The function of the Mercator map was to enable safe sailing and trade By stretching the poles, you can draw a line between any two points (any two sea ports) and the angle with respect to north will be constant This was called a rhumb line: it’s longer than the shortest line that travels a globe, but you can calculate it very easy This was very useful when it was extremely hard to calculate longitude and ships often got lost. With the Mercator projection, you can just calculate your rhumb line and, even if you get blown off course, you know roughly what angle to be traveling in, so you can find your way This is long outdated technology, but it was extremely important in its day. The new “Equal-area Projection” serves no such practical purpose. It exists to soothe neurotic liberals who are upset that Africa isn’t large enough on Mercator and that this distortion is harmful to Africa Its adoption reflects an affluent society where the underlying purpose of things is forgotten and the only function left is for objects to be symbols that signal belief (liberal beliefs)
Latest in space
@latestinspace
Sep 5
NEWS 🚨: The UN has voted 164 to 1 to adopt a new world map that shows countries at their true relative sizes, with the United States the only country voting against it Before (left) and New map (right)
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Having a better representation of reality in our maps is a good thing actually.

Sep 5, 2026 · 4:56 PM UTC

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Why is that your terminal value and not a map being beautiful? Or important? Or a signal of cooperation trade? It’s because you’re a liberal and you believe in equality
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You're just presuming things about me to convince yourself you can just dismiss people who disagree with your take as some kind of lesser. I think people just having a reality based intuitive sense of the relative size of places, is a good thing, end of. I'm not at all against artistic maps, navigation maps, etc. But the general purpose maps should serve developing a realistic sense of scale.
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But Mercator IS a better representation of reality for your day to day use. Every time you open maps on your phone you’re using a Mercator projection. Equal earth applied the same way would have you MILES off your destination.
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"Better representation of reality" No, it's functionally better at serving a specific use case, these are distinct, and it's entirely fine to use a map that does the job better when you're doing that job, but when I'm looking at a world map, I am *never* doing so for the purposes of navigation.
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What part of "you can't project 3D surfaces into 2D surfaces accurately". You still lose details, that map does not reflect reality, it makes Africa look longer then it actually is.
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You can measure the deviation of each section of the map, and determine quite accurately, which one is a better representation overall. There is no need for absolute perfection, just that one is better than the other at the particular thing it's doing, in this case, providing an intuitive sense for the relative size of places at a world scale.
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It’s a better representation of size but not shapes. Take a globe and check for yourself. Shapes are deformed. Africa is elongated. Scandinavia is pressed. There were projections with much better compromise (eg Robinson)
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Is it a better representation of reality?
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Not true. Look at, say, the London Underground map for a prime example. If it was "reality" it'd be unusable. If you want to see real view of the world, you have to have a globe. Every 2d image futzes something somewhere.
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The "new" map has another type of distortion. 2D map aren't 100% accurate
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Area is just one aspect of reality. Mercator is better at shape.
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Oh so you’re opposed to a change from a map that successfully represents one aspect of reality to a map that represents none then?
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It makes Africa look like an even bigger failure.
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it was a representation of reality, you have a round planet, the distortion was only ever near the equator
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it is not better representation if it is badly distirted and does not alow usage like navigation
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Ok but how is it *functionally* better?
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It is not a better representation of reality. It is a better representation of one aspect of reality you find important, and a worse representation of another aspect of reality. Whatever the motivation, it's a preference, not an objective superiority.
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А почему ты считаешь более точное изображение площади важнее более точного изображения углов или формы? Без искажений только глобус
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Buy a globe.
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