With a human face
I did not realize the distance between the US and Canada was so big.
It sucks that mercator became the standard map. I know basically nothing about maps, but i know how not-great mercator is. Of the little i know about cartography I like Winkel Tripel the best
Dln’t quote me on this, but from what I’ve heard, the Mercador projection became standard because it’s good for navigating since qit conserves angles. Draw a strait line depicting your current trajectory and another the trajectory that would get you where you want, measure the angle between them, and that’s the actual angle you need to turn.
Yeah, it’s actually a really great map for its purpose of navigation, which is a pretty damn important aspect of map usage. I’m tired of everyone shitting on it because of that scene in west wing.
It’s great for navigating at sea, but bad for looking at the world as a whole. Nowadays most people use maps for the latter; hence the complaints.
In the Internet age, I believe Mercator remains standard because it’s easy, since image buffers and UI viewports are implemented as rectangular arrays. For example, when you click on the map the pixel coordinates can be converted to (lat, long) just by scaling, without having to do complicated coordinate transformations.
What you see in stuff like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap isn’t plain Mercator, it’s a variant called “Web Mercator”
And the US DoD doesn’t like it because it introduces even more deviations than plain Mercator.
And no projection is perfect they all introduce weird things, like this equirectangular map which is not conformal or equal area.
Ah, I see you’re that kind of map enthusiast, eh?
Edit: I see you’ve already posted it yourself. Not an original bone in my body.
Mercator stans will try and convince you that Russia and Canada aren’t actually islands with thousands of miles of ocean isolating them from all their neighbours smh my head 😤
relevant map men video.
