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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1299 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 10, 2026

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Front-page news on Reddit: The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution recommending the Equal Earth projection (pseudocylindrical, equal-area) over the Mercator projection (cylindrical, conformal). This is the culmination of a campaign that has been backed by the African Union for the past year.

The General Assembly

[Two pages of preamble]

(1) Affirms that cartographic distortions of continental sizes inherited from history have cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic impacts and constitute historical biases, the correction of which will promote recognition, justice and development, particularly with regard to the African continent;

(2) Recognizes that the Mercator projection, widely used around the world, particularly distorts, from the perspective of area representation, continental masses located far from the equator, resulting in a proportional shrinkage of Africa and other regions;

(3) Declares that the Equal Earth cartographic projection offers a more accurate representation of the sizes of continental landmasses and to this end is a relevant option for improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world;

[Two pages of "emphasizing", "encouraging", "inviting", and "urging"]

The resolution does not actually require the Equal Earth Projection to be used, even internally at the UN.

Vote summary:

VoteCount
Yes164
No1 (USA)
Abstain6
(Not present)22

Comparison between cylindrical equal-area projection (Behrmann variant) and Equal Earth projection:

OutputCylindrical equal-areaEqual Earth
Notes—θ = asin(√(3)/2⋅sin(φ))
A1 = 1.340264
A2 = −0.081106
A3 = 0.000893
A4 = 0.003796
x√(3)/2⋅λ2√(3)λcos(θ)/(27A4θ8 + 21A3θ6 + 9A2θ2 + 3A1)
y2/√(3)⋅sin(φ)A4θ9 + A3θ7 + A2θ3 + A1θ
ShapeFamiliar rectangleWeird dirigible
Verdict♥️🤮

Previous discussion of map projections

(If you hate all map projections and want to pretend that you're looking at a physical globe, use the orthographic projection—or, if you're really deviant, the general perspective projection.)

Are there memes already - Africa if Mercator projection was not used - a view of vast futuristic landscape? This one just begs for it.

I haven't seen any, so I made one just for you.

That's some good art, AI? If so, what kind of prompt did you use?

The base image is a common meme. (I manually darkened the skin of the human a little, since this particular instance is supposed to represent Africa.) For the text, I just used Arial Black in white with a black outline.

Unrelated, but I really enjoy that you maintain a personal site and use it liberally. I'm considering starting one of my own. Would you speak highly of NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a network host?

Personally I decided to host my personal projects, which are across a few different domain names, on a Hetzner server. I'm paying about 5 euros per month for it and I like the freedom I have to run whatever I want on it. I can't link the sites without doxxing myself though

I've run clockworkthought.com/blog and a number of other personal or project websites on NFS. They're the most trustworthy provider I can find from an ethos-of-free-speech perspective, but that's damning with faint praise, and I wouldn't put money on it, nevermind data.

(I also trust them to stay around longer than I trust Google Sites, which is the closest 'free' option. Google Sites is a lot more useful friendly for very simple document-style websites, though.)

The big selling point is that, for tiny websites or at low volume, they're dirt-cheap. For really optimized websites, you can end up paying less for hosting than you would for your domain name, but even at standard rates, sub-30 USD / year is pretty much the default.

The downside is that it's cheap, rather than inexpensive. You're not getting first-in-class performance, or user interfaces, or support staff. Even the built-in outbound email functionality is pretty limited. If you need a lot of storage (>10GB), plan on doing anything latency-sensitive, or need a lot of database functionality, they're not a great choice. There is a built-in control panel, and you can just use SFTP or SCP to upload files, but don't expect any WYSIWYG editor. Costs are based primarily on site storage count and don't have a real throttling capability, so if you allow user uploads, this could potentially be moderately expensive.

There aren't problems for my use case: I went with Grav as a content management system knowing that its design would be less responsive than NFS's hardware, and having to boot up a SCP client is second nature from my day job. Whether they'd be an issue for you is a bigger and probably harder question.

I do not have the technical knowledge that would qualify me to answer that question.

Denizens of this website who are more knowledgeable than I am have pointed out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net's increasingly-authleft political views have started to throw the validity of its name into some doubt (1 2 3), but they have not leveled any technical criticisms at it.

the general perspective projection

Anyone who adopts anything else thinks they can map the surface of the earth to a Euclidean plane: they're literally flat-Earthers! Although if you have concerns about perspective distortion I can be sympathetic: no maps -- everyone can only use globes!

/s

You want to show someone far away something, you take a photo of a globe and you send that. Some people send Google Earth screenshots but those are controversial.

Kavrayskiy VII is the best compromise projection:

x = (3λ/2)⋅√(1/3-(φ/π)2)
y = φ

I'll accept Wagner VI too, which is simply a slightly wider version of K7:

x = λ⋅√(1-3(φ/π)2)
y = φ

In the end, of course the Soviet guy still proposes one that just so happens to inflate the Soviet Union (I suppose Canada and Scandinavia are acceptable stowaways in this "uplift"). I would like to see a tabular comparison of all the projections by how they scale each region/power bloc, along with the origins of their proponents.

All compromise projections inflate the higher latitudes, because they want to maintain the shapes of the countries as well.

Kavrayskiy VII is the best compromise projection

Yes, Comrade Kavrayskiy VII is clearly the most principled compromise projection. Winkel tripel and the National Geographic Society are bourgeois nonsense.

I was going to come in here and make a nostalgia argument for a Winkel tripel, but Kavrayskiy VII is clearly more aesthetic, which, re: the original discussion, is the most important property for all these maps. It doesn't make sense to me why area should be the key ontological factor for deciding which map is best. In the modern era, no one is cutting out sections of map to weigh them, or measuring border lengths with a string, or trying to find the rhumb line with a ruler; at least not for serious work and not from a random UN report. If you want to compare areas, clearly a bar chart or a table would be better.

It doesn't make sense to me why area should be the key ontological factor for deciding which map is best.

The General Assembly says:

Emphasizing that cartographic representations constitute an essential component of geospatial information and have a lasting influence on the perception and understanding of territorial realities on a global scale,

Considering that maps constitute a fundamental educational, scientific and cultural tool that shapes the perception of the world and the collective imagination of peoples,

Recalling the Charter for African Cultural Renaissance, in particular article 3 relating to the rehabilitation and enhancement of African heritage,

Recognizing that certain cartographic distortions of sizes of continents, inherited from history, have contributed to their incorrect perceptions, leading in particular to a symbolic minimization of Africa in collective imaginations and knowledge systems,

leading in particular to a symbolic minimization of Africa in collective imaginations and knowledge systems

Yes, because placing Africa centrally in the most common default maps was a conspiracy to minimize the importance of Africa.

Edit: I realize I should probably have made a clearer point. I am aware of the general argument for why the African Union is arguing for an equal-area projection to be "encouraged." I do not find it convincing that area is the only factor in visual prominence, or that area alone should be the only factor for determining if a map introduces undesirable bias or will promote justice. I seriously think the map being aesthetic is more important, and that quantitative comparisons have better forms. I also think developed-country elementary school classrooms can afford and should have a globe available. Preferably a planimetric globe that can be dismounted from its stand and rotated freely to examine.

I have seen maps that split across the Atlantic rather than the Pacific. IIRC China prefers that choice. Seems like you'd be less likely to lose New Zealand (a common map error), too.

In the interest of justice, we should really be lobbying for Auckland to be centered on the map.

It's not about measuring areas, it's about being able to look at a map and see how big (and consequently important) Africa is.

You know what's really big? The ocean -- not super interesting on a map though!

Make Pangea great again!

I see no reason why how big something looks should be more important to visually understanding a map than border and coastline length, relative position, shape, direction, or visual centrality.

Neither do I, but the Africans do. I believe they think that if children look at the map and see

america AFRICA asia

then they will be more attentive to Africa and less likely to consider it the arse-end of the globe.

Beaides children, I think many adults might also consider continental size = importance. Many African adults, possibly. In that sense its a self-confidence boosting plan, to distract from Africa's many other problems.

I’ll be interested to see the reactions when white nationalists start using the new map to point out the relative sizes of Africa and Europe, before asking why the tiny continent should accept any immigrants from the massive continent.

I saw someone post a map of the world showing country size as a function of economic output:

https://x.com/randomnikanona/status/2096669789590811083

It’s a bit suspicious that the poster is Russian and Russia is very long but very very thin…

The technical term is "cartogram".

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