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.

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.

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: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.