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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'?
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?
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
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?
how about a plain old globe !?
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.
I can't find Somali on a map either.
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
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.
Good to know the Boston school system is so rolling in money they can afford to waste whatever they pay Colin Rose. Freeze their budget or cut it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
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?...
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
Not 100% accurate, Earth is not a sphere.
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Students are getting shot right outside of Boston schools but they're worried about racist maps. That's Boston.
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.
"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..
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This thing that's going on in Boston. I mean ... Really sick people ... Just totally un-American. They are trying to emphasize the importance of Africa over the US. This is exactly the kind of thing ... and the people have given me a mandate with my high popularity ... this kind of thing needs to be stopped, and we're going to stop it ... and THEY are going to pay for it." - D. "Orangutan Clown" Drumpf
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
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
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.
...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)
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 somewhat doubt it, because unless my math is off, earth shrunk to the rough size of a billard ball would have a difference in equtorial/polar diameters of almost 0.5 mm, which would produce visible wobble when rolling. Unfortunately I could not find official specifications of how a pool ball is supposed to be shaped -- since you obviously could, mind sharing the ruleset?
That said, even if you're right, your point is moot, because it doesn't change that a globe isn't 100% accurate.
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I guess we should expect so much more from it.
Have gnu, will travel.
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 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
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...
Send everyone into orbit. Preferably Earth orbit.
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 :)
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
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
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
merely those habituated into your distorted and bigoted conservative mindframe
If you can ever break free of the distortion your own religion has caused, truly you will be free to think. Thankfully I cast off religious shackles of all forms long ago.
Preach some more!
The only preaching here is you... I am pointing out rational thoughts, you are the one resorting to cursing and blaming I blaspheme against your beliefs. You say I am wrong but not in what way, a common tasting of religious nut jobs like yourself. You just say "he has sinned against my very thought, and must be purged!"
Hint: What you are looking for is called a "crusade" where you and a bunch of your other religious buddies start getting together and hurting people physically. Good luck with that! I'm sure violence is a GREAT answer to people who disagree with you.
"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
Not according to my dictionary.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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
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...