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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   684 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.

Google Earth is a thing.

It is! It uses a near-sided perspective projection.

You may have missed the joke.

The sphere of Google Earth is projected onto the rectangular plane of your phone screen.

How is transforming the 3D surface of the sphere that Google Earth internally manipulates into a 2D image that can be rendered on a planar phone screen not a map projection?

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