Originally published at: The Decolonial Atlas | Boing Boing
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not in any way accurate
I know what you mean, but if you’re sailing across an ocean Mercator maps are very accurate. It’s just very few people are actually doing that, and if they are they’re probably using GPS and all kinds of nav systems too.
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The evil Mercator projection!!!11!
Or you could just, you know, look at the globe that pretty much every elementary school classroom has.
I also found it interesting when I lived in East Asia for a while that all their maps are usually split across the Atlantic Ocean, in order to keep their region in the center of the map. China is the Middle Kingdom, after all.
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I went to a Lycée Français in New York, part of the international Lycée system. I remember in fifth grade, we had a geography textbook that began with two 2-page spreads. The first showed a simple world map, with the Americas on the left, Europe in the middle, Asia on the right. All land was green, water blue… but France red. The caption was something like, as shown, France is in the center of the world.
The second spread showed an image of the United Kingdom, France and Spain. The caption said, Note France’s harmonious shape, it is not all choppy (accidenté) like Britain, or a simple square like Spain.
I couldn’t believe it. So weird. But the French do love the shape of their country; the sobriquet for France in the French press is “l’hexagone”.
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I know, that’s such an odd thing to say. That’s like criticizing a globe of the Earth for being unrealistically little. When I took geography, the first thing we talked about was the compromises necessary to get a map of a 3-dimensional object onto a 2-dimensional page.
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Did nobody else have a globe when they were kids?
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But the Gall Peters projection has the advantage of interfering with these sorts of comparisons.
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I absolutely love that scene. Any time there’s a cartography topic on here, that’s my go-to.
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Interesting geographical factette.
Because of France d’Outre-Mer, France is the country with the most time zones in the World (12), ranging from UTC -10 in Tahiti to UTC +12 in Wallis and Futuna.
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Ah yes. The
Organization of
Cartographers for
Social
Equality,
Not to confused with the
Organization for
Security and
Cooperation in
Europe.
No, I did not, as every map out side the states has 0 in the middle and the UK/Europe in the middle of the map…
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Nobody else has got there first?
OK, I guess I’ll have to post it again.
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