Globes have to be too large for everyone to be able to see detail, take up huge amounts of space when not in use, and cost more than a rollup map. Projectors still aren’t in every classroom either, though they kind of should be basic equipment at this point.
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What I really want to see is more upside down or east side up maps. I think that the idea of North being on “top” and South being “bottom” and west being “left” is something students should experiment with more. The relativity of direction is important in the sciences as well.
I bet you there’s an app somewhere that let’s you morph from various projections to the others.
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Any idea what the justification is for compressing the 10-30 degree latitudes? Seems random and maybe only serves to make the US and Europe look bigger.
Is it, though? Africa is 11.73 million mi², while Eurasia is 21.14 million mi².
Still, American kids need it drilled in their heads that the United States isn’t all that big on a global scale.
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Hey, Sokal never promised that ‘emancipatory mathematics’ would be simple, elegant, or well behaved, now did he?
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I’ve seen this image on some ridiculous flat-earth video. I’ve never seen the image of the Earth on the right anywhere else. Some idiot just distorted it in photoshop, and then claimed that “NASA” did it.
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I searched for flat earth images and then decided to post that one instead.
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I’m not sure what compression you’re referring to. Do you mean the red lines that are between 20º and 30º? They do look like they’re black latitudinal lines, but they’re just showing the tropics of cancer and capricorn at 23.5º.
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Would you say it robs Peters, to pay Gall?
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West Virginia contains counties called “Mingo” and “Monongolia”; was it settled by cast of Flash Gordon?
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Came here for this. Was not disappointed. 
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all these West Wing videos just make me depressed.
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TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!
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Math. It all has to do with math.
The Winkel III projection is the average of the Aitoff projection with an equidistant cylindrical projection, with standard parallels at +/- arccos (2/pi). The choice of standard parallel determines how “tall” the map is, and I’m guessing that this compresses the grid at around the +/- 30 degrees
http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/CartHow/HowAiHaW3/howAiHaW3.html
but this is new to me.
Also, there are formulas that allow you to calculate map distortion. Most of those formulas privilege land masses over oceans.
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Get ready for the Republican take on this: un-American, unpatriotic, and (huh?) inaccurate.
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