Princeton astrophysicists re-imagine world map (2021)

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/02/15/princeton-astrophysicists-re-imagine-world-map-designing-less-distorted-radically

by sorentwo • 2 years ago

28 12 2 years ago

princeton.edu

igouy• 2 years ago

“To see all of the globe, you have to rotate it; to see all of our new map, you simply have to flip it over.”

That's a way to see half of the Earth, and then separately see the other half.

dang• 2 years ago

Discussed at the time:

Princeton astrophysicists re-imagine world map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26190788 - Feb 2021 (27 comments)

NoboruWataya• 2 years ago

Surely the distortion of the perceived distance between areas just north and south of the equator is the same or greater than that between Japan and Hawaii in current maps. In fact it's very difficult to judge the relationship between the north and south in general because they are basically two separate maps.

And while I can see the appeal of centering the maps on the poles, as it is "apolitical" and probably leads to less overall distortion, it prioritises what are, for the vast majority of humans, the least relevant parts of the world, at the expense of all the other parts.

It honestly doesn't strike me as useful at all, though I appreciate that it can be academically interesting to create new map formats that satisfy some manufactured constraints.

amitparikh• 2 years ago

The "projection" can be centered on any arbitrary point, actually. See https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/planets_webgl/GottPlanets.ht...

arijun• 2 years ago

So can the Mercator projection (or any projection really). Why is the author complaining about the California-Japan distance when they can just recenter near there?

Point being, recentering is not the answer.

pmontra• 2 years ago

I feel sorry for anybody living close to the equator. At least the Mercator map chops an ocean, not land where people live (but people living on islands close to that line could have something to complain.)

ahns• 2 years ago

Huh. I wonder what the difference is between this projection and the recentered [Nicolosi projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolosi_globular_projection), which has been around for way longer.

ivan_gammel• 2 years ago

This map has major distortion in political dimension, prioritizing Global North over Global South.

To be honest, I’m not sure we need A map of the world. Several maps centered on different regions would do a better job from educational perspective, showing point of view of people living there.

pif• 2 years ago

How many times will we have to discover, again and again, that Mercator projection is really the worst possible map, apart from all the others?

absoluteunit1• 2 years ago

Aha; I knew the world was flat

Aardwolf• 2 years ago

This is cool, but the flipping-over aspect seems a bit annoying, perhaps one could draw lines connecting points of the border of the right side to corresponding points on the left side instead to not require the flipping over.

And make versions that are aligned in other directions rather than the equator perhaps

sircastor• 2 years ago

Coincidentally, yesterday I saw (again) “The West Wing” scenes[1] that express this problem (and the related social issues). It was the first learned about map projections and I think if they aren’t already an explicit topic in school, they ought to be. I find it very interesting.

[1] https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI

Princeton astrophysicists re-imagine world map (2021)

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