Accuracy where it matters is why. Do you have a better suggestion for projecting a sphere onto a rectangle?

einpoklum 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would not use such strong rhetoric as the GP, but I believe they probably mean we should lean towards using the Gall/Peters projection, which maintains lengths and areas, but not angles.

(There are of course other projections with other interesting features; or you could take the same projection but center the world differently etc.)

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ecshafer 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why? Why is lengths and areas more important than angles? You have to choose one, its essentially arbitrary. Personally I find it more useful to know what is parallel to what and what is at which angles from what, than some size. We have globes, so we know what the "real size" of Greenland looks like... this has always been a silly argument from the overzealous online looking for right wrongs that don't exist.

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willtemperley 11 hours ago | parent [-]

WEB MERCATOR DOES NOT PRESERVE ANGLES.

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ecshafer 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I know. But they mentioned Mercator, not Web Mercator.

	▲	willtemperley 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They were talking about Web Mercator but didn’t know they were!

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willtemperley 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Web Mercator does not preserve angles.

We're currently forced to use a projection that is strictly worse than what it was based on, the Mercator projection, created in 1569.

Everyone on this thread needs to read this presentation entitled "Use Literally Anything But Web Mercator":

https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/events/conf...

Let's say that a bit louder shall we:

USE LITERALLY ANYTHING BUT WEB MERCATOR.

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willtemperley 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This comment is inaccurate! Web Mercator causes such large errors in geolocation that the NGA had to issue an advisory about it [1].

There is a whole science behind map projections and Google ignored it entirely when they created Web Mercator, which was a hack to divide the world into a quad tree. It was vaguely clever and utterly stupid at the same time.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140607003201/http://earth-info...

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12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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willtemperley 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Accuracy where it matters is why

Why the downvotes for correcting this laughable statement? Web Mercator is well documented as being extremely inaccurate.

	▲	mmooss 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hi - I understand you feel strongly; your Web Mercator input is interesting. I would just focus on the intellectually interesting part - people might not get it; you can't control that or compel them to. You've been repeating essentially the same comment, writing in all caps (in some comments), complaining about downvotes, telling everyone they are idiots one way or another. None of those things are likely to be welcome.