Editing 977: Map Projections

He may actually believe that all map projections are in a way bad. This could be inferred from the fact that he much later began  publishing a series of [[:Category:Bad Map Projections|Bad Map Projections]].

The {{w|Mercator projection}} was introduced by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. The main purpose of this map is to preserve compass bearings; for example 13 degrees east of north will be 13 degrees clockwise from the ray pointing toward the top of the map, at every point.  A mathematical consequence is the mapping is conformal, i.e. if two roads meet at a certain angle on the surface of the Earth, they will meet at that same angle on the map.  It also follows that at every point the vertical and horizontal scales are the same, so locally i.e. considering only a small part of the map, geographical features (shapes, angles) are well represented, which helps a lot in recognizing them on-the-field, or for local navigation in that small part only. For this reason, that projection (or a close variant) is used in several online mapping services (such as Google Maps), which means that it is frequently encountered by the general public. A straight line on the map corresponds to a course of constant bearing (direction), which was very useful for nautical navigation in the past (and thus made that projection very well-known).

*Brought to the world by {{w|Dean Kamen}}, the {{w|Segway PT}} was supposed to be a device that changed the way cities were built. In practice, it had the same problems as other novel personal transporters, such as the {{w|Sinclair C5}} many years earlier. Small, powered vehicles didn't fit neatly into the existing infrastructure for cars, bikes or pedestrians; using them on roads or sidewalks could be unsafe, illegal or both. Early versions of the Segway also cost more than a used car, such that they were never widespread enough to provoke legal or infrastructure changes. The devices found a small niche among law enforcement, mall/airport security and tour operators, rather than private owners. The former owner of {{w|Segway Inc.}}, the late {{w|Jimi Heselden}}, accidentally rode his Segway off a cliff in 2010. Ninebot, then owner of the Segway brand, announced in 2020 that the flagship 2-wheeled self-balancing vehicle would be discontinued.

*{{w|Dvorak Simplified Keyboard|Dvorak}} is an alternate keyboard layout to {{w|QWERTY}}. According to legend, QWERTY was invented to help keep manual typewriters from jamming (by placing the most used keys far from each other) but Dr. {{w|August Dvorak}} performed many studies and found the mathematically optimal keyboard layout to reduce finger travel for right handed typists. While some claim Dvorak is technically better than QWERTY, QWERTY had become the standard. Most keyboards were laid out in QWERTY format, but a lot of software exists to remap the keys to DVORAK for those interested in typing faster.  Retraining the brain to use Dvorak takes perhaps a week.  It has become a [[:Category:Dvorak|recurrent theme]] on xkcd.

 

The comic links this projection to {{w|hipster}} subculture. The hipster stereotype is to avoid conforming to mainstream fashions. "Post-" refers to a variety of musical genres such as {{w|post-punk}}, {{w|post-grunge}}, {{w|post-minimalism}}, {{w|post-rock}}, etc. that branch off of other genres, and are generally considered less accessible than the genres that spawned them. Liking a genre just called "post-" implies that the listener prefers music that is less mainstream, and may have that as the only criterion for listening.  

*In German "Winkel-Tripel-Projektion" means Winkel's triple projection, and therefore the hyphen shouldn't be there: "Winkel Tripel" or "Winkel tripel".

The {{w|Goode homolosine projection}} takes a different approach to skewing a sphere into a roughly circular surface. An orange peel can be taken from an orange and flattened with fair success; this is roughly the procedure that {{w|John Paul Goode}} followed in creating this projection. Randall is suggesting that people who like this map also prefer relatively easy solutions to other things in life, despite those solutions having nuanced problems that are more difficult to address.

People often make arguments that if normal people ran the United States, then the US wouldn't be in the trouble it is. This is from the belief that career politicians are simply out to make money and will only act in the interest of their constituency when their continued easy life is threatened (usually around election time). While some form of this view is very common and probably pretty much correct, Randall is saying that someone who likes this map may take this to extremes.

Airline food is another, much maligned, problem. How do you store enough food to feed people on long airplane trips? What kind of food can be served in an enclosed, low-air-pressure environment? The common solution is to use some kind of prepackaged, reheated meal. Randall is saying that the people in favor of the Goode Homolosine wonder why the airlines don't simply order meals from the restaurants in the airport, store that food, and serve it, rather than using bland reheated food. However, this seemingly-obvious solution ignores how being in an airplane dulls your sense of taste. Airplane food is actually over seasoned for eating on the ground, meaning that if airlines switched to restaurant food it would probably taste even blander. There would also be issues with acquiring special meals (for example, vegetarian, Kosher, and Halal meals), especially if suitable restaurants were not in close range to the airport. Airport restaurants tend to also be more expensive than usual.

All of these references suggest that people who like the Goode Homolosine projection are fans of simple solutions to problems. However, while the solutions appear to be an easy, common-sense solutions, they all rely on over-simplifying the problem, and ignoring any problems introduced by the solution itself. For instance: the restaurants might have trouble making enough food for the whole plane, and it could get cold before being served; the air conditions [https://www.nbcnews.com/health/one-reason-airline-food-so-bad-your-own-tastebuds-6C10823522 aboard planes] can affect taste, so airlines say they optimize for this; there is no such thing as a "normal" person, and if there were, they would have less political experience than politicians, while remaining subject to the same pressures and problems with the larger political system; and the Goode Homolosine projection, while mostly resembling a flattened orange peel as suggested by the earlier analogy, does indeed cut down on distortion, but also has serious problems of its own, such as leaving huge gaps of nothingness between the continents, making distances across the oceans difficult to visualize, and splitting Greenland in half.

As is discussed in the Gall–Peters explanation, the Gall–Peters was developed to be equal area, so that historically colonised and economically disadvantaged areas nearer the equator are not diminished in area by the map projection, while global north areas are generally enlarged.

With feminism becoming mainstream and non-binary genders being more widely accepted, some have begun to invent gender-neutral pronouns so that when referring to a person whose gender is not known they cannot be offended by being referred to by the wrong pronouns. In {{w|Middle English}} 'they' and 'their' were {{w|Singular they|accepted genderless pronouns that could replace 'he', 'she'}} as well as be used to represent a crowd, but this usage is considered by some to be grammatically incorrect because of the plural/singular debate ([https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/the-awkward-case-of-his-or-her stupid Victorian Grammarians!]). There have been {{w|gender-neutral pronoun#Invented pronouns|many attempts at popularizing invented gender-neutral pronouns}} and they are beginning to achieve some degree of success in the mainstream.

Also known as the {{w|Equirectangular projection}}, it has apparently been in use since approximately 100 CE. The benefit of this projection is that latitude and longitude can be used as x,y coordinates. This makes it especially easy for computers to graph data on top of it.

In any good discussion there has to be at least one smart-ass.{{Citation needed}} This is a comic about map projections, that is, the science of taking a sphere and flattening it into 2 dimensions. The smart-ass believes that we shouldn't even try: a sphere is, tautologically, the perfect representation of a sphere.

A globe is the "map projection" used by {{w|Google Earth}} when zoomed out.

 

Notably, what is depicted in the panel itself (the comic being 2D) is technically an {{w|orthographic map projection}}.

Bernard Cahill published a [https://www.genekeyes.com/B.J.S._CAHILL_RESOURCE.html butterfly map] in 1909. Steve Waterman probably has the only extant "ready to go" map following the same general principles, though Gene Keys may not be far behind. Waterman has a poem with graphics in a similar vein to this xkcd comic that is worth reading.[https://web.archive.org/web/20120118095915/https://watermanpolyhedron.com/worldmap.html]

[https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/pcr.2016.48.issue-4/pcr-2016-0014/pcr-2016-0014.pdf Polyhedral projections] like Cahill, Dymaxion or Waterman typically offer better accuracy of size, shape and area than flat projections, at the expense of compass directionality, connectedness, and other complications.

{{w|Inception}} was a 2010 movie about {{w|meta}} {{w|lucid dream}}ing. It has a complex story that is difficult to follow and leaves the viewer with many questions at the end, and almost always needs to be watched multiple times to be understood.

The human brain is not well developed to deal with oddly obvious things. One example is that everyone has a skeleton, but everyone is surprised to see a part of their body represented by an X-ray. Another is the fascinating complexity of the human hand, a machine which is amazingly complex, driven by a complex interplay of electrical and chemical signals; yet is the size of the hand and so useful. A fascination with or fixation on {{tvtropes|ContemplatingYourHands|such thoughts}} is often associated with an altered state of mind brought on by marijuana consumption. Therefore, Randall may be implying that this map would appeal to stoners.

The {{w|Gall–Peters projection}} is mired in controversy, surprisingly for a map. {{w|James Gall}}, a 19th-century clergyman, presented this projection in 1855 before the {{w|British Association for the Advancement of Science}}. In 1967, the filmmaker {{w|Arno Peters}} created the same projection and presented it to the world as a "new invention" that put poorer, less powerful countries into their rightful proportions, (as opposed to the Mercator) during the US civil rights movement, when society was very concerned about social justice. Peters played the marketing game and got quite a few followers of his map by saying it had "absolute angle conformality," "no extreme distortions of form," and was "totally distance-factual". These claims were in fact false. The Mercator projection distorts size in favor of shape, and Gall-Peters distorts shape in favor of size, being especially inaccurate at the equator and the poles.

Anyone who loves such a politically charged map that has become popular by way of marketing stunts and false claims, Randall would rather not have anything to do with. Alternatively Randall just dislikes this map projection so much due to the above mentioned major inaccuracies, that he hates anyone who likes it.