Comment by JuniperMesos
8 hours ago
I never had the impression that the Mercator projection, or indeed any particular world map projection out of the dozens in common use, had any kind of official status that needed to be removed. It seems obvious to me that different map projections have different tradeoffs, and that any particular publisher of a world map can and does use whichever one makes sense for the information they're trying to convey.
This was also exactly what I was taught in school when I was 10 years old. We also saw examples of other maps from other parts in the world that put their location front and center.
That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.
At least they're not renaming any lakes.
or gulfs. Or states
1 reply →
I mean it also accurately depicts relative land mass sizes? For the purposes of the UN that seems fairly relevant compared to Mercator which is a good map if you're actually navigating a coast line but atrocious if you're trying to gauge how big the territory you're talking about actually is.
> I mean it also accurately depicts relative land mass sizes?
At the cost of distorting shapes and distances.
> compared to Mercator
The UN resolution compared Equal Earth to Mercator, a comparison Equal Earth easily wins in many circumstances. But the comparison should not be to Mercator, but to other widely used projections that do a better job of minimizing distortions generally, such as Winkel Tripel.
The UN resolution is explicit that Equal Earth was chosen specifically for “social justice”–type reasons.
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I assume the UN is a major publisher of maps, often featuring them on all sorts of pamphlets, websites, and if television is to be believed that backdrop for smoke filled meetings.
It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.
What was the UN’s default before?
Look up status quo bias. People are very adverse to change and worse, they're very vocal about it.