Boston school district switches to a more accurate world map, blows kids' minds

Isn’t there a dog that the Moon Nazis left there 70 years ago that’s still up there?

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The Turtle Moves!

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I thought Cori Celesti would be taller than that…

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If you think about it hard enough, physicists who are following up the holographic universe idea are flat-earthers.

However, I suspect that the part of the flat-earther set that is in intersection with astrophysicists is almost vanishingly small, though I can’t produce evidence for this suspicion.

I once saw a cross-section of Europe which had one line to scale and the other with the vertical scale exaggerated about 10 times. The Alps are barely a ripple on the scale maps. A 40km high peak in the centre of a disc roughly, say, radius 2000km is only 1% of the horizontal axis high.

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Uh oh. This will piss off the conservatives.

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You are probably thinking of the immortalised cat, Darwin.

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Iᴛ ɪs ғᴏᴜʀ ᴇʟᴇᴘʜᴀɴᴛs, ᴀᴄᴛᴜᴀʟʟʏ. Aɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀɴᴅᴍᴀssᴇs sᴇᴇᴍ ᴏғғ.

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I know a PhD and certified Florida Man that believes that.

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Have you seen this site?

https://www.mapthematics.com/ProjectionsList.php

What I really like is the color coding that highlights the disitortions

Mercator


Note that it’s only accurate in the tropics.

Robinson

A compromise that gets much of the inhabited world correct.

Mollweide.

Two perfect poles that let england (and st helena) shine… Everything else is a compromise-- but not a serious one for most of the world. Africa isn’t slighted in the least,

Peters


What the FUCK?

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You didn’t tell us that one looked like a butt!

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I <3 the planet.

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Ha! Good to know. I always kind of feel like I’m missing out on some non-trivial element of the cultural zietgeist by not having read the Discworld books. They seem like the kind of thing I’d like, but I just never got into them. OTOH, it’s been probalby twenty years since I last tried, so maybe I should give them another shot.

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Give me some time and I’d alter it…but DAYUM I’m lazy sooo…I’ll map it to 2025.

And with love, there is strength.

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You would know. BTW, had any Near-Vimes Experiences lately?

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Well I live in New Zealand (yeah, I know, most Americans don’t really know where that is) - that projection leave me smeared around the boundary.

But more importantly it splits the Pacific in two - the Pacific is full of lots of nations, small but interconnected - any useful map has to show those nations and their connections. Almost no one lives in the Atlantic, if you’re going to split the world somewhere do it down through there

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Maps are a big deal to me. I spent a large part of my life navigating boats and ships. All different sorts of projections and datum are critical tools for the navigator. for those who don’t know, datum has more than one meaning for the cartographer. In this case, I am talking about different ways of measuring the earth’s size, which result in small but important changes in position for objects. In many cases, a chart using an odd datum might have a reef or shoal a mile or two from the position it appears at with standard datum. When we use GPS systems with sub meter accuracy, that can be a big deal.
Anyway, all those projections are tools. They all have advantages and flaws. But the source article actually paints this as part of a process to “decolonize the curriculum”. When I have heard that language used in the past, it seems to start with the sensible goal of adding non-western perspectives, but ends up pushing an explicitly political message.

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There’s a NEW Zealand now?!?

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