Oct 15, 2010

Something that Surprised Me

One of the problems of living on a spherical planet is that it is nearly impossible to present an accurate representation of it in two dimensions.  You can't really do it--any given projection is either distorted or all chopped up.  Since we get our pictures of geography more from maps than globes, we tend to internalize those distortions as facts: Greenland looks bigger than Australia, for instance, and despite that my brain knows that the latitude and longitude grid is distorted, I always subconsciously picture it bigger.

That's why I did a double-take when I saw this:




A infographic beneath explains:


Well, guilty as charged--though I would point out that this is the continental US and excludes Scandinavia.  But still.  I consider myself pretty well-informed, but it's crazy what can still surprise you.

1 comment:

  1. Syracuse Culture Workers sells some interesting maps that make viewers confront prior assumptions about geography.

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