Well, I tend to think the moon is solid as is the Earth. What amazes me about the moon and Earth though is that how it’s tidally locked so that it always faces us. This unique circumstance of magnetic field, moon, Sun… it’s really amazing that life flourishes as it does. I mean, we need more than water – we need protection. Oh, and the asteroid field too.. stops baddies from getting in. The outer planets… I don’t think life is uniquely here necessarily but I’m just glad to be here on this planet at this point in history. Life might just be a lucky happenstance.
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I can’t wait. I always feel like I’m living in the past, just waiting for the world to catch up but I’m enjoying the ride!
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I’ve made predictions as a kid that I’ve watched come true through the years. It’s all in the realm of technology, which I always cared about more that politics. Still, we’re very far behind from where we could be. So much is possible but we get stuck on profit over progress
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Ah nash! Brilliant dude. Just read the article – marvelous. Reminds me of some of the work done with manifolds and toruses (tori?) – but way more awesome.
I suppose what I mean is 3D -> 2D in a manner comprehensible to a species which views the world using curvilinear vision…. but Nash’s work is astounding… all of it really.
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I like that map as well. I think what always bothered me was the day I discovered that England wasn’t “straight across” from New Jersey where I grew up. All the maps I ever saw made it look like England was straight across. I was shocked to find out just how far north it was.
That was a long time ago now, but it still bothers me that I was taught wrong.
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Growing up in the USA, Arctic circle always = freezing cold. But while they taught us about warm sea currents and England, because the maps looked like they were at the same lattitude, the importance of the warm sea water never clicked in.
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I used to hate the NJ stereotypes. I lived two towns away from Newark and it was a great place to grow up.
We always blamed the smells on the highways because they were on the way to NYC. Of course, they probably blamed NJ.
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Left in 2002. Roselle Park. Used the Raritan Valley line to get to everyplace I wanted to go and I knew the bus system by heart.
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The OP is equivalent to saying, “If the world was only populated by women, there’d be no war”, which is also BS. War is a complicated affair with no singular cause.
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It’s not a pretty map at all. But that’s what’s interesting about it: It shows how we’ve been trained on a more or less singular view of the Earth and deviations of it cause an immediate reaction. Yet, if we were educated on the usefulness of various map projections… or better still trained from the start on globes and ditch the wall maps in schools and textbooks, we might have a better notion as to relative size and distance of things.
I was irritated the my ne’s textbooks contained the same old map I learned, with the USA at the center and Asia cut in half. It’s such a part of culture that we become passionate about it.
Then again, maps have always been political things.
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Oh of course. But the issues with it have been raised for at least three generations now, at least since the early 1970s with Peters and caused a ruckus… which is what he wanted.
A few adopted his map, a group of cartographers decided to reject ALL flat maps because of it… definitely stirred up something.
Yet, the textbooks carry on the same. It’s like how we continue to teach Mendel the same way, introducing errors early on that don’t get corrected when they get to DNA. But I could rant about what education does wrong for hours.
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Post secondary, sure. But it’s the primary schools I’m thinking about. That’s when the mistakes get set and fixed. I was in my late teens in the 1980s when I discovered, on my own, that England was NOT straight across from New Jersey but much further north and that the temperature being similar is due to sea currents being warm.
It really bothered me. Even when I moved to Florida 14 years ago, when I looked to see what was laterally across, ,the old mistake I was taught young reasserted itself and I was again surprised what lay on the other continents across.
I can’t see any defensible position for it remaining ubiquitous.
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Agreed. As far as the map in the OP goes, i think, as a basic pedagogical tool, the Galls-Peters has the best combination of simplicity and accuracy. The distortions are annoying to us, but things like relative size and relative spacing is more accurate. I don’t see schools discontinuing textbooks and wall maps anytime soon. Some groups have adopted this projection for wide use already, although when I’d see it as a kid, I’d wonder, “Why are they using this weird stretchy map?” Oh well. Like I said, I could complain about education for hours. tongue emoticon
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True, but it’s less wrong in a number of ways which would make it a good pedagogical tool, as schools will likely continue to insist on textbooks and wall maps forevermore.
The technological revolution is always slow to hit the schools. They’re still in 19th century in most ways.
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I know it’s not a conspiracy. I just can’t see any defensible position to continuing mercator projection.
We put the US in the center, split Asia in half. England looks like it’s straight across from New Jersey.
We went over map projections of course but the geographical mistakes introduced by the mercator projection stick for a lifetime.
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I know why we use it. When we’re studying the USA, the mercator projection is fine, as long as the rest of the world is cut off.
Well, if nothing else, you’ve helped prove to me why the mercator will likely continue being used forevermore as the main tool for showing all of the continents.. I’m not saying this is “The Map” but there’s a good reason why a number of countries and International organizations use this map instead of the Mercator: it’s more accurate from a global perspective even if it’s less pretty.
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UNESCO, world council of churches and the british school system use this particular map because it has more accurate relative sizing.
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If you’re on a ship navigating, then the Mercator is certainly a better choice.
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Hideously expensive is erroneous. Textbooks are replaced yearly due to the industry…. which is a whole other thing.
What prompted this?
Despite having access to a globe, the relative locations and sizes of the continents mapped in my head were wrong. Set young by the standard map.
How stupid in my late teens I felt to discover England wasn’t across from NJ? I traced it on a globe once, the finger didn’t go where all the school maps showed me it would.
Pissed me off.
Or even now, Americans are shocked to discover that all of these countries fit inside of the African continent.
They shouldn’t be shocked. Why are they shocked? Because they learned it wrong. We all learned it wrong.
I”m not saying “this map” is necessarily ‘the answer’. I’m saying that, like Mendel continuing to be taught before DNA, setting heritability mistakes in kids’ minds that DON’T disappear when DNA is taught… once you set a mistake in mind for ‘simplicity’ of pedagogy, you can’t easily erase it later on.
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I hated geography. It’s not stupidity. History and geography were my least favorite subjects in school. AS an adult, I learned to love them. In school though, hated them. I was more a math/english head,
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There ya go. For me, I’d teach things via analogies, have computer programming classes starting in Kindergarten. Teach the basics of relativistic thinking so they don’t get hung up on Einstein later on. This stuff probably would’ve bored you.
I did well in History/Geography. I got all A’s. Still hated it though.
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Actually, I’m much the same with that. I’m not much for math. Did well in it but I was more into programming. It’s all visual in my head. I think that’s why squished maps don’t bother me.
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Oh I see them and for a moment my gut says, “BUT THAT’S WRONG!” but when I realize the purpose behind it and envision the straight lines wrapping around a globe, fixing the relative shapes like silly putty, then it’s ok.
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I mostly picked this map because of the ‘gut’ reaction people have to it. People get angry over it because of the shapes and the squish, even though it gets a lot of things right our everyday maps get wrong. It’s a good reminder that all maps are wrong, including our beloved ones.
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yeah, participating in the standardized testing programs yields $ benefits for the schools. But the US school system has made us into lab rats since they started it in the mid 1800s anyway. Always experimenting on the next generations.
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