Mildly Interesting

And of course, nobody is surprised.

Lmao the fucking irony:

The US, which voted against the resolution, slammed the text as an ideological exercise that it said undermined the UN’s credibility.

“This initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions,” said Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN. “The United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to.”

Guess they will soon not only have their own system of measuring distance, weight and temperature; but also their own system of displaying Earth. They want to live in their own version of reality i guess.

This might be the first time in history Israel voted differently than the United States of America

Web Mercator is a special kind of abomination, even down to the way the map is cropped to be exactly square. But it is probably the most suitable for navigation, as Mercator itself was designed specifically for it.

Buildings, streets and map features would be more distorted under Equal Earth projection than they already are with Web Mercator. Web Mercator also has the benefit that the cardinal directions are always straight respective to the XY grid, even though the Y direction is non linear.

There is no perfect way of flattening a 3D spheroid into a 2D map, sadly.

What we had in school in the U.S.

The Robinson projection:

What many U.S. texts moved to after I left school.

The Winkel Triple Projection:

Apparently the Mercador map is what digital maps seem to use because the lines are 90 degrees so it makes it easier.

It’s both/and.

Let’s say you’re trying to convince a populace of an unpopular war to invade, I dunno, Greenland. You want to convince the country of its massive land & untapped riches.

Which map would you use?

The Mercator projection is also a systemic legacy of colonialism, so doing away with it doesn't hurt.

"radical" lost all meaning in the US

I saw the US was against it an thought it had to be smth like this. Only americans can look at a problem like "you can't project a 3D sphere onto a 2D plane" and think "waow this is a little too political for me" (I know I'm oversimplifying but u get the gist)

Exactly, which is why it really grinds my gears when people try to present the map as intentionally amplifying some countries at the expense of others. That's not the point, it's just a side effect of inventing the first map that could actually be used for long-distance navigation.

For the UN it makes complete sense to use a different projection.

Racism and white supremacy. Typical.

Some critics of the Mercator projection suspect it has remained widely used because it enlarges and centers Europe, as well as other Western regions such as North America, perpetuating ideas of European superiority.

The UN resolution notes “with concern that this distortion contributes to minimizing the perceived sizes of Africa, Latin America and South Asia, and perpetuating an unbalanced view of the world.”

Because it makes them look smaller. Because reality.

Because it would make Greenland look far smaller and uninteresting for Trump.

Their stated reason boils down to "New map is woke".

I hate this timeline.

They don't want Trump to see how small Greenland actually is. I think he reckons it's about half the size of the United States because he's an idiot. Not that this map projection is at all new, or has been a secret or anything, but trump isn't exactly the investigating type and so he probably hasn't seen it before, but if the information is shoved in his face he might become upset.