In before “The USA has no business criticising maps making Africa bigger as a waste of time when they just renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America and, last year, the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.” Yeah, those things are stupid. Also, I think, so is making Africa bigger.
According to the BBC, there’s no real good way to do it. I don’t get that. Can we not get relatively 2D dimensions of every nation and place them on a map? The issue here is that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, so if you flatten countries close to the Equator, or countries closer to the poles, they will not be the same “shape”. That is to say, what is the shape of a circular sticker on an orange? It’s a circle, but I mean the arc it lays against the orange. If you’ve ever tried to put a flat sticker on a mug, you know it does not evenly place. So if you magically picked a country up (say, down to sea level) and placed it elsewhere on the Earth, it would not lay flat. It would be raised in the middle, or it would be sunk a bit in the middle. Therefore, if we did what I said, you would not be able to “connect” every country. There would be gaps you could not reconcile. Therefore, you have to compromise somewhere. You don’t really have to compromise Africa much because it’s surrounded by water everywhere but Egypt, where it loosely connects to the Middle East of Eurasia. So we can “short” the Atlantic Ocean, they won’t mind. ;)
So, the issue is way more complicated than American politics or making African/people of African descent feel better. There are real physics issues around it.
Can we at least trust Google Earth (and similar virtual globes)? I think even those lie since the Earth isn’t perfectly round, but it’s probably more accurate than a flat map.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. It just boils down to how people feel about it. No one who needs maps for navigation or anything important cares about this stuff. They have their own tools and instruments which are way more accurate.
Of course, it’s fun to take pot shots at the Trump Administration for the dumb shit they do to distract people from the Trump-Epstein Files.
A roughly representative map is preferable. The Mercator projection was never good. The problem I have is that the one they’ve adopted, the equal earth projection, instead stretches the equatorial parts vertically and the polar parts horizontally. The natural earth projection is better because it reduces this distortion, including Africa.
In before “The USA has no business criticising maps making Africa bigger as a waste of time when they just renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America and, last year, the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.” Yeah, those things are stupid. Also, I think, so is making Africa bigger.
According to the BBC, there’s no real good way to do it. I don’t get that. Can we not get relatively 2D dimensions of every nation and place them on a map? The issue here is that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, so if you flatten countries close to the Equator, or countries closer to the poles, they will not be the same “shape”. That is to say, what is the shape of a circular sticker on an orange? It’s a circle, but I mean the arc it lays against the orange. If you’ve ever tried to put a flat sticker on a mug, you know it does not evenly place. So if you magically picked a country up (say, down to sea level) and placed it elsewhere on the Earth, it would not lay flat. It would be raised in the middle, or it would be sunk a bit in the middle. Therefore, if we did what I said, you would not be able to “connect” every country. There would be gaps you could not reconcile. Therefore, you have to compromise somewhere. You don’t really have to compromise Africa much because it’s surrounded by water everywhere but Egypt, where it loosely connects to the Middle East of Eurasia. So we can “short” the Atlantic Ocean, they won’t mind. ;)
So, the issue is way more complicated than American politics or making African/people of African descent feel better. There are real physics issues around it.
Can we at least trust Google Earth (and similar virtual globes)? I think even those lie since the Earth isn’t perfectly round, but it’s probably more accurate than a flat map.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. It just boils down to how people feel about it. No one who needs maps for navigation or anything important cares about this stuff. They have their own tools and instruments which are way more accurate.
Of course, it’s fun to take pot shots at the Trump Administration for the dumb shit they do to distract people from the Trump-Epstein Files.
A roughly representative map is preferable. The Mercator projection was never good. The problem I have is that the one they’ve adopted, the equal earth projection, instead stretches the equatorial parts vertically and the polar parts horizontally. The natural earth projection is better because it reduces this distortion, including Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Earth_projection