Mildly Interesting

What we had in school in the U.S.

The Robinson projection:

What many U.S. texts moved to after I left school.

The Winkel Triple Projection:

Apparently the Mercador map is what digital maps seem to use because the lines are 90 degrees so it makes it easier.

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.

Well, NATO isn't about legislation so much as mutual defense. And the UN's resolutions have as much impact as individual countries permit, in many cases.

It's often said that the real point of the UN and the security council veto power was to offer the world's most powerful nations a way to come to a more permanent table and disagree, instead of war being the default threat.

"radical" lost all meaning in the US

I saw the US was against it an thought it had to be smth like this. Only americans can look at a problem like "you can't project a 3D sphere onto a 2D plane" and think "waow this is a little too political for me" (I know I'm oversimplifying but u get the gist)

Made out of "gold" and sold to the highest bidders!

Literally thinking the same thing

Their stated reason boils down to "New map is woke".

I hate this timeline.

They wanted to rename Africa to New America.

And of course, nobody is surprised.

Lmao the fucking irony:

The US, which voted against the resolution, slammed the text as an ideological exercise that it said undermined the UN’s credibility.

“This initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions,” said Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN. “The United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to.”

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.

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.