this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
760 points (98.8% liked)
Mildly Interesting
27816 readers
815 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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.
How would it prevent learning about the world?
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.
Here's a map with political borders, capitols, and large cities
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.
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
Fair. I don't agree, but I see were you are coming from and you are not really wrong, so 🤝
But you completely discard the very concept of direction. And look at poor New Zealand.
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
What a trippy representation of the world! I love it!
This is a very interesting map to contemplate but entirely useless to actually orient oneself by. Which direction do you sail from Africa to get to upside down Africa?