Boston Public Schools now buying maps in Peters Projection

[Chaotic42]

https://www.theguardian.com/educati...-schools-world-map-mercator-peters-projection

So as a cartographer this annoys the crap out of me. True, there are much bigger problems right in our faces, but in this so called era of "fake news", this hits a little too close to home. Most of us were raised with maps in the Mercator projection. This means that straight horizontal and vertical lines correspond to lines along latitudes and longitudes respectively. Go straight right from New Orleans, for example, and you'll stay along 30°N. This has the problem of making things close to the poles, famously Greenland, look huge:

In reality Greenland is much smaller than Africa. The Peters projection makes things along the equator overly large:

To a person, every cartographer and GIS professional I know dislikes Mercator and *loathes* Peters. Peters (aka Gall-Peters) is an equal area projection, so areas are correct, though shapes are massively distorted. We have much better projections, such as the Winkel-Tripel:

BPS claims that the Peters maps will help students get a better grasp of the sizes of countries and continents, but there are much better ways to do this and I think most people can agree that the Peters maps just feel wrong. Somehow more wrong than Mercator. I like the Butterfly Projection, but I don't see it catching on:

Just say no to bad maps!

 

[interchange]

Are you a fan of xkcd by chance? https://www.xkcd.com/977/

 

[Chaotic42]

Are you a fan of xkcd by chance? https://www.xkcd.com/977/

Heh, yeah, that made its way around the office when it came out. Cartographers take projections very seriously. Color and symbology too. We're fun folks...

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Are you a fan of xkcd by chance? https://www.xkcd.com/977/

I'm conflicted. On one hand I prefer the Winkel-Tripel as being the overall best projection, but I do think that airlines should get food from the airport restaurants, which suggests Goode-Homolosine and I have flattened a number of orange peels in stages to watch the transformation from a three dimensional spheroid to a 2D topological equivalent.

I'm hopeless Charlie Brown, completely hopeless.

 

[IronWing]

I hadn't realized Nat Geo had dropped Robinson. I remember going into the All-Things-Buckminster-Fuller store in Boulder and seeing the Dymaxion maps for sale, and thought, "what a fascinating and totally useless projection". The Butterfly solves some of the problems with the Dymaxion but doesn't strike me as being of much value. My job occasionally takes me into schools and I've learned to not be too surprised to see the Soviet Union on the wall maps but I still pause when Rhodesia shows up.

Edit: I detest the Goode Homolosine. Maps, regardless of projection, should first be useful.

Edit edit: Sometimes I open Google Earth and set the globe spinning on different axes just to watch the world go by.

 

[momeNt]

Why not make a polygonal map based something like a world equivalent of the state plane coordinate system. Then just splay it in an appealing fashion. My guess is that the Butterfly map is the closest to it, but isn't there a way to make it a little bit more appealing?

 

[HTFOff]

Inb4 mercator is racist

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Heh, yeah, that made its way around the office when it came out. Cartographers take projections very seriously. Color and symbology too. We're fun folks...

Testing my defective brain cells and confusing memory with confabulation. Is it Delorme?

 

[Homerboy]

#butterfly4lyfe!


...though the problem with the buttterfly version is that it shows things disjointedly and not as "one big happy, interconnected world" While things are properly sized and not deformed, it removes their spacial relativity to each other.

 

[Chaotic42]

Testing my defective brain cells and confusing memory with confabulation. Is it Delorme?

They got bought by Garmin, apparently. If you're asking where I work, I don't think I've ever said before, but it isn't for them. I generally like to avoid linking my personal life in any way to any of my employers (sans McDonald's back in the day).

 

[Chaotic42]

#butterfly4lyfe!


...though the problem with the buttterfly version is that it shows things disjointedly and not as "one big happy, interconnected world" While things are properly sized and not deformed, it removes their spacial relativity to each other.

Yep. Unfortunately you can't get a perfect map because the surface of a sphere can't be stretched to a rectangle. In other words the surface of a sphere is not homeomorphic to R^2.

 

[IronWing]

Just say no to bad maps!

Speaking of bad maps, who came up with that color scheme?

 

[Chaotic42]

Speaking of bad maps, who came up with that color scheme?

The mind of a Peters mapper is a strange and terrible place, not even spoken of in the most dusky whispers of the damned.

 

[Homerboy]

Yep. Unfortunately you can't get a perfect map because the surface of a sphere can't be stretched to a rectangle. In other words the surface of a sphere is not homeomorphic to R^2.

Yeah -- I get that.
I guess then a combo of the two is needed -- butterfly and Mercator to show both size and correlation.
If you have to use JUST one then the Winkel-Tripel is the obvious choice.
Peters makes NO sense at all, and therefore I agree with the point of your OP: Boston Schools are stupid.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

They got bought by Garmin, apparently. If you're asking where I work, I don't think I've ever said before, but it isn't for them. I generally like to avoid linking my personal life in any way to any of my employers (sans McDonald's back in the day).

Hell yes I understand not getting personal stuff, but if you had said it before I thought I'd satisfy my curiosity. I had Delorme state atlas for VT, NH and ME. Loved them. I also have one of their GPS units which will have to be pried from my cold dead hands.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Inb4 mercator is racist

alright this is pretty funny

 

[Smoblikat]

Im glad some people see the value in discussing the merits of different types of world maps, because I genuinely couldnt care less.

 

[Zorba]

My friend and I actually just spent way too long talking about map projections a couple weeks ago. I was bitching about how tons of people have started showing the silhouette of Oklahoma with a curved northern border. It drives me nuts. Oklahoma's northern border is the 37th parallel, so it should be straight.

Then he brought up world map projections. I personally thought since we were in Oklahoma, it was flat earthers fault, but he blaimed Winkel-Tripel.

 

[IronWing]

The Solute of Oklahoma pleases me.

 

[Zorba]

The Solute of Oklahoma pleases me.

Yeah, I hate typing on a phone...

 

[PottedMeat]

why not just get a globe for every elementary school classroom for the way things really are?



beavis:'peters projection'
butthead:heheheheheh
beavis:yeah hehehehehe

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Heh, yeah, that made its way around the office when it came out. Cartographers take projections very seriously. Color and symbology too. We're fun folks...

There's no pedant quite like a cartography pedant. I personally love 'em.

 

[mizzou]

I wonder sometimes if African's cringe every time white European/Americans get ready to "help" them.

I remember when I was a kid in the 80s Africa aid was the huge thing. I had a pen pal somewhere there and we exchanged letters. I lost them a long time ago, but they were pretty mundane. We would basically send them money and essential gifts and ask them about food and animals. They would send us letters about the weather and other basic things. I loved being able to communicate with someone from a far away place, even if it was sparse.

People need to understand that we don't need to replicate our lifestyle everywhere in the world to get world peace. Basic access to water, health care, and peace shouldn't be that big of a hassle to accomplish. But apparently it is still an issue there.

To get back on topic, I think we, as american's specifically, feel like we accomplish more when we turn our attention to an area a'la Peters projection instead of actually doing something. We would rather have that selfie on the Ivory Coast with a hashtag then turn our phones off and get our hands dirty. I feel that if we turn our attention to Africa, it will be more imperialistic/colonialist then to actually help solve problems. Just look at everything we've touched...pure chaos. Well...everything except Japan.

Anyway, I actually am neutral with the whole thing. Accurate flat map projection is difficult and I think that was explained to me as a little kid very early on and it was never a big deal. I always knew Greenland and Alaska were big, but not as big as they appeared on the flat map. The globe is always a better resource.