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Today, the United Nations voted to adopt a new world map that reflects countries’ true relative sizes (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/world/un-vote-new-world-map-intl-scli

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[–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

Eckert and Equal Earth are fine, but I much prefer Peirce Quincuncial as more representative of the globe. All of the land distortion is minimal and equal, and it's tileable to get a better image of distance across hemispheres

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    But you completely discard the very concept of direction. And look at poor New Zealand.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I don't think so, I think it accurately portrays what North is on our globe. Magnetic North is in the Arctic. By displaying the Earth this way, we're seeing a map that's oriented to the North.

    The issue with New Zealand goes away with tessellation. This is from Wikipedia, I think that we should be tessellating around the the first part of the map instead but it gets the point across

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    Remember, the idea is to use this maps for teaching, the Peirce one would simply prevent people from actually learning about the world. I don't say it cannot be useful in some contexts, but for human readability is shit.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    How would it prevent learning about the world?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Because it is very hard to visualize correctly, when I look at it I need time to even understand what I am looking at. You can blame it on the fact that we used Mercator for centuries, but this does not feel natural. The one selected keeps proportions while feeling natural to almost everyone alive today. Maybe I am wrong about learning, maybe if everyone learns with this it would make sense, but this is the type of thing in which you have to compromise, no one alive (of course there are exceptions, but you know what I mean) prefers to look at yours instead of a map focused on the Ecuador/Atlantic.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Here's a map with political borders, capitols, and large cities

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I am not saying it is not a good map, I just don't think it is the right representation. Think about it, what picture do you think shows you better? One from the top? Or one from the front? Both show you, both miss information, but still one gives you way more to work with than the other. Looking at things from "above" is not natural for humans.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I don't know, I find this map to be incredibly intuitive. It shows the reality of living on a sphere, and really emphasizes a lot of the logistics of navigating the oceans. I think there's a huge amount of potential with this projection

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