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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   647 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 10, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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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.

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?

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.

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