The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

sspeckx about 2 hours ago 43 commentsRead Article on not-ship.com

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Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

simonw•22 minutes ago

I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth

gumby•6 minutes ago

Very nice!

LeFantome•7 minutes ago

Time to rename Mercator the “Map of America”.

decimalenough•15 minutes ago

It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.

frmersdog•8 minutes ago

Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.

...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happen to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus

kspacewalk2•about 1 hour ago

Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.

tensor•about 1 hour ago

No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.

jsLavaGoat•34 minutes ago

"The world" is not represented by the UN General Assembly. Did you vote for your representative?

raincole•30 minutes ago

The UN does not dictate which map you or your government or your school or Google uses.

Muromec•15 minutes ago

I didn't vote for a foreign minister of my country, but his job is to represent my country, including in UN. This is fine.

mdp2021•about 1 hour ago

Somebody who does not represent anybody "agreed" - not us.

tensor•38 minutes ago

I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.

No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!

nisegami•38 minutes ago

Representing a 3D sphere-like surface on a 2d plane definitionally requires compromise.

flexagoon•43 minutes ago

Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...

Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.

poncho_romero•5 minutes ago

Why? Mercator is useful and familiar to billions of people.

mc32•21 minutes ago

I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.

Apocryphon•36 minutes ago

I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.

atoav•about 1 hour ago

Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.

rkagerer•about 1 hour ago

It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.

jsLavaGoat•35 minutes ago

80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.

AlexandrB•about 1 hour ago

What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

dgellow•about 1 hour ago

The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.

> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter

Muromec•13 minutes ago

>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.

It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.

neuronexmachina•about 1 hour ago

> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.

> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand

Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

dnautics•18 minutes ago

> many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?

jubilanti•32 minutes ago

I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.

Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.

This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.

tekla•24 minutes ago

> This has clearly influenced geopolitics

Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.

Of course they were lying the entire time.

sb057•about 1 hour ago

>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.

EA-3167•42 minutes ago

Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?

neuronexmachina•25 minutes ago

Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.

erxam•about 1 hour ago

It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.

EA-3167•42 minutes ago

That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.

erxam•36 minutes ago

The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.

frieseke•about 1 hour ago

The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.

Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.

GolfPopper•about 1 hour ago

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/977/

ButlerianJihad•40 minutes ago

Oh, it's not often we get an entire category of XKCD comics: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Bad_Map_...

I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...

lordloki•39 minutes ago

"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."

We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s

steanne•11 minutes ago

why the /s?

https://mapdesign.icaci.org/2014/02/mapcarte-38365-mcarthurs...

varispeed•38 minutes ago

Not sure why UN is taken seriously today. Isn't that a club of corrupt drunkards who meet from time to time to fart in their chairs and spout nonsense?

Muromec•8 minutes ago

Well, unfortunately it's clubs of corrupt drunkards farting in chairs all the way down to 9-member housing association. The difference is in how much power each club is allowed to have and advertise at any given moment.

pphysch•32 minutes ago

Who is taking it seriously? The unipolarists clearly don't, and the multipolarists have been busy building alternatives for the past couple decades.