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Today, the United Nations voted to adopt a new world map that reflects countries’ true relative sizes (programming.dev)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/world/un-vote-new-world-map-intl-scli

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[–] 22 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Web Mercator is a special kind of abomination, even down to the way the map is cropped to be exactly square. But it is probably the most suitable for navigation, as Mercator itself was designed specifically for it.

Buildings, streets and map features would be more distorted under Equal Earth projection than they already are with Web Mercator. Web Mercator also has the benefit that the cardinal directions are always straight respective to the XY grid, even though the Y direction is non linear.

There is no perfect way of flattening a 3D spheroid into a 2D map, sadly.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    But at the scale of streets and building surely the type of map projections is such a mute point the earth might as well be flat.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Not actually, it depends on the projection.

    The most noticeable visual distortion of a map projection at street level isn't actually size and area, but angle. While Mercator and Web Mercator distort both size and area, angle remains the same. But projections like Equal Earth distort angle to keep area and size the same.

    In practice, what this means is that with Web Mercator, you will see an intersection as 2 perpendicular lines crossing each other, leaving four 90° angles. But with Equal Earth, depending on the location, all those angles will be different, and the lines won't be perfectly perpendicular.

    (of course, Web Mercator also has this issue, because it uses a perfect sphere instead of a spheroid for the projection, but the very slight difference isn't really noticeable, and using a spheroid is more compute-heavy)

    Map navigation and satellite imagery are very specific cases where a Mercator or Mercator style projection are better suited, mainly because of the preservation of the angles. However, for any other case, Equal Earth is a very good projection, and I agree it should be used over Mercator. Especially in education.

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