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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/
to lay the reasoning on "fake news" sounds stupid.
https://xkcd.com/977/
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.
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.
We learned about maps and their inherent distortions in fucking _middle_ school, again in high school. Referenced the globes sitting in every classroom.
The globes have been removed because the other shapes objected to the privileged position of circles and spheres. In their place will be a diversity of shapes with the exception of spheres which have also been blamed for keeping down Africa and South America. The only spheres that are now allowed are other shapes that have had the corners chipped away to now be spheres as they always felt that they were spheres on the inside.
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
If anything, this change draws more attention to the "distortion fact" and may ultimately reduce misconceptions going both ways. Good thing right?
Is it really PC? Or just "stuff that's different than you wish it to be"?
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 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
http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjInt/projInt.html has some examples of this, looks odd and tends to split countries into pieces when flattened out.
Anything looks distorted when flattened out from a globe, and a globe would be the best thing to use, but having one for each desk for kids to measure and plot on is infeasible. A single flat projection like Gall-Peters is more useful, but the level of distortion is more jarring than some others.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
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
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
No flat map of the world is perfectly accurate. But some are more accurate than others.
They're all a compromise. The best you can say about any of them is that it's more accurate in an aspect you just happen to care about.
they very rarely have the equator in the middle.
That's not the projection's fault, though. That's the mapmaker's flawed decision. My Mercator map in my school atlas was symmetrical.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes it is. The PC red flags are all there and quite blatant.
eg:
1. abuse of the word 'imperialist'
The result goes a long way to rewriting the historical and sociopolitical message of the Mercator map, which exaggerates the size of imperialist powers.
2. use of the word 'decolonize'
“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.
The 'journalist' makes it clear (and supports the fact that) they don't want to replace Mercator because there's a better projection. They want to replace it for ideological reasons.
3. Most of the article rambles on about social justice instead of geography or cartography.
It is distorted differently, not less.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
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.
The only spheres that are now allowed are other shapes that have had the corners chipped away to now be spheres as they always felt that they were spheres on the inside.
Are you sure? I thought apple had a patent on that.
2. They were, or should have been had they been paying attention, taught about projections in geography class
But they weren't, or didn't; so we have to deal with reality. Reality says people don't understand map projections, even though they were supposed to learn about them. So the choice is to continue trying the same thing, over and over, again, or try something new.
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.