Prestigeous Boston Schools drop 500 year old fake news colonial map

[H10]

 

 

Old fake colonial map that exaggerates the size of Europe and shrinks rest of world.

 

Decolonized map that shows a more accurate representation of the world.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.4034374/a-whole-new-world-why-boston-public-schools-are-adopting-a-different-map-1.4034379

"

A whole new world: Why Boston public schools are adopting a different map"

 

This is what I mean when I say those old timers were being taught fake history, fake geography and fake knowledge.  They will be quick to call this political correctness, when it is actually  the truth and a phony map was invented with fake dimensions to make Europeans feel better about themselves and taught for 500 years.  That is the real political correctness.

 

[Guest]

Personally, I'd like any map I look at to accurately reflect the truth. 

I do cut some slack for those who were creating maps 500 years ago, though.  Their satellites were nowhere as good as those we have now.

Edited March 25, 2017 by bcsapper

[hot enough]

52 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

 

Personally, I'd like any map I look at to accurately reflect the truth. 

 

However, you don't want your personal world view hampered by the truth.

[Peter F]

I think Mercator created his projection for navigational purposes and not propaganda. The projection here sucks for navigational purposes unless one uses a computer to deal with the distortions if one is sailing the equatorial or polar areas. But, with a Mercator chart there is not much problem at all despite the distortions. 

However, in a classroom it is pretty good for area, though I would suggest an actual Globe would be the better thing. Globes have been around for quite a while.

[-TSS-]

That decolonised map is still not accurate though. Australia, for example, is too little compared to its real size. So are most African countries.

[bush_cheney2004]

40 minutes ago, Peter F said:

I think Mercator created his projection for navigational purposes and not propaganda.

 

Excellent point....I guess in today's education systems, geography and cartography take a back seat to political correctness.

[OftenWrong]

The only problem with the two maps is how to take a spherical object and map it onto a 2-D surface. There's no conspiracy here.

[Bonam]

The maps are different projections. Any time you map a spherical surface to a flat rectangular representation, you get distortions. With any particular map, you have to choose what those distortions are to still achieve the purpose of the map. Among other attributes of map projections, map projections can be angle-preserving (useful for navigation) or they can preserve horizontal scaling, or vertical scaling. But not all at once. 

Given that the standard map projection people are used to seeing (the Mercator) most exaggerates the size of Russia, Greenland, and various other uninhabited arctic and antarctic areas, it seems likely to me that the projection was chosen for cartographic reasons, not political ones. 

On the other hand, the suggested replacement "decolonized" map is clearly being presented for political purposes. While it may more accurately show the overall area of various countries in comparison to each other, it completely butchers their relative shapes. While the Mercator projection shows northern areas enlarged, it keeps their actual shape relatively accurate. On the other hand, the replacement greatly stretches northern areas in the horizontal direction, rendering Canada and Russia into thin horizontal bands, which they clearly are not. Meanwhile, equatorial areas are compressed in the horizontal direction, making equatorial countries look like thin vertical strips. 

Overall, without any political motivation, I would say the proposed replacement projection (the Gall-Peters) gives a poorer overall understanding of global geography compared to the Mercator. The Mercator distorts scale, but the replacement distorts angles and shapes far more significantly. If one were to look at a globe (which, obviously, accurately renders the actual size and shape of geographic features since it doesn't have the sphere -> plane mapping problem of a flat map) and then to look at a Mercator projection, one would easily recognize the shapes of all the countries. On the other hand, if one were to look at the replacement, almost every country would look unrecognizable, except for small countries at moderate latitudes (which retain their shapes better) - it is again the US and Europe that are spared distortion in any case, hardly a less "Eurocentric" result than the Mercator. 

So overall given that the supposed replacement shows a less accurate picture of the world, not a more accurate one, I would say that it's this replacement that is politically motivated, and not the more classical Mercator.

Better map projections to show in schools (if for some reason a globe or computer screen with interactive spherical maps is not available) would likely be some of the pseudocylindrical projections. They are not angle-preserving but that matters little unless you're navigating - but they do a good job of preserving shape and scale compared to either the Mercator or the Gall-Peters projections. For example, the Natural Earth projection: 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

Edited March 26, 2017 by Bonam

[Guest]

There's no denying Greenland had a hell of a lobby...

[-1=e^ipi]

I like the plate-caree projection. Simple, easy to use and it's used by NASA, climate scientists, etc. Easy to work with if you are trying to do any programming with it.

Edited March 26, 2017 by -1=e^ipi

[bush_cheney2004]

I like this Chinese map of the world....

 

[Wilber]

Bonam is right. Boston schools are just trading one distortion for another. While Boston's map may have each country"s area correct, just look at Google earth, the continents don't look anything like the ones on that map.The Boston School map is just as "fake" as Mercator's map which came out in the 16th century, before colonialism became the rage.  It was intended primarily for navigation and is what happens when you try and make a map where the meridians are parallel.  Only the countries closest to the Equator will be accurate. You can't make a flat rectangular map of a globe without distorting something. Europe is in the centre because the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich. It has nothing to do with colonialism.

Edited March 26, 2017 by Wilber

[-TSS-]

As the medieval map-makers were mostly Europeans it is easy to understand that they also made maps on a Euro-centric basis. Medieval maps are incredibly close to being accurate given the methods they had those days. I don't think modern people could come even close to being as accurate if they had to manage with the same methods.

Besides, why would Europeans exaggerate the size of Europe and then go on colonising the rest of the world? Wouldn't the other way round be more logical? "Look, we are so little that we can't possibly all of us fit in here. Therefore we desperately need new land and you've got plenty of land to spare" 

[GostHacked]

13 hours ago, Wilber said:

Only the countries closest to the Equator will be accurate. You can't make a flat rectangular map of a globe without distorting something. Europe is in the centre because the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich. It has nothing to do with colonialism.

Hard to disagree with that!

[Wilber]

1 hour ago, GostHacked said:

Hard to disagree with that!

They used to use the example of an orange peel. Slice an orange down one side from top to bottom then pull the peel of without damaging it (if that is even possible) then try and make the peel flat and see what happens.

[jbg]

On 3/25/2017 at 1:50 PM, bcsapper said:

Personally, I'd like any map I look at to accurately reflect the truth. 

I do cut some slack for those who were creating maps 500 years ago, though.  Their satellites were nowhere as good as those we have now.

The Europeans were the only ones really moving around throughout the world. Their own borders were more important to them than borders elsewhere in the world. I can understand the overstatement.

The extreme version of this was a map by the New Yorker grossly overstating New York's size. It was satire, of course.

 

[Wilber]

The problem of finding longitude for navigators was taken on and solved by the British. While they weren't the sole inventors of the system, it was British mathematicians who took the method of using the angles between celestial bodies (called lunars) and produced the tables which made them usable by navigators to establish longitude, instead of having to do several hours of advanced math to come up with a position. It was British clock makers who produced the first reliable chronometers that could be carried aboard ships and used to determine the difference between time at a fixed point on earth and local time to establish an even more accurate calculation of longitude. It's no wonder that Greenwich was chosen as the fixed point through which the 0 meridian passed.

 

Some people might call that colonialism, I would call it science.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Wilber

[SpankyMcFarland]

Any decent map for schools should make Australia look a lot larger than Greenland and exhibit the fact that Borneo and New Guinea are the next biggest islands in the world. Mercator fails abjectly here. 

[Wilber]

You could take a flat rectangular  map of the whole world and place each continent on it, using the center of that continent as the point of view for each one, so their sizes would be correct in relation to each other. That would be fine for land masses but the problem is, then the oceans would be completely wrong and the thing would be useless for navigation. The Mercator isn't really intended to depict large areas. Navigators use many charts depicting much smaller areas and the distortion is minimal.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Wilber

[Wilber]

One thing the PC types and other SJW's can't accuse the Europeans of is putting nearly 70% of the earth's land mass in the northern hemisphere, a good portion of it north of 45 degrees, including Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe and most of Russia. In the southern hemisphere,  the only things south of 45 degrees are Antarctica, Patagonia and the southern tip of New Zealand. The distortions are the same north or south, but in the south no one cares because it is almost all water.

 

[JamesHackerMP]

Why not just buy a *&#$@ globe instead?

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, JamesHackerMP said:

Why not just buy a *&#$@ globe instead?

Tough to fold...

[JamesHackerMP]

ah...expensive too