Dln’t quote me on this, but from what I’ve heard, the Mercador projection became standard because it’s good for navigating since qit conserves angles. Draw a strait line depicting your current trajectory and another the trajectory that would get you where you want, measure the angle between them, and that’s the actual angle you need to turn.
Yeah, it’s actually a really great map for its purpose of navigation, which is a pretty damn important aspect of map usage. I’m tired of everyone shitting on it because of that scene in west wing.
Sure, that’s why I qualified with “for its intended purpose”. It’s not a great classroom map but it is perhaps the most historically important projection. The problem is this idea of “Mercator bad” has entered public consciousness. For example, the start of this thread mentioned “how not-great the mercator is” without any such qualifications.
In the Internet age, I believe Mercator remains standard because it’s easy, since image buffers and UI viewports are implemented as rectangular arrays. For example, when you click on the map the pixel coordinates can be converted to (lat, long) just by scaling, without having to do complicated coordinate transformations.
Dln’t quote me on this, but from what I’ve heard, the Mercador projection became standard because it’s good for navigating since qit conserves angles. Draw a strait line depicting your current trajectory and another the trajectory that would get you where you want, measure the angle between them, and that’s the actual angle you need to turn.
Yeah, it’s actually a really great map for its purpose of navigation, which is a pretty damn important aspect of map usage. I’m tired of everyone shitting on it because of that scene in west wing.
Which scene is that?
https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=EJI98A0zZR6zkURc Im sure there were people who felt this way before this episode, but it really exploded in public consciousness afterward.
It’s great for navigating at sea, but bad for looking at the world as a whole. Nowadays most people use maps for the latter; hence the complaints.
Sure, that’s why I qualified with “for its intended purpose”. It’s not a great classroom map but it is perhaps the most historically important projection. The problem is this idea of “Mercator bad” has entered public consciousness. For example, the start of this thread mentioned “how not-great the mercator is” without any such qualifications.
Maybe one day I’ll get a Cahill-Keyes projection on the wall. I think it’s useful to see how surface areas compare.
In the Internet age, I believe Mercator remains standard because it’s easy, since image buffers and UI viewports are implemented as rectangular arrays. For example, when you click on the map the pixel coordinates can be converted to (lat, long) just by scaling, without having to do complicated coordinate transformations.
And no projection is perfect they all introduce weird things, like this equirectangular map
which is not conformal or equal area.
This one has been mentioned a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection