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.

Comments

Geometry is hard, as is geography

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:Geometry is hard, as is geography

[epyT-R]

This article tries to justify imposing socialist political propaganda as a 'new' lesson in geography. As you said, many of us were taught about the distortions of Mercator (and possibly others) back when we were children too, without the political indoctrination. The implied message is that it is somehow racist/'imperialist' which is insane. If this was strictly about more accurate geography and cartography, there'd be no need to talk about politics or sociology.

The fact they use a TV show, itself a piece of propaganda, as a reference drives home the vapidity of modern journalism.

Never had a globe?

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Never had a globe?

[meta-monkey]

I think it's just retarded to imply that the use of the Mercator projection was intended to "diminish" Africa or South America. Grrrrr those Greenland supremacists, always tryin' to keep the Africans down!

But everything's gotta be political these days. Even fucking map projections.

Re:Never had a globe?

[Knuckles]

All flat maps will be distorted. The PC dweebs don't teach that 'maps are distorted' they replace the maps with new ones distorted to overemphasise other parts.

This is a non-issue raised by an idiot who is very bad at geography.

1. Poll people on the street. Only a tiny minority even among the educated will know about map distortion.

2. All maps will be distorted, so you need to pick the projection that works best for your needs. The Mercator projection is a good choice when you need to sail across the Atlantic. It is however among the worst choices you could make for teaching people about our earth in a geographical or political sense, for which it has been used. Choosing a better suited projection is the most logical thing one can do.

Re:Never had a globe?

[epyT-R]

Uh no. Not even close. Their usage of vocabulary like 'imperialist' and 'decolonize' invalidates your position completely. The quotes from school administrators in the article make it clear the justification for this is very political. More than half of the article is social justice rambling that has nothing to do with geography or cartography.

I'm all for correct country proportions, but

[SensitiveMale]

to lay the reasoning on "fake news" sounds stupid.

Re:I'm all for correct country proportions, but

[93 Escort Wagon]

Problem is, this new map isn't particularly reflective of the truth either. Go look up the total area of both North America and South America on Wikipedia, then look at how they are represented on this map.

TFA states that "the USA is small", which is a silly thing to say about the third largest country in the world... but they did an even greater disservice to now-puny Canada and Russia.

Politics always wins out, one way or the other.

Re:oblig xkcd

[Eloking]

https://xkcd.com/977/

Nice find!

But in the end, it's all relate to this : The earth is a globe, and there's no way to represent is on a 2D map without :
1-Tearing the map appart
2-Stretching the map

Personally, I prefer the 3rd option : "Put more globe in your school" like this one : http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fEqw...

Now that is awesome.

Fake news?

[the_skywise]

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.

Opposite effect of that intended

[SuperKendall]

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?

Re:Opposite effect of that intended

[Gilgaron]

I found the ideas about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond to be pretty interesting. His thesis is that flora and fauna played a large role in where civilizations rose when, and how successful they were. South America and Africa each run North/South which inhibits trade in livestock and crops.

Re:Distortion is fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems the teachers were not capable of explaining the distortion to the students using a method called 'teaching'. So, the easy solution is to replace the maps.

Why limit the solution to 2D maps on paper?

[ei4anb]

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/

Re:oblig xkcd

[saider]

Google Earth in all classrooms!

The reason Europe in the middle

[GuB-42]

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..

odd thing I've noticed

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Mercator straight lines are not great circles!

[Baloroth]

useful for navigation.

Not!

Yes. By construction, straight lines on a Mercator map have constant bearing towards magnetic north. That means if you take out your compass, face a given angle with respect to north, and follow it, you make a straight line on the Mercator map. That's extremely useful, probably one of the most useful properties a map can have for navigational purposes (unless you're really really good at doing some rather complicated coordinate transformations).

Was Boston that far behind? Or is this propaganda?

[MobyDisk]

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.

Now with more distortion

[pz]

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.

Think for a second

[argStyopa]

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.