{"id":1229,"date":"2019-11-11T20:50:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T20:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lazaris.net\/lazaris\/chris\/?p=1229"},"modified":"2021-10-18T22:10:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T22:10:12","slug":"true-size-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lazaris.net\/lazaris\/chris\/true-size-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cTrue Size\u201d Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Country (and Will Change Your Mental Picture of the World)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We all understand, on some level, that as adults we must go back and correct the oversimplifications we learned as schoolchildren. But for a sense of how large the scale of those quasi-truths, you must imagine the whole world: that is, you must imagine how you imagine the whole world, a mental picture probably taken straight from the map hung on the classroom wall. And the lines of that map came straight, in a sense, from the work of 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Though Mercator’s world-mapping method came as a revolution, it has also given generation after generation after generation very much the wrong idea about how big the world’s countries actually are. Mercator Projection, as Citymetric describes it<\/a>, “re-imagines the earth as the surface of a cylinder.<\/p>\n

When laid out flat, it\u2019s pleasingly rectangular, and its eastern and western edges line up neatly.” But while “in reality, lines of longitude converge at the poles; on the map, they’re parallel.<\/strong> As a result, the closer you get to the poles, the more distorted the map becomes, and the bigger things look relative to their actual size.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

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