Even Israel voted differently to the US, that's way funnier than it should be
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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I'm sure that Google will quickly change their map projections from Pseudo-Mercator to Equal Earth projection as quickly as they changed the names of the bodies of water because President orange cheeto said so... right?... Riiiight?
Web Mercator is a special kind of abomination, even down to the way the map is cropped to be exactly square. But it is probably the most suitable for navigation, as Mercator itself was designed specifically for it.
Buildings, streets and map features would be more distorted under Equal Earth projection than they already are with Web Mercator. Web Mercator also has the benefit that the cardinal directions are always straight respective to the XY grid, even though the Y direction is non linear.
There is no perfect way of flattening a 3D spheroid into a 2D map, sadly.
It would be funny if they built their entire system on one projection.
The United States cast the sole vote against, dismissing the initiative as part of a “radical ideological project.”
Did the US vote no, because they are smaller on new maps?
Their stated reason boils down to "New map is woke".
I hate this timeline.
Or because China looks bigger?
As I heard it, Africa is smaller on map than it should be. "It would be woke to fix that"
the UN, fighting the important fights /s
The fuck? Why wouldn't the US want the actual sizes. Wouldn't having geographically correct maps help the planet and the people, oh wait.... The US government hates that kind of shit
I understand the intention behind using equal earth projection, but personally I still find the Robinson projection more pleasant to look at. Or, of course, the wonderful Waterman Butterfly projection.
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The Robinon projection makes Canada look nearly smaller than Australia.
Maybe the US has a broken voting button, they would want to click "yes", but it ends up as "no" every time.
/s
They probably tried to mail in their vote, but it got stuck at USPS because of a botched bar code.
They, like clockwork, vote against everything. They were one of maybe 3 countries that voted no that water is a human right.
They're just a contrarian nation.
Why the us voted against? In the new map they look bigger than Canada, it should appease the baby in command.
They don't want Trump to see how small Greenland actually is. I think he reckons it's about half the size of the United States because he's an idiot. Not that this map projection is at all new, or has been a secret or anything, but trump isn't exactly the investigating type and so he probably hasn't seen it before, but if the information is shoved in his face he might become upset.
WOW. I did NOT know Africa was so long, America so small, and India so thin...
Every projection deforms either size ot shape. The projection that this resolution proposes stretches everything vertically (but preserves the sizes). You can see it by looking at intersections between meridians and circles. The spaces between them are supposed to be closer to squares.
India used to be a long thin Island and then it smashed into the rest of the continent to the North and sort of smushed out on the northern's edge. Eventually it will be completely flattened against the uppercontinent.
I mean, the mercator map was meant for ship navigation, not as a geopolitical bat.
Exactly, which is why it really grinds my gears when people try to present the map as intentionally amplifying some countries at the expense of others. That's not the point, it's just a side effect of inventing the first map that could actually be used for long-distance navigation.
For the UN it makes complete sense to use a different projection.
How does an inaccurate map work in favor of long distance navigation? Genuinely curious because I fail to see any benefit.
The only advantage I see is you can read all the small countries on the map, which you may not be able to on more realistic maps.
The maps were very accurate in terms of latitude (north/south position) which meant ships could find a particular port or harbor even if they had only a rough idea of their longitude (east/west position) by sailing along the latitude lines until they hit land. How big it made a particular piece of land look was irrelevant.
It's not well known, but maps started to become super-accurate in terms of latitude as well in the 1670s or thereabouts. Astronomers had observed that Jupiter had eclipses of its moons about a thousand times a year, and thanks to Isaac Newton and others they were able to predict the exact times (in Greenwich England) of these eclipses a few years in advance and publish them. Observers around the world with good telescopes could view these eclipses and note the time differences between their observations and the published Greenwich times and use this to precisely calculate their latitude. It was not really possible to do this reliably onboard a sailing ship (although many attempts were made) so this led to accurate maps but still not fully accurate navigation until the much later perfection of ship's clocks.
The other thing is on the Mercator, if you measure from point A to point B, and it gives you a compass heading, this is the correct compass heading to use to navigate to point B from point A. This is not true unless a map is designed for this purpose.
It won't necessarily be the shortest distance -- to plot that out, it is best to use a globe and chart the arc of a great circle path, which is a straight line on the curved surface of the earth. But that path will have the compass changing all the time.
If you are navigating by compass, which ships and airplanes had to do more often way back when, the mercator was great.
Posting for the benefit of @AAA@feddit.org and anyone else who didn't know.
Or everyone can just do their own projection where their house is the centre of the Earth.
i would've thought russia would be the one against it
Russia didn't use Mercator in textbooks even in Soviet times. As well many other countries I suspect (IDK about USA), it doesn't require a great mind to see how flawed is it.
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