I feel very lucky to have grown up with a huge (~ 75 cm diameter) globe as a centerpiece in the living room; I never ended up with Mercator-derived misconceptions in the first place.
I really enjoy this! I wish it would also support cities, it would help me get a better sense of the size of a city to compare it to one I'm familiar with already. But I guess city limits are less well defined that country limits. Anyway, great project!
That site only seems lock the zoom value of the two maps together, not correct for distortions. E.g. zoom in on Svalbard on one side and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other. Svalbard appears larger despite being many times smaller. This means if you zoom into Longyearbyen it will appear several times larger than it should compared to say Kinshasa.
Longyearbyen is a pathological example but it's quite easy to end up thinking a city in the UK is ~1.75 linearly and ~3x by area compared to one on the equator using this site.
I've been using, and sharing, this site for several years. I think it's excellent. The two things I'd like to see are the provinces, at least in larger countries, and large bodies of water. I'd like to be able to drag Ontario, Lake Superior, the Caspian Sea, New South Wales, and so on, around the way you can with countries and US states.
Pretty neat.
One tip it took me a while to realize is that after you tap on a country, the compass rose (now the same color as the country) can be used to rotate it.
But why do countries rotate to the left as you drag them north and rotate to the right as you drag them south?
I think part of that is an illusion, since for something bowing upwards, the usualy anchor point of top left seems rotated clockwise.
But there is still a real rotation - look at wyoming or colorado for a perfect rectangle. My guess is the div element isn't quite centered - perhaps too much padding on the right edge, causing the center point to be off to the right. So when it bows you get the rotation bias
What a nice well made tool. I was shocked how massive Algeria is! Maybe larger than half of Europe. And Tunisia which is a tiny country in my head, seems to be not tiny at all.
It's interesting to me how the large countries are roughly similarly sized. Canada, Australia, US, Brazil, China, Russia, India are all within a factor of 2, and it shows when you drag it across eachother. India and Russia as outliers slightly.
The largest surprise for me (besides the massive size of Africa and South America of course) was that Australia has roughly the same area as the entire US. Somehow I had always imagined it smaller.
It's useful for navigation in the open ocean without satnav or even a chronometer, which is what it was designed for in the 1500s. Not for much else.
Is the use of Mercator in schools common, globally? Based on what I've read on the internet it's common in the US, but I have no idea about other countries. In Finland I think I only ever saw Robinson or Winkel-tripel type compromise projections. Mercator was maybe used as an example of how projections distort things.
It preserves angles, which is what makes it useful in navigation. Mercator is bad at relative sizes for places far apart, but when you look at a small patch shapes are less distorted. For that reason, online maps use a version of Mercator.
Wow - in my head, Australia was somehow ~20-25% the size of US (I'm from Europe) - really surprising, and shows how misleading the projection can be in this regard.
It's interesting how Russia appears to only be about twice as large as the United States or China, but on a typical map it looks at least 3-4 times larger.
If you drag something large over so it covers the south pole the shading can invert so that only the region covering the south pole is unshaded.
That's how I proved that the actual size of Australia is approximately 90% of the area of the globe. Who knew the mercator projection could be so confusing! :)
It's about half of my state in Brazil (which is one of the smallest in the country). However, I've been to Belgium many times and it feels bigger. I think the key is the population density: 388/km^2 in Belgium vs 70/km^2 here. Like, yes, it's big, but empty space is truly boring.
Wars are won with tanks^W drones, not by measuring the area in a map. Laypeople may be confused, but when a government decides to invade another country or add some economical penalty, they know the real data like real-world-surface, GDP, number of weapons, ...
You can see that any translation from 3D sphere to 2D plane will always create a tradeoff of geometry somewhere. E.g. Distorted shapes and lines, torn oceans, etc.
There's already several, Gall Peters being the most (in)famous. Other than accurately showing size, such maps are pretty useless. Mercator is actually useful for navigation because it maintains angles, all "size accurate" projections have to sacrifice that.
Nothing is "hijacked"; it just sets the hash to allow permalinks. It should probably actually load the state when pressing back (or replace the current entry instead of adding a new one). But that's just a bug and not malice, as some seem to assume.
reply