Understanding maps¶
I’ve always enjoyed maps, and they still kind of blow my mind when I really think about it. Especially with hiking and international travel, the sense of space in a place is always something I have a hard time intuiting, and maps are a starting point to understanding, as well as geopolitics :)
In terms of understanding how map projections work, I really enjoyed this video that was linked from this Slow Boring post:
Any chance I can persuade you to write a column titled “The Mercator Projection is Bad?”
Johnny Harris did a great video on this for Vox, and that’s really all I have to say about it.
I’m sure he’s just cutting it open for effect, but it’s a great visual that explains the problem, and the visualizations of how different map projections happen are really well done.
The true size¶
This is a great chance to also link to one of my favorite tools: The True Size Of. It allows you take a specific country or state, and create a shadow image that you can move around and compare to the size of other places. This is shown using the projection, so you can get a sense for the size of things.
Here is an example of Texas compared to Alaska, but using the same projection space:
It’s a great way to better understand how big Africa is, and get a real sense of the relative size of places.