Why All Maps Are Wrong 🗺️
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Morning Map lovers!
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All world maps are completely WRONG!
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What am I talking about?
Well, imagine you're an ancient map maker… aka a Cartographer!
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Now, everybody knows the Earth is a sphere…
But carrying around a big bulky spherical map everywhere would suck butt.
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So you’ve been tasked with turning this globe map into a foldable flat map, like this:
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But there’s a problem…
Turns out that's REALLY frickin hard!!!
Like mathematically impossible hard.
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You can pull and stretch and tear it as much as you want, but it will never look flat…
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So what's a mapmaker to do???
Enter: PROJECTION!
Simply take your globe map and project what's on it onto a flat surface, like this.
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Then roll it out and… TADA you've got yourself a map!
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But now there's another problem…
The shapes may be accurate, sure.
But the sizes? They’re WAY off.
Just look at Greenland and Africa.
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About the same size, right?
Well, in reality, Greenland is like 14 times SMALLER than Africa!
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For some reason, this map projection makes the poles a bit… INFLATED!
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But it’s not just this map, it's ALL of them.
Every single way you could project a globe onto a rectangle is slightly off…
Maybe it sacrifices size for shape, like the one we found.
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Or maybe it sacrifices shape for size like this one.
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Or maybe it does a bit of both like all of these:
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Really, the most accurate map is… just a globe.
Lol.
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Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈
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