I distinctly remember Goode-Homolosine in school. At the time, I found it odd because of the gaps, but it does immediately make it clear how it’s distorted, unlike Mercator and Gall-Peters, which have a tendency to normalize their distorted view on the world.
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Not “on maps”, but “on Mercator”. Mercator is a stupid projection to use as a general purpose overview of the world, but so is Gall-Peters, because it distorts just as badly, just on a different property. Gall-Peters only really shows Europe and the US correctly proportioned, and stretches and squashes everything north and south of that.
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I need to quote some bits so they don’t get lost in the thread:
THIS. Whenever I am in a hurry, which is basically every time I need to do something GIS-related, I nowadays first ask myself if I can do it faster using GE at least for a bit of the way.
I’ll give you an example: I have had a supporting job for a biogeographical meta-analysis. We pulled much information out of published sources and grey literature, and besides the data, we needed extent and grain of the studies in question. The fastest way to do this was often to grab a map out of the source, zoom to the area in question in Google Earth (Pro), drag the image into GE, “georeference” it there, export the KML file to ArcGIS and create the polygon you needed.
Hell, sadly no. “Often” is highly overstating it in all fields of biology I am familiar with. And even if they do provide geographical databases and maps, the metadata is often incomplete, or completely missing.
Considering maps in publications, these often don’t even include the scale, not even a bar scale. It is near to impossible to guess from most maps if they are projected, and it is a true pain in the arse to do proper georeferencing with them. See above: enter GE.
THIS, a thousand times this. It seems to catch on, however. More or less. Over here, it’s often a matter of funding: there are simply no positions which a properly educated GIS specialists could fill in the university system. Those jobs are, however, created in research centres universities are involved in, or cooperate with.
Last not least, knowing how much I don’t know:
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Not sure why this focus on land mass, relative position, lat/long, etc. let’s focus on the stuff that really matters;
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I can’t believe that is Hawai’i scaled up…
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Wait, is it Zea -land or Zeal- and? If so, who or what are these Zea? I get that they’re zealous, but what else? They just kind of left that ‘and’ hanging.
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Oblig. xkcd:
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New Zealand is named after Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands. Zeeland means sea land.
Apparently, Australia was once “New Holland”, after another netherlander province.
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Thank you for answering earnestly. I thought my post was silly enough to be recognized as a joke; I’m 0-2 today so i think I’ll give it a break. 
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I don’t know why but I just want to sing “ZEAL AND CRUMPETS! ZEAL AND CRUMPETS! ZEALNCRUMPETS! ZEALNCRUMPETS! ZEEEEEAAALLLL AND CRUUUUUMMMMMMPEEEEEETS” to the tune of “Hallelujah”
I don’t even know if they have crumpets in ZealLand.
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I wonder how many people tried to figure out how Leonard Cohen’s song scans with your words before realizing you meant the other Hallelujah?
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At the very least, one.
pat pat
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It still works, just be less emphatic and more maudlin:
Zeal and crumpets, zeal and crumpets…
Zeal and crumpets, zeal and crumpets…
Zeal and crumpets, zeal and crumpets…
Zeal and cruuuuu… uuuuu… uuuumpets.
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Because it preserves angles, the Mercator projection also preserves shapes. Humans are generally pretty good at recognizing shapes but bad at estimating areas. As a result, the Mercator is going to look more like what you see on a globe at first glance than most other quadrangular projections.
The two biggest applications for maps, both now and in the past, have been navigation and land surveying. And only the former has any use for maps of large areas of the world, which meant that large scale maps of the world have long been dominated by navigation-centric projections… like the Mercator.
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New Zealand is fake news. That’s why many maps don’t have it.
For those not familiar with the meme:
(Looks like @wisconsinplatt beat me to it. Oh well.)
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I didn’t feel that way at all. Depicted as an eccentric fringe group, sure. But CJ and Josh both seemed like their minds were blown by what was being presented. While it was meant to be humorous, I never felt it to be mean spirited.
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That’s what THEY want you to think!
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If you mean the one from Handel’s Messiah, that one is called the “Hallelujah Chorus,” not just “Hallelujah.”
</pedant>
If not, I don’t know what you’re referring to; Leonard Cohen was the one that I first thought of.
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blink
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I’m interpreting that “blink” to mean, “I want another xkcd map projection,” which I am happy to supply.
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