DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Xavier_Onassis on March 28, 2008, 03:49:30 PM
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efjcrbNcW6s
The Mercator projection is highly inaccurate.
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The Mercator projection is highly inaccurate.
YouTube is blocked at work, so I haven't seen the video yet. But I have to comment on this.
Duh.
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The argument made in the video is that the Mercator projection is somehow partly to blame for the world's ills. It makes Europe look bigger than it is, thereby feeding a West-centric view of the world that somehow keeps the rest of the world down and poor. While I agree there are more accurate map projections than Mercator, I find the notion that Mercator is some how responsible for the West dominating the world to be ridiculous. But then, I think it was supposed to be.
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Then, by that standard, Russia, Greenland and Canada should rule the world. They are the most distorted.
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I don't think Mercator himself is to blame for this. But it is nonetheless true that a distorted view of the physical world also serves to distort ideas about the world.
The world is a sphere, and a map must be flat. Therefore, it really isn't possible to have an undistorted view of the world.
The Peters projection flattens the northern tiers of latitudes excessively.
Here is a discussion of projections:
http://www.hypermaths.org/quadibloc/maps/mapint.htm
The polyconic projections seem to have the least distortion. The importan thing to remember is that every square outlined by longitudes and latitudes is a square exactly as large as all other squares.
I thought that this was an interesting presentation. After all, Greenland a LOT smaller than South America or Africa.