h a l f b a k e r yNot so much a thought experiment as a single neuron misfire.
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The world is commonly depicted with a Mercator preojection map. These are fine, but look how big Greenland is. Really it is not much bigger than Mexico but it appears 10 times the size. Plus Russia is obscene. A lot of map area is dedicated to circumpolar areas which have very little in them but
are artifically enlarged by the Mercator technique. Places with lots of things worth labelling have the labels crammed together because the things are so small on the Mercator map.
I propose that for purposes of mapping, the pole be placed near the locality where people will be using the map - for example, Texas. Texas will be enormous on such a map and occupy much paper, allowing greater detail for local features. Objects more distant from Texas will shrink in size, with the least paper devoted to objects farthest away - which for Texas and nearly every other populated area will be the poles, and they do not require much paper to do them justice. Of course objects on the opposite side of the earth will be as large as Texas, which is unavoidable but might be partially compensated by using some nonimportant beige or taupe in their depiction.
Mercator projection
http://en.wikipedia...Mercator_projection
[bungston, Dec 17 2009]
[link]
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I think the Indian Ocean is on the opposite side of the Earth
from Texas. |
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I would like to see this, but i don't think it'd be useful. There would be a lot of distortion and the "centre" of the map would be infinitely far away from everything else. I know that's not literally true but i can't express it clearly because of the whole aleph-one thang. |
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Have you considered using Mollweide but putting the most important location at the centre? Or a dodecahedral projection onto the faces secant to the caps of the geoid (don't quite know how to put that either)? |
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Either way up, that would give it infinite area. Is that what you want? |
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But Greenland is so much more important than Texas, it deserves to be bigger. |
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Objects within Texas will be very long and thin. |
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They'll also be closer than they appear. |
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Because of all the infiniteness, Texas would need to be either at the top or the bottom of the map, and the artifical pole (for example, Lubbock) would spread across the entire top of the map. For that reason maybe the artificial pole should be placed in a body of water as street maps would be difficult to depict. |
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This is a local pole, for local people. |
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If the map were printed sideways on a flag, then the pole could be the pole. |
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It would help Winnie the Poo. |
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I think it's a great idea - and somewhat reminiscent of the old(e) world(e) maps where the country of origin tended to take prominence in the centre. |
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If you can get a map in HEALPix data format, it should be fairly trivial to render it on demand in Mercator projection, oriented however you want. It actually sounds like a fun little software challenge, not over a couple dozen lines of Python code. |
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//Put Texas on the bottom.// |
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There's often a section near the pole that's not shown at all because it would be too distorted. Put Texas there. |
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