>have our world maps been wrong or misleading for 500 years?<p>No, they were just used mainly for navigation. The reason why the Mercator projection was popular for so long is that its angles correspond to compass points and you navigate by a trivial algorithm:<p>1. Draw a line to your destination on the map and determine its angle with the north, say 25 degrees north-east.<p>2. Set your course at 25 degrees north-east and keep it constant. Your will arrive to your destination by a rhumb line [1], which is only slightly less efficient than a great circle.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line</a>
When you project a map, there are three properties you would like to maintain: shape (aka conformality), size (aka equal-area), and direction. But you can have at most two of these properties.<p>Mercator preserves shape and direction at the expense of size. Peters preserves size and direction at the expense of shape. Peirce Quincuncial preserves shape and size at the expense of direction. Here's a transverse Peirce Quincuncial map I generated: <a href="http://frammish.org/tpq.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://frammish.org/tpq.jpg</a><p>Many other projections try to combine these, like the Miller projection maintains direction but strikes a balance between shape and size, getting neither one right, but neither is horribly wrong either. The Winkel Tripel projection tries to balance all three attributes.
Obligatory XKCD:
<a href="http://xkcd.com/977/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/977/</a><p>I wonder if there is some sort of theorem that describes which fidelities you can get out of a flat projection of the surface of a sphere. For example, a projection could have accurate area ratios or accurately reflect point to point distances but not both.
>The Peters Projection World Map is one of the most stimulating, and controversial, images of the world. When this map was first introduced by historian and cartographer Dr. Arno Peters at a Press Conference in Germany in 1974 it generated a firestorm of debate.<p>I'm not sure any of this is really accurate. Go read the wikipedia page: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection#Controversy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection#...</a><p>tl;dr:<p>-Peters wasn't novel. An identical projection was created a century earlier (that's why it's called Gall-Peters).<p>-Peters made completely BS claims about his projection.<p>-Cartographers had already been using plenty of projections beyond Mercator for a long time and they knew very well that it had problems.<p>By the way, I'm pretty sure the xkcd about projections has a punchline and hover text that is directly related to the information above.
The peters projection doesn't solve the size problems, it just moves them around.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map</a><p>If you are interested in a size-accurate map, you can't get much better than that.
Having lived in equatorial Africa for a decade, and having spent weeks driving to cross a single given country, I always get a kick of out conversations where someone asks, "Oh, you lived in Africa--did you know So-and-so?"
Not that it is terribly relevant, but I question the authors aptitude in science journalism. I encourage anyone curious to see his articles on the vaccine/autism controversy. Oh, and he's a 9/11 truther, illuminati conspiracist, etc., etc.<p>CE sucks.
This article has been reworded by blogs since 2010 some time:<p><a href="http://calabarboy.com/2010/10/11/the-true-size-of-africa-kai-krause/" rel="nofollow">http://calabarboy.com/2010/10/11/the-true-size-of-africa-kai...</a>
Gall-Peters clearly has the best PR, since it always gets mentioned as the primary candidate for a replacement map. And while it's definitely more suitable for getting a good "feel" for the world than Mercator, the enormous shape distortions still don't make it a very good map. There are better ones out there.<p>Personally I'd prefer a map that emphasizes that the world is actually a sphere, rather than a rectangle. I also have a soft spot for Dymaxion, although I don't use Dvorak.
Rather than misleading maps, I'd say misleading title: The article asks if we've been using misleading maps for over 500 years and then presents an alternative which is just as misleading (another rectangular projection, just as Mercator).
I'm a little disappointed in HN for the fact that this is on the front page. The wikipedia article on Gall-Peters is much more accurate and informative, and even the whole (misleading) "oh look what I just found out but barely anyone else knew" thing with projections has been done before, and better (e.g., by Arno Peters himself).<p>I might take up the project of posting the relevant wikipedia links as stories, and in turn linking those in the comments of all shoddily written blog posts, in the hope of righting these wrongs.
Africa is big. The Sahara desert is also big.<p>But this whole "true size" is true in measure, but I'm not really comfortable with people using it to push their agenda<p>Yes, Africa is big, and?<p>Big countries (yes, Africa is not a country) are usually on the wrong side of the stick. Maybe the USA has the most usable land, but it's still costly for them<p>Asia is gigantic, where's its population? Concentrated into tiny spaces! Japan, Indonesia, a narrow stretch of India.
I'm confused...I thought the Robinson Projection [1] has been the standard for quite some time.<p>Obviously not the best for navigation, but considered the best compromise for viewing the entire Earth in two dimensions.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection</a>
Why does no one seem to care that the bottom 15 degrees is missing from virtually every projection? If it's just because it's un-inhabited why not cut off the top 15 degrees as well?
I have a globe, which should be the best way to represent the earth's surface. However even that is biased -- I'm fairly sure the UK is bigger than it should be.
Maybe some kind of globe like this:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_gXnjjdk4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_gXnjjdk4</a>
or
<a href="http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/globe-search/" rel="nofollow">http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/globe-search/</a>
is best?
Otherwise just buying a standard globe will do just fine.
Peter's is hardly better. It still destroys the appearance of the earth quite badly.<p>Personally I really like this one:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map</a>
It's basically a net that you can print of and fold together.
Antarctica is also the size of Europe. So what? What does geographical size have to do with anything? Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world. What does it mean?<p>It means that geographically, Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world. And not much else.
Reminds me of this mercator projection puzzle: <a href="https://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledrag.html" rel="nofollow">https://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/poly/puzzledr...</a>
I knew Africa was large. I did not know that Antarctica is larger than Europe at 5.5 million square miles (Europe is 4.0 million square miles).<p>I did not like the picture showing various countries contained within Africa. Why is Alaska not considered part of the "US"?<p>Several times while driving North through mid-western States I've been startled to realize how much land is north of the US border in Canada. I knew Canada was larger than the US, but I didn't comprehend the scale of that country.
To put this in perspective, the area of Alaska, the largest US state, is twice that of Texas - many Americans have at least a basic idea of how large Texas is, if not Alaska. The area of Africa is 18 times that of Alaska.
I've been saying this for years. The Earth is egg-shaped and fatter in the southern hemisphere, not a perfect sphere. Logic would dictate that any surface with steep mountains, continental tectonic shifts, and deep trenches is not perfectly spherical. Coincidentally, I have an uncle who was a geodecist and one of the world's GPS experts.<p>I knew college professors who believed that most map projections have a eurocentric bias, but it makes almost as much sense that creating maps and globes is easier to do if you assume the Earth is a perfect sphere.
A word of warning to visitors: the site is broken. It pops up an ad after about a minute of letting you read the content.<p>I've seen this behavior previously (it's becoming more common) and I reward it the same way each time: closing the site and putting it on my proxy's blocklist.
West Wing - Why we are changing maps?
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM</a>