Ah, that’s exactly what it is. Had my screen turned down really low so the red lines looked black.
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In my day we didn’t have computers in the classroom, and we had actual chalkboards and cork bulletin boards. These days, there are probably computers everywhere, and not a stick of chalk in sight. I haven’t set foot in a K-12 classroom in decades, but if I did, I’d probably not even recognize it.
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That sounds heavenly. I couldn’t stand the feeling of chalk getting all up in my fingerprints. Cleaning erasers was a true punishment for me. UGH.
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Ah, that’s a different world. The one with more turtles — turtles all the way down, specifically — is planet Earth. The one with just one giant turtle is the Discworld.
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I had a chalkboard in my last house. And a friend who’s SO is a teacher had one… Expatriated… To his garage. It’s where he writes all his EE diagrams.
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Make America great again? … !
I can’t guarantee it’s like that now. I came up through a specific time and place. Montreal has changed since I lived there; I don’t know if quality of education is one of the changes.
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Surely the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is more free.
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I actually find it fascinating, even if I completely agree with you here:
As pointed out by:
Noticing how the fact that we don’t understand that the shape of the world on a map projection is fit for purpose instead of an accurate representation of it does indeed shape what we think of the world.
We don’t need to adopt a fairer map of the world, we need to stop projecting our biases onto it,
If we believe ourselves and those around us to be free from prejudice or accepting of those different from us, we can then look at the world and assume that the spaces we inhabit and the institutions we rely on, which were not built to be fair or free from prejudice, are now also free from prejudice and fair as well.
Pointing out systemic racism (even in the fringes, like insisting what maps are really trying to map) is not necessarily a condemnation of the way things are, it is a reminder that we must be able to detach our perception of a system from its real intended purpose and/or its effect on people.
TL;DR
I agree with you. It’s still interesting to note how sticking to just one imperfect, but useful, view of the world can inform our worldview.
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Somehow, I’ve gotten sucked into the rabbit-hole of flat earthers for the past couple of days. Someone had told me that the “really do believe this, it’s not a joke,” but I hadn’t quite realized how much they believe it, and how many seem to, including some national figures like pro athletes.
I think we’re entering a bizarre dark age of scientific fear. I think flat earthers are part-and-parcel with climate-change deniers and Trumpism.
And, as I realized (which of course anyone could have told me), trying to have a rational discussion with these people is pointless. They do little toy experiments, like sending up a weather balloon and taking photographs, and echo them around endlessly, while the mountains of other evidence is just conspiracy. And any time their experiments don’t work, they talk about refraction and “cones of light” in a way that makes anyone who actually knows science tear their hair out — not because they’re wrong, but by how smug they are about their scientific superiority in their dunning-kruger cocoons.
But somehow, I think people just find it comforting to think of the world as being run by a mind-bogglingly massive conspiracy, so long as it adheres to their fundamental worldview that scientists and the rest of the “elites” are evil and out to put them down.
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Me too. I have sensory issues, and I can’t stand the way chalk feels. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
That and Styrofoam, and cheap imitation felt.
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Hey, wanna head over to the white cliffs of Dover and make some art with me?
(Yet another potential cause of japhroaig’s demise: egging on Learned)
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I think if you turn the question around from “Why did Mercator create this projection?” (which anyone can explain by referring to accurate angles) to “Why did this navigation-centric projection become the dominant projection in the world?” you can more accurately describe the Mercator-bashers’ arguments.
In each decision to adopt the map in a book or a classroom, someone was picking it based on “this is the map that best represents the world.” Obviously, as the Mercator projection grew in popularity, this was self-reinforcing, but the genesis of this decision is people looking at the map and concluding that it looks “right.” Now, the only way it can look “right” is if you ignore how small Africa and South America look, and how distorted the far North looks. Indeed, it mostly looks “right” if your eye is drawn to the US and Europe.
I think this is the crux of the argument: that this map gets used because it looks “right” to eurocentric eyes, and then this reinforces the image that eurocentric eyes have of the world.
(All that said, Gall Peters looks wrong because its large shapes are horribly wrong, as anyone who has a globe knows.)
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Back on topic–that is one reason why I unironically like dymaxion. It fails in some fundamental ways, but can be used to derive truth better than just about any other projection.
However it doesn’t hand you the truth. You get to figure that part out yourself.
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Teacher: Wait until you see this new map, kids! It’s going to blow your minds!
Kids: Meh.
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I can only speak to the classrooms that I’ve been in; but, while whiteboards appear to have massacred chalkboards pretty much across the board(I’d say deservedly); tech can still be patchy; and is often clearly bolted onto the prior generation of infrastructure with greater or lesser elegance.
And, honestly, partial adoption is about all it deserves. There are a lot of cool things that you simply can’t do without some tech; but unless you plan on doing those, it’s easy to end up with a ~$1000 computer(probably a bit more if you use laptops, a bit less if you use desktops; but remember that sticker price doesn’t include support costs), driving a ~$1000 projector that eats $300 bulbs at terribly inconvenient times, throwing an image onto a ~$2500-ish touch-sensitive board; all to provide a slightly laggy simulation of somebody using a dry erase marker on a whiteboard; or to spare the class the horror of ‘slide decks’ that involve actual slides or prints onto transparency stock and an overhead projector.
It’s much like PC and/or tablet’s seemingly endless quest to catch up with the humble cheapo legal pad as a notetaking instrument. The computer has acquired a great many other capabilities over the years; but when it comes to that purpose even fairly top-shelf Wacom hardware, backed by ample CPU and RAM and carefully pruned software, just about manages to be ‘adequate’.
(Now, speaking of ‘cool things you simply can’t do without the tech’, perhaps my favorite feature of Google Earth is the fact that, while it lacks the sheer power of some of the old school and/or expensive and arcane professional grade GIS packages, it is free, close to drool-proof; and can get gorgeous-looking GIS visualizations with surprisingly minimal skill or effort. Various scientists and research groups often throw up a KML/KMZ file in addition to their ‘official’ databases and georectified TIFFs, if they are interested in public outreach, so you can get easy access to data that would otherwise require actually knowing what you are doing; or just settling for a summary and a couple of figures grabbed from the paper, all overlaid on the (pretty good, very good for what you pay) Google Earth default imagery.
If you want to make your own fun, the use of KML is handy because it allows you to take essentially whatever data sources you have; and manipulate them with whatever tools/languages/etc. you prefer, so long as it supports spitting a suitably formatted KML file onto an HTTP server(you are supposed to treat this as an exercise in XML generation; it will technically work if you just string-bodge it correctly, possibly with a couple of points of sanity loss). Google Earth has explicit support for HTTP resources; including expiring and refreshing them, so, despite KML being (surprise, surprise) just a markup language, you can produce KML files that, effectively incorporate whatever server-side programs and data sources you want to visualize, do assorted data munging, math, and so on.
The GUI-provided tools aren’t entirely useless, by any means; and my experience has been that teachers who care can pick them up pretty readily; the ones who you’d expect to discover constructing Access DB applications and Office Macros can definitely put together their own KML files; and the biggest obstacle to doing fancy-dynamic stuff is often the fact that Google Earth is not lax about MIME types, and a lot of common ‘free’ web hosting options don’t let you specify MIME types; and since KML files aren’t some kind of media, will usually just slap whatever default they use for web pages on them and expect it to work; which cuts down on your cheap options(incidentally, Amazon S3 doesn’t have this limitation; and is either free-as-in-demo or pretty damn cheap for delivering small files, I found this useful on some occasions); and most environments…become displeased…if random user workstations are mysteriously running HTTP servers.
Anyone who dismisses the value of having proper GIS expertise available(as many colleges and universities do; to assist researchers who have geographic problems; but don’t necessarily even know how much they don’t know) is a fool; but anyone who expects your standard K-12 school system to have a GIS guru on tap when they are probably struggling to keep class sizes in check and save the arts curriculum is…naive…so Earth’s rather user friendly capabilities tend to do you a lot more good than the professional expertise and tools you can’t afford will.)
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We definitely had more ‘social studies’ or ‘history’ than we did ‘geography’(though I do remember one course explicitly labelled ‘geography’, whose only real excursion into ‘what humans do’ was when it came time to talk about how those political boundaries get made and moved); but (perhaps I was just lucky) the teachers usually managed to squeeze in some geography because what people do and how they live is pretty much inseparable from what they live on and what resources they have; so talking about ‘social studies’ without talking about geography has a habit of reducing the subject to a bunch of comparatively sterile trivia about which group adopted what colorful, traditional, funny hats; but without any exploration of why.
Something like, say, talking about ancient Egyptian and then moving on to the Sumerians and their assorted successors; without mentioning the differences between living on the Nile and living on the Tigris and/or Euphrates isn’t impossible; but it misses so much that it makes the ‘let’s play physics-without-calc’ game look downright sane.
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Hey, dude, careful down how far down that rabbit hole you go; you might fall out of the other side!
Of all the “theories”, Flat Earth seems the most nonsensical; because there doesn’t seem to be any advantage in THEM lying about the shape of the world (THEM being the vast, multi-dimensional, trans-chronal Illuminati).
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Styrofoam. My teeth are already on edge.
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