Show this map to Trump. He will not want Greenland anymore.
Acquiring Greenland would move the USA up 2 places in the list of largest countries (past Canada and China). That’s probably why he wants it.
He just wants it ti deflect from the Epstein Files.
He wants to embed himself in the history as some kind of victor. It’s his sick phantasy to be presented in history books as a hero. That’s why he is doing everything he can to irreversibly leave his legacy wherever he can. That’s why he’s building the Epstein ballroom. That’s why he renames buildings and places after himself. That’s why he wants to create new colonies. He’s a narcissist.
It is quick becoming a very important strategic hub in the Arctic due to shipping lanes opening up due to global heating. Greenland is also continuously opening up to natural resource extraction as ice disappears, and they have vast quantities of a lot of very valuable shit under the ground that keeps getting easier to access for the same reason, like rare earth elements, oil, natural gas, copper, gold, zinc, uranium, lithium, tungsten, the list goes on…
Controlling and exploiting that land is a major strategic interest for all the big (and small) powers. That’s why he wants it, and everyone else too. Fuck his fat fucking ass though.
The dissonance with Trump is astonishing. The Arctic is recently becoming more important strategically due to ice disappearing, and yet he’s one of the biggest and most stubborn climate change deniers.
Greenland: I was in the pool!
There’s shrinkage!
Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men!
Men map men map men map!
So, these men… What is their area of expertise?
Glue
Huffing, or…?
technically and
I’ll add that we use the mercator projection because it preserves shapes but not scale. There’s other projections that preserve scale but not shapes.
But how will we ever know who the anonymous “West” is?
Only the Mathematics and Cartographer classes, or the most elite Historians shall be able to decipher such knowledge.
Szupermaci
None of those preserve the shape of Antarctica!
What is this Twin-peak Earth?
how are the owls?
Superb!
Not to start any shit, but the Robinson Projection looks pretty nice.
This post didn’t need to include an ad for x-dot-com.
I don’t think that’s the true size. You’ll find all those countries are actually a lot bigger than presented on that map and scaled down to fit on a screen
You don’t know how big my screen is.
What is this map, a territory for ants?
It needs to be at least 3 times bigger then this
Ragebait
Tbh any discussion of Mercator is ragebait enough. (There’s no better choice for slippy maps btw)
This is why Trump wants Greenland so bad. He sees it, and says “It’s big, I want it. Get it for me!” and gets all Veruca Salt about it.
All because he doesn’t understand what a Mercator Projection is, on account of he beat up some nerd to do his homework that day, like every day.
A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.
Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump’s legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that’s all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that’s his entire ethical framework.
What does Miller want from it? No idea, he’s utterly, inhumanly insane. He’s just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.
The Dems need to make a major case out of PeeWee Himmler for the Midterms. Expose him, and add him to the list of horrors that we are running against.
I feel strongly part of why he’s even more “shrieky” and unhinged than normal is because the GOP broadly has NO plan right now for when Trump keels over. They tried so desperately hard to parade JD Vance around to get him ready to take the reigns, but so far MAGA haaates him, he talks like a politician, he has all that inhuman proceduralism that made people embrace Trump’s open hatred and malice.
So Miller is slowly realizing once Trump dies, which could be any moment, that he’s going to potentially face charges, and all the comparisons to people who met their end on a rope are likely dancing around in the back of that huge, empty skull.
wormtongued
I don’t want people associating Stephen Miller with a Brad Dourif character.
Mr. Dourif is a saint, and mensch, and doesn’t deserve that smoke.
The good news is Dourif is such a good actor and played such an iconic character in that role, that I doubt anyone is going to connect him to the apt-term that is already spreading through public lexicon.
Hmm, so the Mercator projection makes things look larger than they are? I think I’ve got an idea for another use for it… 😏
Is that it?
Your penis isn’t far enough north for it to help
All right, well first I may need to see a doctor.
Yet
Slightly enlarging something that is microscopic doesn’t change much.
10 x 0 = 0
This just in: projection requires distortion.
Not if you project it onto an oblate spheroid.
Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.
And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.
The reason it’s Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn’t stray too far East or West will be very accurate.
Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.
There also an interactive version of this, also a bunch of copies (not sure if this is the original, but i believe so): https://thetruesize.com/
How much do you wanna bet Trump wouldn’t be so gung ho on Greenland if he saw this map? He probably thinks he is going to double the size of America.
Can they spot grrenland on the map tho?
Trump handlers want the resources. Trump wants it because his ego is inflated by mercator projection.
Eh, I doubt that’s the case. It could be a 20 m^2 area, but if it had Greenland’s resources they would want it.
Did it cut out the European portion of Russia?
No, it just can’t be scaled down and somehow kept in place at the tame time
Its distorted on the Mercator projection quite a bit because of its width. So the true shape looks very different presented like this.
TL;DR Somebody made an awful mistake rendering this map, it’s way too low-poly.
It’t not exactly the European portion but most of its recognizable parts (Kola peninsula, Caucascus…) are missing because of the horrible SVG compression that deleted vertices presumably by count rather than keeping the most significant* ones. Just look how the Mercator/shrunk versions differ from each other and from an actually good map! Not even they will show every fjord of Iceland but at least they won’t reduce it to a triangle!
* A simple illustration would be Colorado, originally defined as a (Mercator) rectangle (between meridians and parallels) but ending up a 697-sided polygon (still way fewer than most surveyed administrative areas that size) largely because of surveying errors. However, if you pick the 1ˢᵗ, 175ᵗʰ, 349ᵗʰ and 523ʳᵈ vertex (or points every 362 mi/582 km along the border), you don’t approximate the shape nearly as well as by picking the 4 corners of the defining rectangle.
And because corners are always mostly convex (they have to be because turns add up to 360° for closed areas), this compression will remove area more frequently than add it. This makes the map quite disingenuous (maybe not intentionally), as it amplifies the effect OOP was trying to show.
If I were a full-time Lemmy commenter, I’d download the Colorado polygon from OSM, import sone geo-libraries into Python and do all 174** combinations of picking the 1ˢᵗ, 175ᵗʰ, 349ᵗʰ and 523ʳᵈ vertex, visualize each quadrilateral (with great-circe edges) as a video frame with its area printed in the center.What Colorado might look like using an algorithm similar to OOP’s:
(Manually created single frame but accurate to the number of digits shown. Also, I actually used every 228ᵗʰ of the 912 OSM waypoints, which are sometimes redundant (colinear), which I didn’t bother to check.)
(Edit: maybe official government geoJSON would help? The best files are “500k” or “1:500,000 resolution”, and even they reduce Colorado to 357 vertices. The complete dataset is probably https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/grfc/public_grfc_cur25_08.txt (50 MB text file!); see also legend and FIPS but that is for all Colorado’s counties, I’d have to merge the polygons and maybe also remove any non-polygon data if there’s any.) ArcGIS says they processed the data but they probably left lots of redundant colinear points in, since there’s 1565 vertices in their dataset.** Technically 697 options because 697 is not divisible by 4. But only ¼ of them are fully distinct, as every consecutive 4 maps have an identical starting vertex and just differ in which pair of vertices is 175 apart as opposed to the normal 174.
