this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Whatever happened to that wavy "W/M" looking one I remember seeing on some news stations when I was younger?
Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.
And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.
The reason it's Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn't stray too far East or West will be very accurate.
Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.
Russia 😂
Ragebait
Tbh any discussion of Mercator is ragebait enough. (There's no better choice for slippy maps btw)
Maybe show this to taco trump and he'll realize Greenland is small and level it be.
level it
INSTRUCTIONS UNCLEAR, ICBM SEQUENCE INITIATED
☢️🚀⤵️💥🌇
(You made a fatal spelling mistake, you killed Greenland, its all your fault!)
Instructions nuclear
This is why Trump wants Greenland so bad. He sees it, and says "It's big, I want it. Get it for me!" and gets all Veruca Salt about it.
All because he doesn't understand what a Mercator Projection is, on account of he beat up some nerd to do his homework that day, like every day.
A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.
Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump's legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that's all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that's his entire ethical framework.
What does Miller want from it? No idea, he's utterly, inhumanly insane. He's just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.
The Dems need to make a major case out of PeeWee Himmler for the Midterms. Expose him, and add him to the list of horrors that we are running against.
wormtongued
I don't want people associating Stephen Miller with a Brad Dourif character.
Mr. Dourif is a saint, and mensch, and doesn't deserve that smoke.
The good news is Dourif is such a good actor and played such an iconic character in that role, that I doubt anyone is going to connect him to the apt-term that is already spreading through public lexicon.
I need a Mercator Projection in my pants.
That close to your equator, wouldn't it have the opposite of the intended effect?
I only know that it helicopters in the opposite direction when you cross the equator.
Anyone know of a 2D map print of true size? All I've found print wise is Mercator or other such variations.
Mathematically impossible, but you could try an Equal Area projection.
Equal area projections usually preserve straight and perpendicular meridians and parallels. That's neutral but then there's the political decision of what latitude gets the correct aspect ratio. And Gall-Peters is not anti-colonialist if representing Africa correctly was your goal.
Essentially this. A true sized projection, it can be in any "cut" of the globe as long as all the continents are true to size.
Let me know if I understand correctly. You want a true to life sized map of earth? 😳
They want a 2d map of earth but with every continent to true size at scale, rather than Mercator projection where the northern hemisphere is expanded to increase their importance over the southern hemisphere.
That's not why Mercator exists
Exactl, this.
Mercator wasn’t created in order to increase importance of the northern hemisphere, but to allow for directional rhumb lines to be drawn for shipping. For its intended purpose of navigation, it does an excellent job.
It may not be the intended purpose but I certainly does change how the world is seen by everyone using it to warp the mind's eye to how the world actually physically is.
Edit: Does it do an excellent job for navigational purposes if you are shipping from Japan to Brazil or it it only excellent for shipping from the northern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere?
I don't know what you mean by "other such variations", but maybe you are looking for a map with something like the Mollweide projection? That's a bit of distortion in shape but trying to keep areas real.
No, because Africa is larger than Asia, and this shows Asia as massive.
You may want to double check that, or you probably will need an imaginary map.
Africa is fucking vast! I always knew that,but looking at mercator maps puts it in perspective. You could comfortably fit Russia into it, the worlds largest country by are 😳
over compensation, much like americans using monster trucks
I'll add that we use the mercator projection because it preserves shapes but not scale. There's other projections that preserve scale but not shapes.
But how will we ever know who the anonymous "West" is?
Only the Mathematics and Cartographer classes, or the most elite Historians shall be able to decipher such knowledge.
None of those preserve the shape of Antarctica!
Not to start any shit, but the Robinson Projection looks pretty nice.
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