The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

AlexandrB

What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically. My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

rkagerer

It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.

kspacewalk2

Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.

GolfPopper

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/

lordloki

"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south." We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s

jsLavaGoat

80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.

simonw

I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth

decimalenough

It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.

frmersdog

Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels. ...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus

LeFantome

Time to rename Mercator the “Map of America”.

samizdis

For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires. [0] https://www.mapfight.xyz/

JdeBP

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro ), and it does not. And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion. Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica. Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:

xyzelement

As the article says, all protections have some distortions and it's just a matter of which ones you chose. It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant. On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant. It doesn't shock me that the US voted against it. I am surprised that others voted for it, and diminished themselves.

qwerty_clicks

and trump pooped his pants over it

scotty79

Since we are moving away from print and towards screens, shouldn't we be just using actual globes?

bawolff

I feel like people are making more of a fuss about this then it is. The UNGA isn't a body that controls what maps its member states use. They can make the recommendation of course, but it has yet to be seen if anyone follows it.

maxglute

Now rotate it 90 degrees like T and O map.

theanonymousone

I came across AuthaGraph projection some time ago and got hooked to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection A version of it including political borders my desktop wallpaper for a long time, until I decided to not change default wallpaper on my new devices anymore.

alehlopeh

Calling it Equal Earth was a bad move. The word “equal” has tons of baggage. Why not call it something less incendiary like Actual Earth or something? What ever happened to being pragmatic?

emmelaich

Mercator is fine. Or if you want something flat use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection . Or buy a globe FFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections