Mercator: Extreme
26 comments
·January 21, 2025bangaladore
aylmao
Some very impressive ones to look at here:
- Colombia is about as tall as the USA's West Coast.
- Brazil is comparable to Canada.
- Indonesia is wider than Europe.
jvanderbot
Oh so the whole UK would fit in Texas, USA a couple times.
And Greenland is like CA, OR, WA, NV combined.
Good to know.
cluckindan
”We and our 727 technology partners ask you to consent…”
I would bet the billionaires in Trump’s good boys club are in it for the pardons they need after justice realizes what is being done with everyone’s personal data.
mkehrt
Is this really a Mercator projection? It doesn't appear to maintain the invariant that lines of constant bearing are straight lines.
If I pick a point somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, the top point of Manhattan is somewhere near the top of the light colored area and the bottom point of Manhattan nearish the bottom of the light colored area. This means that if I draw straight lines on the the map from San Francisco to these two points, the angle between them is something like 30 degrees. They pass through very roughly the top and bottom of Nevada. But there's no line of constant bearing that passes from SF through the top of Nevada to the top of Manhattan while at the same time one that passes through the bottom of Nevada to the bottom of Manhattan.
This is all very wishy-washy, but it doesn't look right to me.
mbrubeck
"Lines of constant bearing" (or "rhumb lines") depend on the choice of poles.
A rhumb line relative to true north looks straight on a standard Mercator projection, but can look like a spiral on another Mercator-style projection where the pole and center-point have been swapped.
mkehrt
Oh, that's an interesting point. Maybe that's what's going on. It's hard to picture such a line with a different pole.
bmenrigh
If you search for "90,0" and then use the change orientation button to put the south pole on the bottom of the screen you can recover the more familiar distorted map.
Other choices really do put into perspective how distorted this projection is.
elil17
This reminds me of "The View of the World from 9th Avenue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
michalc
I made something along these lines a while back too: https://projections.charemza.name/
aylmao
I like the simplicity of yours!
pvg
A Show HN thread in 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840059
NotAnOtter
Damn, still getting reposted a decade later lmao
pvg
You ain't seen nothin' yet!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982493
Some HN evergreens are about to hit voting age.
nelblu
Incidentally a friend just shared this with me earlier today : https://www.thetruesize.com/
Ajedi32
Reminds me of bad map projection #45: Exterior Kansas[1].
patternMachine
Essentially the plot of The Inverted World.
somishere
This is basically how my mind works. Mind projection.
kzrdude
I honestly wonder why I find this so skin-crawling and unsettling. Something about the distortion of a familiar shape.
Theodores
Brilliant fun. Do change the layers and orientation, to play with the suggested locations!
Not the same idea, but the same category. You can Drag countries to different places on the Mercator projection to see how they warp and change size.
Classic example is moving Greenland onto the US. Or Russia. Russia isn't talked about much in this case, but its dramatic how it changes.
https://www.thetruesize.com/