this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Funny: Home of the Haha

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Isn't there a flat map where the actual scale is kept intact? That fucker looks so weird when you've been taught the other one your whole life. It's like planetary dysmorphia.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fascinating, thanks for sharing!

Australia and China are absolutely massive, wow. They look deceptively small on most maps 🤯

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is what us Aussies have been trying to say! We're not that much smaller than the contiguous USA. Yet so often online people act like we're this tiny island. It's just our population that's tiny by comparison.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm from the US, and I've always pictured Australia as a place nearly the land area of the lower 48 states, with people along the coasts and one city right in the middle.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

In the US, we assume the difference in population is due to attrition due to dropbear attacks. We're not entirely sure where we got that information, but it seemed pretty reliable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That's a cool site, thank you for sharing it!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No, it's not possible to take a 3D surface and to transpose it onto a 2D plane without any distortion.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is true. There are some projections that show area more accurately, or shape of landmasses, etc.

For example:

Many map projections do one thing well at the cost of sacrificing others. For example, the popular Mercator projection (which you'll see in many US schools and textbooks) is well suited for marine navigation but is exceptionally distorted the closer you get to the poles.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I kinda like how the Kavrayskiy VII projection looks. It appears to preserve both the area and the shape fairly well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

this kind of projection is my favourite, it just looks like a map that belongs on a wall

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

is well suited for marine navigation but is exceptionally distorted the closer you get to the poles.

Which makes perfect sense for its use case - navigating from Belgium, Portugal and Spain to Africa, India and Central and South America.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can easily do it without distortion. The issue is continuity. You'd have to make cuts and effectively unwraped the globe like you would a 3D sphere. Some countries might literally be cut in half, but it would at least be accurate

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There will still be distortion, just less. The more cuts, the less distortion. But you can't make an unwrapped sphere lay perfectly flat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Erm, yes you can, just run it through the infinite-cuts device!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Or without chopping it up in an odd way rather than a rectangle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My fucking..

UV MAPS

AGGGGGHHHHH

[–] Honytawk 8 points 1 year ago

There are many different world maps, and some have an intact scale. But they lack in other ways.

Map Men has a good video about it:

https://piped.video/watch?v=jtBV3GgQLg8

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

No, but there are several better projections. The Mercator is a nautical chart, it was never intended to be used as a general purpose map of the world but for some reason it's used that way.