Mercator projection

This is where he was shot, Meridian, Pennsylvania.

So when John Dee started to advise Queen Elizabeth and the British Empire, what he was using was Gerard-- Gerardus Mercator's meridian maps of longitude and latitude.

That's what it was all based on.

They were navigators of the seas.

They'd be vomiting off the blood and the guts and the gore that was taking form.

That's five hundred years ago, so imagine what they can do today on the world stage.

So Gerardus Mercator's meridian lines, why this is important.

So Gerardus Mercator's world map essentially is the atlas.

Question four.

The U.S. was the only no vote in a recent General Assembly vote to encourage governments to officially abandon what map projection in favor of equal area maps? Mercator.

The United Nations vote passed 164 to 1.

Two.

But yeah, I guess the Mercator projection inflates the size of lands the farther they are from the equator.

So that's why the sizes are wonky.

And we should change it away from that map.

But I did discover that the Mr. Mercator was a Flemish geographer.

Also within her court, our producer, Gunner, reached out to me and sent some information.

Mercator, from the Mercator projection map, which is the most common world map that we have, was also in the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

No way.

Yeah.

So we've got John Dee, Sir Francis Bacon, Mercator.

They are all the people that are surrounding Queen Elizabeth I.

Okay.

So that somehow reminds me of an old bit from West Wing where all of the cast members are assigned to just meet with some lobbying group just during one of the episodes.

And there is this... map lobbying group who's like oh the mercator production which we all use which makes greenland huge and africa really small it's wrong yes what if we flipped it upside down what if south was north there's no real reason that north is north and south is south it's just you know the geomagnetic poles are there but it could be either way but what if antarctica was the top of the world it's just a different way of seeing literally the world and everything it's perspective that is the lesson in every debate we have every feud there is it's perspective

right flip the ballot over because the person at the end of the ballot is more likely to be in your life than the person well i mean they are you just yes statistically you can run into them at the grocery store or a church or on the playground Just say, you ain't going to run into, you know, bless her, but you're less likely to run into soon to be elected Julianna Stratton, Senator Julianna Stratton.

I'm just saying, you might run into her at an event, but not in line at the grocery store.

Uh, can you see my screen? Awesome, you can show that now.

The, the most famous, uh, map, uh, that we have is the Mercator projection, uh, which everyone, everyone has heard of that even if they don't know what it, what it means.

This is, this is a version of the Mercator projection, and you can see even before I put up the little bullet points here.

So a- and this is...

All the maps I'm showing are from a, uh, Scientific American article that just came out yesterday called The Mathematical Impossibility of Making a Perfect World Map.

Uh, and it's, and it's pretty good although their description of how each of the projections are made is a little bit too simplified so I'm not gonna go into it because it's, it's kind of mathematically complex.

Um, but so a guy whose last name was Mercator, and so this came to be known as his projection, uh, developed in 1569 this projection.

And very roughly speaking, like this isn't entirely accurate and it's very imprecise, but imagine if you have a piece of paper, uh, that you've, that you've like taped together at both ends to make a cylinder and you drop it over the globe such that the only place the, uh, the paper is touching the globe is the equator.

It's a round globe.

Yeah, the Mercator sizing of Africa-

Yeah

... all that.

I'm sure I've snuck into some places that I shouldn't for emergencies.

definitely done that by the way we have a clarification a correction from vincent from the last episode from ola saying uh straight lines on the mercator mercator protection are rumb lines lines of constant bearing so they're not in general great circles the shortest route they are uh constant bearing the equator Yeah, so they're not all great circles.

They're just the lines of constant bearing, like direct, like a straight line on the thing.

So lines of latitude are straight lines on the Mercator projection, but apart from the equator, lines of latitude are not great circles.