A colleague in Lima, Peru shared this website with me: TrueSize.com
Standard 2D maps are inaccurate in that countries further away from the equator appear larger than ones closer to the equator.
On this website, enter Canada or United States into the search box to highlight it. Then drag it up or down. Quite fascinating, eh?!
I wonder if it could be modified to show the true size of Prinz Dummkopf’s ego, or some other of his “characteristics”.
What fits into Russia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqKkYYALMU
What ever happened to Mercator projections?? Developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, he corrected most of the distortion.
I thought that was solved when the Japanese installed one or more cameras on the moon!!
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Mercator projection error. Polar projections are more accurate.
Neither of them is accurate beyond its reference meridian / meridians, because the problem is that you’re trying to display a round object (the Earth) on a flat object (a piece of paper).
Mercator projections involve curling the paper into a tube and putting the Earth in the middle of it; the most simple Mercator, one that touches the Earth at the Equator, has steadily-increasing distortion that renders it marginally-useable for navigation above 20 North / 20 South. This indeed is the “classic” world-map projection, in which Greenland appears larger than Africa. You can get away with a trick to make a classic Mercator useable farther north / south by twirling the tube of paper a bit tighter, so it now touches the Earth at 20 North / 20 South; this gives acceptable distortion from above 40 North / South across the Equator. But obviously, as you twirl your tube of paper tighter and tighter, the distortion at the Equator becomes unuseable – and the increasing curvature of the Earth means you have less and less useable map at high latitudes.
But of course, for navigational purposes you don’t really need a single map showing the entire surface of the Earth – so you make projections (which’re called that because you are simulating putting a lightbulb in the centre of the Earth, and then tracing-out its projected features on the paper) for the areas and latitudes you’ll be working at; and as you go into areas that your map no longer faithfully represents, the next map you roll out on the table has a different projection that shows that area faithfully. And if you’re going north / south, you can flip your tube of paper on its side and have a Transverse Mercator map, which touches the Earth all the way around a North / South Meridian of Longitude.
Numerous projections exist, which are more useable depending on where you are. The Polar Stereographic is useable above 40 North or below 40 South; if you want even more fidelity, move your lightbulb well below the Earth (and ignore the lines you’d see from the opposite hemisphere); I believe this is the “polar Gnomonic”. And if you’re making a map series for one popular straight-line route that goes from anywhere to anywhere else, North / South / East / West / “wherever”, wrap your tube around the Earth along that route; it will be almost perfectly accurate for ~20 degrees of Latitude above / below that route.
– And yes, degrees of latitude are the same size; the degrees of Longitude are the ones that converge at the Poles. The old joke – “A hunter goes out stalking a bear. He walks a mile south, then a mile east and then a mile north, ending-up back where he started. Where is he?” Well, there’s only one place you can do that – he’s at the North Pole, and it’s a polar bear. And it’s okay – the bear is hunting him, too. If you’re a few feet from the North or South Pole, you can walk around the world in a few seconds – and I’m sure you all wanted to know that…