The 25 March 2024 xkcd honours Greenland’s place as a measure of cartographic distortion. It’s also, unexpectedly, a riff on the idea of the 1:1 scale map (cf. Borges), especially if you consult the comic’s alt text: “The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.”
Previously: xkcd: The Greenland Special.
Today might be a good day to look at cordiform map projections—maps in the shape of a heart. This Geography Realm post (and related video) looks at the history of such projections, such as the Werner and Bonne, which first saw use in the 16th and 17th centuries. This Library of Congress blog post explores two maps that use the projection: a 1795 Ottoman Turkish map attributed to a Tunisian cartographer, and the 1534 map by Oronce Finé (pictured) that apparently inspired it.
Matthew Edney has written a long blog post on Arno Peters and his map.
I’ve been struggling for months now on how to deal with Arno Peters and his world map. Every time I turn to the subject, I just get bogged down by the complexity of the scattered and multifaceted literature, by the insanity of much of Peters’ map work, and by the different responses to his work. […] After at least three tries to say something new, and floundering each time, I am presenting this blog entry simply as an attempt to organize the information about Peters in a way that makes sense to me, which is to say historically. Think of it as a long bibliographical essay based on what I have to hand (so not comprehensive, especially in the German-language literature). I’m not sure that it says anything necessarily new or significant. So please join me as I go through a series of cuts at Peters and his map work.
Daniel Huffman’s map projection trading cards are making a comeback. “While my colleagues and I did our best to let everyone know about these cards, some people inevitably missed out during the first print run. I’ve had many people contact me asking and hoping to get their hands on a pack or two. So, I am bringing them back for one final print run via Kickstarter,” writes Huffman. “I hope you’ll share this widely, so that we don’t miss anyone this time around, as this is almost certainly the last time these cards will be printed.”
Previously: Map Projection Trading Cards.
The latest in Randall Munroe’s Bad Map Projection series on xkcd is perhaps his most evil yet: it turns all longitudes positive—i.e., it turns west longitude into east longitude, putting Quebec somewhere in Kazakhstan and the Panama Canal off Sri Lanka.
Fresh off of producing a (now sold-out) line of map projection trading cards, Daniel Huffman has produced a 16×24-inch poster showing the surprisingly close and entangled relationships between the various map projections.
I first learned about a couple of these connections several years ago. I don’t quite remember how or where, but I found out that the Mercator projection was equivalent to a Lambert Conformal Conic with the standard parallels set opposite each other across the Equator. And that if you moved both those parallels up to a pole, you got a Stereographic. My mind was suitably blown, and I saved it as a fun fact to share with people. This year, while working on The Projection Collection, I spent a lot of time on daan Strebe’s site looking up details, and I often saw his notes (usually derived from Snyder/Voxland) about how projections were related to each other. I started to realize there were a lot of these connections out there, and I thought it might be fun to diagram them in some way.
The diagram is digital-only (PDF) and donationware.
Daniel Huffman’s map projection trading cards are now a thing you can order. Daniel, earlier this month:
A couple months back, I floated an idea for making some fun trading cards based on map projections. I’m very happy to report that several dozen of you responded and contributed designs to help make the set happen. I’ve been spending several weeks on managing everyone and working through logistics, and I’m pleased to now be able to offer a pre-order of The Projection Collection.
The cards can be pre-ordered here, with delivery later this year (or pickup at NACIS). Each pack has 16 cards, with complete sets not available by design—these are meant to be trading cards in the classic sense. Pre-orders will close on July 6, so you have until then.
To follow-up on xkcd’s Madagascator cartoon (previously), I missed the fact that clicking on the cartoon at the xkcd website actually did something, but Keir caught it: it links to Drew Roos’s Mercator: Extreme, an online tool that allows you to have some fun with the Mercator projection’s excessive polar distortion by making any point on the planet the North Pole and which clearly served as Randall’s inspiration.
Uncharacteristically for xkcd’s Bad Map Projection series, the Madagascator is actually totally legitimate as a projection. Not that it’s any less mischievous, mind.
Update, 3 May: Turns out there was more to this xkcd cartoon. See Mercator: Extreme.
Randall Munroe’s map projection humour is increasingly on point, as last Friday’s xkcd demonstrates. (The mouseover text is even better: “There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.”)
Previously: xkcd: The Greenland Special; xkcd: All South Americas; Blame the Mercator Projection; xkcd’s Time Zone Map; xkcd’s Liquid Resize Map Projection.
Stefan Reifenberg’s Map Projection Explorer is another interactive tool that morphs a world map into the projection of your choice. The availability of data from the d3.js library seems to be enabling a lot of them. [r/Maps]
Previously: Map Projection Playground; Comparing Map Projections.
The Spilhaus projection has been available to ArcGIS Pro users for nearly two years. Now, to expand the Spilhaus’s availability beyond ArcGIS users, John Nelson provides vector assets suitable for designers working in, say, Illustrator.
Previously: The Spilhaus Projection Comes to ArcGIS Pro; Everything’s Coming Up Spilhaus; About the Spilhaus Projection.
There is something decidedly off about a map-print basketball that stretches a Mercator projection across the basketball’s surface instead of, you know, doing it like a globe. Why? Why would they do such a thing?
It’s a Spalding ball exclusive to Urban Outfitters, it costs $29, and it hurts my brain. [r/Maps]
A lot of fun can be had at Florian Ledermann’s Map Projection Playground, which loads up nearly a hundred map projections for you to manipulate: controls enable you to change the centre meridian and several other parameters. You can even overlay a simplified Tissot’s indicatrix! [Maps Mania]
At some point, xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is going to put out a book focusing on his map-related cartoons, isn’t he. The latest in his “Bad Map Projection” series (previously: All South Americas, Time Zones, Liquid Resize) is The Greenland Special, an equal-area projection except for Greenland, which uses Mercator. And I thought he was messing with us before.
