Sunday, April 29, 2007

 

It all makes so much more sense

Click to see larger image. Discuss.

(Tip o' the cowboy hat to Pecheur.)

--ER

Comments:
Sense? The North pole is still a 25,000 mile long line instead of a point. Greenland is still much larger than it should be. Want to make sense of Historical exploration and human diffusion, get a globe. The you'll see that you can go straight North from the great plains and end of in the "great plains" of Eurasia, or that if you lower the ocean level and freeze the edges like it was 15,000 years ago you can walk from Europe to New England like the Solutrians did.
Get a globe.
 
There's something about seeing those familisr geographical shapes upside down, with the worfds on them right side up, that has an effect that can't be gotten any other way.

It's the words. I am a word man first. You are a geographer first.
 
Something I learned while traveling in Switzerland: Not all countries draw their maps with North at the top of the page. That threw me.
 
"There's something about seeing those familisr geographical shapes upside down."

Sort of like reading Hamlet in its original Klingon?
 
"... in its original Klingon."

Is that much different than modern Klingon? And, exactly, how do we know what's original and what's futuristic? Isn't that television show from a few years ahead?

I'm confused.
 
I think he means King James Klingon.
 
Yeah, it weird to have that perspective (as you said with the names written right side up or whatever you call it)

Dr. Lobo,
How else can one represent a 3D object on a flat surface without distortion?
 
drlobojo's complaints to one side, I happen to like it because it shows that our cultural bias - what ER calls "familiar geographical shapes" - is most definitely not something universal to be implanted in the minds and hearts of other countries. In fact, we could learn a whole lot from this map. Our world is being turned upside down in all sorts of ways right now, and hanging this map on our collective walls could do us all much good and virtually no harm at all.
 
There are all sorts of projections.
All of them have some kind of distortion. Trick is to select the distortion that is least problematic to what you what to show.
The least distorted map is the one on a globe.
If you want to know more see:
http://www.hypermaths.org/quadibloc/maps/mapint.htm
 
Geoffrey said it well. I first saw an inverted map, of North and South America, or should I say South and North America, in "Mother Jones" at the height of the Contra debacles.
 
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