I'm sure Russia is bigger than an inch wide

That’s just what the US Military Industrial Complex want you to believe!

pff. that's tankie revisionist current eventstory

Nah, he will just call the map "DEI".

Actually, 164 to 1 countries voted in favour of the new projection, the one opposing vote was from the USA.

Can't get picky if you're an orange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

Equal Earth Area projection:

To be fair, that's his resting state.

Dymaxian is a pretty good one for showing sizes, useless for navigation though

How about Dymaxion

Pfft, you believe in Antarctica? Sure, a wHoLE ConTiNenT cOVeEreD in IcE.

I swear they did this so Trump doesn't get grand ideas of expanding hugely.

And witty banter!

The projection should have been changed, but it should be a a compromise projection like Robinson or Winkel Tripel that doesn't perfectly preserve area, distance, shape, or direction, but also doesn't horribly distort any of them.

I mean, before the advent of GPS, ships at sea got a "fix" of their position by taking two measurements: north/south latitude (via a sextant when the sun was visible) and east/west longitude (via a set of very accurate clocks that showed the time in Greenwich England, which could be easily compared to the time aboard ship). Mercator maps are just a grid showing where all the land is as a function of these two measurements on the X and Y axes. Any other projection would have just meant a lot more work figuring out where shit was, which is why Mercator became "the" map. It had absolutely nothing to do with any attempt to make Europe appear dominant -- Europe's dominance when these maps came into existence was too obvious and unquestioned to need any parlor tricks.

For political uses new projection is better. UN body are not going to use that to navigate.

As a neurodivergent map person, I'm over-aware of the difficulties of map projection. And I agree that simply calling this new projection 'accurate' is misleading

But at the same time, the use of the Mercator as the standard default map in situations that have nothing to do with ocean navigation for literally hundreds of years is absolutely a reflection of the relative power of the Global North, and can't be dismissed as 'nonsense about colonialism'

How do you use a globe on paper tho?

I don't really understand the difference, but Greenland is not bigger than Australia right?

Can't use a globe, the Earth is flat! I did my research

Isn't this incorrect though? As far as I am aware it is possible to represent true size (equal-area) or true shape (conformal), but not both at the same time

some nonsense about colonialism or whatever

Wow imagine believing this nonsense. Privileged "or whatever" AF. Why do you think USA voted against this? Ofc it's racist and colonial.

Then there is the politics. The United States voted against the resolution, insisting it was a distraction. But American resistance actually strengthens the argument of those who voted to change the map. If the map does not matter, why oppose it? If size does not matter, why insist on preserving the projection that makes the US appear larger? ...

Moky Makura of Africa No Filter put it more sharply: “If we got something as basic as Africa’s size wrong for this long, what else about Africa have we simply accepted without questioning? Africa doesn’t need to be made bigger. It needs to be seen accurately.” ...

The geopolitical implications of this generational shift should not be underestimated. The Mercator projection did not merely distort geography; it distorted ambition. For centuries, European and American leaders made decisions about Africa based on a visual representation that made the continent look insignificant. That misperception shaped colonial borders, investment decisions and strategic calculations. The Equal Earth projection will not erase that history, but ultimately, it will reshape how future leaders, African and non-African alike, conceive of the continent...

Dr Ikenna is right that the science of map projections is technical and trade-offs are unavoidable. But the politics of representation is not technical. It is about how people see the world and, more importantly, how they see themselves in it. Friday’s vote was not about changing geography. It was about changing perception. And perception, as every cartographer knows, is the map that matters most. - https://www.thecable.ng/the-mercator-myth-how-a-map-shaped-the-worlds-view-of-africa/