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Greenland

Red said:
Interesting to see this, as it has been reported that Trump was impressed by the size of Greenland.

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While it is probably the best representation we have of a spherical planet on a 2D plane, it has done a lot of disservice to children learning geography across the planet. I remember in geography classes the teachers never talked to the true size of the countries and continents, although I had one teacher who insisted on teaching from globes almost as much as he did from maps, so that helped. And I loved globes personally, so I had like 6 of them I collected as a kid and I feel I had a better idea of this than most kids. But yeah, the vast majority of people on this planet are like Trump and take the mercator projection as a true to form representation of our planet without giving it a second thought. I even had to correct my wife, a very intelligent woman and salutatorian of her high school, in this years ago when we were talking about global politics and she expressed amazement that greenland was as big as the united states. Yeah, no it's not.

I always thought they should shift the focal point of the mercator projection much further south, so Australia looked much bigger but the northern hemisphere would be closer to actual sizes, as there is much more land mass in the north and way more countries are affected. But an argument can be made that by exaggerating the northern hemisphere more it gives better detail to more countries, so it is a crap shoot really.

Edit: sorry I meant have the projection more pronounced in the southern hemisphere. So the focal point needs to move further north. Duh.
 
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Red said:
Interesting to see this, as it has been reported that Trump was impressed by the size of Greenland.

View attachment 20020
Click to expand...
Trump is fixated on size. He is trying to compensate for his lack of size in certain areas.


I made a bad joke about him being a pedophile and no one noticing, but cut it out as it was in poor taste. My apologies.
 
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