
Why limit the solution to 2D maps on paper? You can get a much better visualization on a computer, e.g. https://earth.nullschool.net/
Just not the ones they set out for
Nullius in verba
Trump supporters spent the latter part of the campaign complaining about how Clinton didn't understand their concerns (lost jobs, etc.). All this crying about how the dem's just don't understand the problems faced by REAL Americans(tm). So now the shoe is on the other foot and the REAL Americans(tm) show that they don't care about anyone but themselves. They now comfortably embrace and espouse that which they whinged about just a few months ago.
This is why dem's hate Trump supporters: "We won, so I can do and say whatever I please."
Just watched this scishow the other day. It explains why this type of distortion occurs and the trade-offs when you try to correct it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU
Also, it's fun seeing people get up in arms about this.
On the Mercator projection. straight lines map to great circles,
No! No, no, no, no!
In the Mercator projection, straight lines do not map to great circles-- the only straight lines that are great circles are meridians and the equator. Plot a great circle route from, say, New York to Berlin. It goes way north of the straight line on a Mercator projection.
(In fact, there is no possible mapping in which all great circles map to straight lines, nor all straight lines to great circles. That's non-euclidean geometry for you.)
This, in a nutshell, is exactly why we should stop having Mercator maps be the standard.
useful for navigation.
Not!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I attended middle school in the mid-60s back when it was called "Junior High School". We did study the Mercator projection, but mostly to demonstrate that a flat map was going to be distorted and always pointing out the huge Greenland vs. the tiny southern continents. We also got the example of how the flat projections make polar air routes look longer than more southerly routes. A globe makes this clearly wrong.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Schools used to be able to afford this marvelous technological invention called a "globe".
And I dunno about schools these days, or everywhere for that matter, but way back when I was in high school the books usually used something that was quasi-cylindrical like a Robinson or some such. Tended to give you a good picture of whatever they centered it on (which would usually be whatever was being talked about) and squished things near the edges.
I don't recall ever seeing a Mercator projection. Maybe the local maps were, like when it was showing a single country, but of course it doesn't matter a lot at that point as the distortion in a small area isn't that large whatever kind of projection you use.
So let me get this straight, Africa and South America have that much more land and natural resources than the first world countries - and still can't do nearly as well in terms of development and wealth?
What a bigoted and ignorant statement.
It's hard to do much with whatever amount of wealth your land might have, if it is taken from you by colonial powers, your culture is ripped apart by external agressors or outright outlawed for generations by said colonial powers, your people enslaved, tribes split apart by artificial boundaries while historical enemies are suddenly grouped together into one "country" and so on. And all that ignores the unique challenges tropical jungles impose, vs, say, subtropical grasslands or deciduous forests (see how many people survive trying to hike the length of the Congo vs hiking the same distance in North America, even sticking to relatively undeveloped areas such as northern Canada).
"Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller." Actually, if you make something 1 times smaller, it's gone! Nothing left! Perhaps you meant 1/14 the size, instead of "14 times smaller"....
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
No flat map of the world is more or less accurate than any other.
No flat map of the world is perfectly accurate. But some are more accurate than others.
All of them are wrong.
Just because all are wrong doesn't mean that some aren't more wrong than others. There's a great Isaac Asimov essay on that subject: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
And the north hemisphere is distorted in exactly the same way that the south hemisphere is.
Even there, you're mostly wrong. Grab your dictionary and take a look at the Mercator maps (here, for example, or here): they very rarely have the equator in the middle. The reason they don't is that if the map goes all the way north to show Alaska and Scandanavia, then if they want equally far south, Antarctica becomes absolutely huge on the map.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It is time for the world to look at itself and see that though the world powers dominate from the Northern Hemisphere, the real world is that of the neglected "Southerns" who have so much more of the earth under their feet.
And the reason is not because of Europe itself, you have to look the other side : between Alaska and Russia.
It is a very convenient place to split the map : it avoids cutting important landmasses in half and the wraparound occurs in the middle of the pacific ocean where there are few things of interest.
Putting the Americas in the center will split Asia in two, which is a bad thing. We could cut through the Atlantic unless you have good reasons to do so, it is an overall worse solution than cutting through the Pacific..
Use.
A fucking.
GLOBE.
You were likely playing grabass while they tried to teach it. If you had paid attention you would know _all_ maps are distorted. The PC dweebs just prefer one distorted in a different way. I don't believe your class didn't have globes.
This is a very odd thing I've noticed, and I've see it from both liberals and conservatives: they are unable to conceptualize the idea that other people's experiences may not have been just exactly the same as their own.
Nice of you to tell me what my grade school was like. If I were a woman, I suppose I'd call your lecturing me about what my grade school classroom was like an example of "mansplaining," but since I'm not, I guess it's just arrogance on your part.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Everyone knows that the Mercator projection was designed specifically to minimize the size and therefore perceived importance of the third world and to maximize the size of Europe and its various colonies. The Mercator projection had absolutely nothing at all to do with representing lines of constant course between points to make it usable for oceanic navigation.. nothing at all to do with that. It's all about racism. Clearly.
An interesting perspective on continent size (though not informative) is the number of time zones on each continent. For example, Russia (yes, it's a country, not a continent) has 11 time zones. But it looks like some of Russia's timezones have been influenced more by history than geography.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A school district switched from one visual aid to another"
Film at eleven.
Flame bait much?
Equal area projections have been around for a very long time. Mercator maps are popular for good reasons. If you can't grasp map projection distortions, or you want to know what things really look like, get yourself a globe.
Yay politics. The cycle just repeats itself over and over with the sides occasionally switching. This is why I'm an independent.
I wish people would drop the labels and the parties and just think for themselves, but I know that is too much to ask.
The Behrmann is undistorted at 30deg, where Gall-Peters is undistorted at 45deg. This makes the Gall-Peters have a bit too much vertically stretch distortion at the equator for my taste.
I remember my teacher mentioning the controversy over map projections when I was in elementary school in the 1970s.
The problem isn't the map projections. The problem is people's insistence on believing there is always one and only one best solution. There isn't. Different map projections are best for different applications. I see the same flawed reasoning all the time when people ask me for help buying a computer - "What's the best laptop?" There isn't a single best laptop. There's a best laptop for you, there's a best laptop for me, there's a best laptop for Fred in accounting. But they are all probably different laptops. You have to prioritize what's important for what you want to do, then pick the best solution based on those priorities.
The same thing happens with election systems. Turns out all methods of voting are flawed in some way.
I prefer Eckert IV which is an equal-area projection like Peters but with less of the coastline distortion. The trade-off is the border is not quite a rectangle, though it's less circular than Winkel (which wastes a lot of map real estate in the corners). Eckert is what National Geographic use on many of their wall maps. Virtually any of these options is preferable to Mercator though.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
just googled images of earth from space, don't look like Bostons map.....
Except no one GAF about trade routes aside from shipping companies. As .000000001% of school kids will work in that industry, the Mercator map is a shitty map for them.
To quote the film, "Men in Black". "1500 Years ago everybody KNEW the Earth was the centre of the universe, 500 years ago everybody KNEW the Earth was flat. and 15 minutes ago you knew people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll KNOW tomorrow".
I remember when I was taught that Christopher Columbus was NOT the first European to visit North America. people in my class told me I was crazy/stupid. We have so much misinformation in our school for various political (and even economic reasons). We are VERY slow in correcting misinformation. Governments had long believed (as said in Men in Black) people done want [a clue] or need one they think they have a good beat on things.". Brings another quote from Oscar Wilde in "The Importance of Being Earnest" to mind:
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever" It would be cool if we could actually try to truly education even if against popularity so we can actually learn to think and strive for better information.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
But one with far less distortion than Mercator - which is the point.
There are a number of compromise projections which are better overall representations for general purpose use. Equal area maps distort landforms. Conformal maps distort area and so selecting one of either extreme is always suboptimal as a general purpose representation.
The only reason anyone knows or cares about this projection is the re-inventor of the projection's past political statements. Trading one extreme for another isn't progress. It's just stupid.
It's a wonder that some of them are still in the path to development [like, say, Brazil], since almost all the wealth was stolen by the colonial powers
They stole only gold, and even then not all of it.
The true wealth of a nation - land and natural resources - were still there, waiting to be used.
So it's not a wonder at all that Brazil is doing somewhat well, because they came closest to actually making yes of the wealth they had. Sadly Brazil is also a great example of how poor government and lack of rule of law can debilitate a whole culture.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What I am pointing out is the natural thoughts anyone would have to such a revision. Only the truly blind and religiously devoted PC acolytes such as yourself cannot see the natural consequences of such an action. If you were not blinded by rage at your doctrine being attacked, you'd see I don't even agree with the conclusion, I am just pointing out what people will see in it.
Try engaging with the thinking and reasoning part of your brain next time you see something you disagree with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, the aspect ratio for that one varies according to the parameters you choose, you can squash and stretch it. The Lambert cylindrical equal-area is just one parameter choice.
Yes; I like the un-squashed Lambert cylindrical precisely because the distortion is intuitive: the equator is undistorted, and everything off the equator has exactly the distortion due to perspective (as viewed from theoretically infinite distance at the equatorial plane). Other vertical perspective magnifications don't have any obvious reason for the choice of magnification, other than "make the map undistorted at latitude X."
I used to write code for these projections as part of my job. Decent choice though.
Mercator's most useful property is you can pick an origin and destination, draw a line connecting, and that gives you an initial bearing for travelling between. Keep that bearing, and you will get there albeit not by the shortest distance. Very handy for sailing ships.
Indeed, each of the projections used has one or another advantage. Mercator's great strength is that it locally preserved directions: a compass bearing of X maps to an angle on the map of X, which, as you point out, means you can plot constant-heading trajectories, which is reasonably efficient if your path is short compared to the Earth's radius. As a consequence, for any infinitesimal area, the map is un distorted. It's globally distorted... but not locally distorted.
I quite like the Winkel Tripel but the inverse is nasty to calculate.
Ah, the compromise solution. In real life, the best solution often is a compromise between solutions that are each bad in different ways.
But since we're talking schools, they'd also be well served by a nice spinning globe.
Indeed: the best map of a sphere is a sphere.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Have your students never heard of Google Earth? You don't need to buy a single thing, it's free for educational users.
And that gives a damn-near perfect, rotatable, zoomable view of anything you like and you can even get plugins that compare area, measurements, etc. using proper sphere-following routes.
But, no, let's continue printing things out on 2D paper that is GUARANTEED to be distorted, and then argue about what distortion we prefer.
If you know anything about map projections, you already know more than most of the useful idiots involved in this decision:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/19/boston-public-schools-world-map-mercator-peters-projection
This is not a new comcern, and it has been addressed by alternative projections decades ago. (Example: The National Geographic Society, Rand McNally, and others.)
The fact they think the Mercator projection is the last word shows just how behind the times they are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection
Read towards the end of The Guardian article in the link, and you will see the REAL reason behind their decision: maps in the school's chosen new projection are only produced by one company, and it's located nearby: sweetheart deal. Follow the money!
...and wants their fixed 2D projections back. Except for third world countries, what teacher doesn't have a PC and a projector to show Google Earth? Oh wait, Boston... You don't have to do it every time, just do it once and show that the closer you get the more the paper map looks like the 3D map. For extra fun, hollow out an orange and show the absurdity of trying to make a sphere into a square. Then leave the world map - the old and the new - to collect dust until the power's out - like a third world country, but I repeat myself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Individual schools in the US have used the Peters maps, Scott said, adding: “We believe we are the first public school district in the US to do this.”
You have got to be kidding me. C'mon! Somebody prove that statement wrong. It can't possibly have taken this long* to start fixing this, can it?
*The West Wing, Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, season 2, episode 16, (February 28, 2001)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
That's right, we can, and we should. This is why everyone else hates democrat supporters: they hate free speech.
The insinuation that students never saw any map other than the Mercator projection seems unlikely. The implication that the map is some kind of Anglo-Saxon reality distortion field is borderline propaganda. Was there some kind of district-wide rule that teachers had to use the Mercator projection? Was the Boston school district really that screwed-up?
I went to school in Maryland, and we used Robinson and either Goodes or Boggs (I can't tell the difference). Our social studies teachers had 10 foot tall maps that they could pull down over the chalkboard like a blind. We had a unit where we went over different map projections and had to understand the differences. It is a classic elementary science demonstration to give kids an orange and challenge them to peel it and make it flat, or to take a sheet of paper and wrap it around a ball. Did none of this happen in Boston?
The article spends several paragraphs slamming the Mercator projection, as though it was news. It has an embedded clip from a fictional television show debating map projections. But this sounds like it is attacking a strawman here. The article presents no evidence to me to indicate that Boston school teachers really only used one horribly stupid map projection, that they didn't use globes, and that they didn't have curriculum to explain map projections. It seems more likely that the school board decided to standardize, and the site is exaggerating it into a civil rights issue to make it newsworthy. The Boston school district official is happy to take credit for a "paradigm shift" which just feeds into the whole exaggeration.
I guess we should expect so much more from it.
Have gnu, will travel.
My problem with Gall-Peters is it doesn't look like what I see in a satellite photo of, you know, the actual planet.
Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion
... by adding even greater distortion that is entirely motivated by a petty political agenda, rather than scientific accuracy. I read the article, and the quoted motivations are not well-founded (Europe, for example, is not in the center of the maps used in the US, the United States is). The distortion in the propsed map (which, gallingly, is "an internal decision that will not be put up to public approval" or some words to that effect that make the person behind them sound more like a petty dictator who will shout down any dissenting view) is far worse than the traditional Mercator projection. You can see it: South America and Africa look stretched vertically (because they are).
There are so many, many projections that are scientifically superior. The only reason to select this one is political. Shame on those educators.
And I had such hope with the momentum building up behind the STEM movement.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
... residents of Greenland and Alaska should be complaining that Mercator is more inaccurate when representing their territory. It is biased in favor of Africa because that portion of map suffers from much less distortion.
You'd have to be a total idiot and blatantly ignorant to not understand how the projection works, and that the apparent relative sizes of various landmasses cannot be determined by simple visual comparison without reference to the longitude lines, which are in fact on the map for exactly that reason.
All Boston schools are doing is admitting that they have failed to teach basic map reading skills as part of geography. But I bet all the little jerks in class know all of the 58+ genders their "teachers" have come up with.
Quote from TFA that motivates all this:
âoeThe Mercator projection is a symbolic representation that put Europe at the center of the world. And when you continue to show images of the places where peopleâ(TM)s heritage is rooted that is not accurate, that has an effect on students.â
Yes, "has an effect". That's it. Not "bad effect", not "large effect".
There is going to be some compromise made unless you're using some kind of globe, or keep the errors on a small scale by only looking at one section of the Earth at a time (like a survey map or county map). That's why we have a lot of different kinds of projections. Using mercator projection is not some kind of white conspiracy against Africa, as some SJWs would have you think.
If we'd give schools a better budget maybe they could afford maps in more than one projection. Not that public schools spend time discussing world events with students anymore.
I'd like students to see a very abstract map that is drawn as flight times between major airports in the world. As I think it is easier to think of far away like India as a 19 hour flight than 13500 km. (Hyderabad in this example).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The problem with visual comparison is that some people see injustice wherever they look.
We have a lot of well meaning SJWs, but they are not methodical in their criticisms. Sure you can feel something is wrong and point it out. But if you can't describe how it is wrong or in what magnitude, then it is impossible to prioritize one injustice over another.
I argue with my wife about this all the time. Sure it's really unfortunate have a single mother wait all day at the urgent care with her kid because the lines are so long, and on top of that she had to ride a bus and work is not paying her while she takes the time off. Life really is harder for people without financial stability.
But forcing engineers like myself to pay to correct every little problem is not right either. I earn money to keep my family stable, and pay for the things my family needs. Of course I volunteer and help out when I can, but that's my choice. Raising my taxes so we can have bureaucrats operate a charity is more wrong than making a mother having a hard life.
If you didn't know, it's wrong to use force to make me participate in social experiments. (real force, as they will send me to to prison)
The last 50-60 years of education have been committed to presenting 'alternative facts' - white people aren't the most important, the US and Europe aren't the most important and successful, minorities were meaningful to history, Columbus was a fucking asshole, women are important, homosexuals aren't sexual deviants, there is no absolute morality, babies are just chunks of tissue, etc.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of any of those, but one has to recognize that, as opposed to conventional wisdom at the time, all of those things were being consciously presented as alternative viewpoints to the established narratives.
So let's not pretend that we haven't been dogmatically acculturated to the presentation and acceptance of alternative truths for most of our lives.
-Styopa
We covered Mercator maps in calculus. When sailors had to sail at a heading, it would land them ideally where they would expect to. Since they had no land to base their measurements from, they used the Mercator map and celestial field to navigate.
When I was a kid, we learned all the different common projections and how they skew portions or shapes. Greenland was used as an example of how distortion can make accurate maps misleading. Seems that school is trying to put a bandaid on a larger problem: their kids don't know geography.
Just because teachers are apparently unable to explain how projecting a sphere onto a 2-dimensional surface in a way that explains it any longer any longer...
Showing the Northern hemisphere as bigger than it really is actually just us Northerners trying to not make the Equatorials And Southerners feel so bad. If they saw how small we are compared to them, they would probably develop inferiority complexes. Add in the fact that Africa had a head start on the whole being human thing and it just becomes rather embarrassing.
Continental reunions can be awkward.
Thanks for the reply.
Nod. Compromise is often the best we can do in this game.
Enjoyed your contributions today.
Note to self: lookup useful homepage links before replying to a NASA scientist as he just might know these things already :)
I read it to mean South America was much smaller than North America. To be fair Africa isn't that much bigger than North America either (about 20%).
That projection would appear to vastly undersize both Canada and Russia.
What, Lambert cylindrical equal-area? No, it sizes Canada and Russia exactly correctly: that's what "equal area" does.
However, the way it achieves equal area is by squashing the map vertically by exactly the same amount that the sphere distortion expands latitudes horizontally. So if you're thinking of the vertical extent of the country, that's undersized. And, if you're used to other projections, it might look funny.
I'm a fan of the Goode homolosine projection, have been ever since National Geographic used it in the insert of one of their special edition magazines in the 1980's.
Yes, if you get rid of the constraint that you have to map to a rectangular shape, it opens up the choices quite a bit. Those "orange peel" projections do give you a nice visual feel that the map gets wrapped onto a sphere.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As the victim I know a thief has written some fake news. In rough language, a child is born guilty due to information transference (like electrical spark transference), because the thief had gained information from the victim that enabled the spark and the child to exist, It is very simple, use electricity become a thief. The mere participation in sex is using electricity and results in guilt due to the static potential difference between the female and male in their ground state.
Transverse Mercator Projection or nothing.
So everybody on this forum who was actually educated about maps being distorted and globes being very common in school is wrong?
No. Not everybody. Just you. Youstate with utter confidence that you know the contents of the classroom and the curriculum of the teaching in every single school in America ... and you can even tell me confidently how things were taught in "middle school" even before you were born. The idea that different schools might have different curricula is apparently beyond your conceptual horizon.
The fact that flat maps are distorted was and is common instruction, EVERYBODY does it, using a globe as the primary instruction tool. It's a way of crossing between history/geography/math, which teachers love.
"Everybody." Really. How in the world do you know that? Everybody where you went to school, perhaps. But unless you have visited every school in America, your confidence is misplaced.
I think that much of your belief about what is taught is probably just a matter of decade. In 1973 Arno Peters had a press conference, and instigated a big flap about map projections, leading to a lot of visibility, even making it to debate in the United Nations-- the "Peters projection controversy." https://www.thoughtco.com/pete... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Peters_projection
Before 1973, the choice of map projection was a technical detail that really hardly anybody knew or cared about, except for cartographers and perhaps mathematicians. After that it became high profile, and it seems reasonable that it might even have made it the middle school curriculum. At least, wherever you live it apparently did.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem is even that satellite photo is a 2D projection of a 3D thing...comically, it is probably the least accurate when looking at all aspects as it greatly exaggerates what is dead center from the viewpoint.
Since "Growth Rate" says nothing about actual size currently, I'm pretty sure you are in desperate need of reading this book.
Or are you saying that in just ten years after 6% compounded growth any number of various African countries will be equal in development to the U.S and Europe??
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
US school students have maps of the world? Who knew?
...unless one reads Guns, Germs, & Steel,
Yes I read that also - it's partly why I wrote.
Having a large amount of land at the same latitude is really important to any agricultural society.
Look at the revised map. Most of northern Africa is wider than the U.S. (at the same latitude).
Like I said, it's not the people, but the model of governance they live under that really determines long term prosperity. At this point in time technology has advanced enough that the historical reasons cultures could prosper or not hardly matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
to match your egos and compensate for your small dicks.
And Trump hears dick.
And you know he's not gonna like you telling him that his penis is smaller than previously believed
Yeah, the Mercator is also the reason why there are people that think that this meme about Pearl Harbor being impossible for Japan and thus an inside job is not a joke but the truth. {/sarcasm}
Seriously. Having latitudinal lines on the a map is a big clue that the map is a projection that distorts shapes progressively towards the poles. Also, the occasional globe in the geography classroom or at least the library. Oh and before I forget, the ubiquitous Earth as seen from space photographs and reproductions, often featured on posters, the corners of world maps, atlas covers, and the introductory pages of atlases where projections are discussed.
Maybe there is something more fundamentally wrong than the choice of map projection - perhaps the lowest common denominator approach to education?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The insinuation that students never saw any map other than the Mercator projection seems unlikely.
Given the typical street level knowledge of general geography I would say that the only unlikely part is that people have seen a map at all, let alone more than one and understand the differences.
The article is well and truly right. Distortion in maps will come as news to anyone who's never looked at a map and a globe side by side. it was rare that this difference was taught. Hell I only know about it due to photography and graphic design. The paradigm shift is that they realise they were teaching something wrong.
Now if they could address common core maths next. ...
Gnomonic projections have the property that great circles map to straight lines. But they don't preserve angles.
I stand corrected.
You can't map the entire globe with a gnomonic projection, though, since it maps half the globe onto to an infinite plane.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Transverse Mercator Projection or nothing.
Ah, the Equator Mercator! Nice.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It is, as we all should know, an oblate spheroid. Anyone advocating displaying a sphere as a map of the Earth is clearly trying to foist a lie upon our children!
The only maps of the Earth that should be allowed are somewhat flattened beach balls.
these new maps, with Africa large and in charge in the center, have been pretty much standard issue in public schools on the West Coast for better than a decade, closer to two.
Pretty sure lots of others have either that projection or the one Buckminster Fuller popularized.
Makes Boston a little late to the party.
I'm surprised, to be honest. I attended public grammar schools quite a few years ago in Massachusetts - not in Boston, but in the vicinity - and we didn't use Mercator. Besides the obligatory globes, all the classrooms had one of the interrupted projections. I think it may have been Boggs eumorphic. Besides being somewhat less distorted, it was a good prompt for explaining projections.
I quite liked maps and globes as a kid. My mother had a really nice big desk globe with a light in it. The globe was marked politically, but when the light was on, an inner printing with physical features showed through. So you could flip it on and off and see how physical barriers influenced political boundaries and that sort of thing.
We kids had a pair of smaller globes, one of the Earth and one of the Moon. A present from my grandmother, I think - probably among the ones we spent the most time with (along with encyclopedias and the like).
I didn't really learn about "projections" in high school I don't think, or not that I remember anyway. It became very clear when I went to University for GIS however. Professionally I recall using Lambert conformal conic for a lot of things. However like any projection it really depends on what you are using it for and at what scale. Different projections work better for what and where you are using it for. As you say, none are going to be perfect, that is just the nature of the beast. What is good about GIS VS a paper map on the wall is that they can more less be changed at will now. It used to more of a PITA sometime ago, but most software does things automatically now for you. In addition in recent times we have things like Google Earth and Maps, none of which used to be around 20 years ago...
In a school type situation I see no reason why it should be bounded by a "paper map on a wall" these days, and in fact I bet it would blow a lot students minds playing around at changing projections and seeing what the results are. As you say, these things were not nefarious in nature, only the focus of what they show may have been important to the author which might not be all that relevant depending on what you are using it for. Might also be a subject lesson on perception and not to believe everything you see, or at least to think critically about it...
Here's my favorite projection: https://www.google.com/maps/@20.7535001,-38.9243935,7801613m/data=!3m1!1e3
I just created it. I call it the Page-Brin projection.