I've waited twenty years for this. #GIS FTW
(Hopefully I won't need to wait another twenty for them to add historic empires, Mongol, Tang, Qing, Arab, Alexandrine, Achemenid, etc.)
#Maps matter.
Australia is as big as continental USA.
Africa is bigger than USA+China+India.
As a child growing up exposed to big Mercator maps, I thought Muslims in America should face east-south-east to pray towards Mecca. Then years later my mom showed me this app that said… east-NORTH-east??? Got down the globe and… mind blown. Thanks shit maps.
So when I see Web Mercator ruling the world, I 🤮 in my mouth. Cesiumjs.org 4 eva!
And the insights don't stop when you get a little smaller: South Korea, Ireland, and Uruguay superimposed above my state of Ohio, four hours drive diagonally-across. Via https://thetruesize.com
We've been thinking a LOT about how casually our perspectives get parochial as kids, as we design our kids' homeschool curricula and this is just underscoring the point.
Land area, population, GDP, life expectancy. Most of the relative rankings we have in our heads, and which we reach for when meeting foreigners or reading the news, are from paternalistic sources that completely mislead us. I predict that someone having a more tactile or visual understanding of world rankings and relative sizes, in these various dimensions, will see more opportunities and be more successful on average than a more ignorant person.
Via https://thetruesize.com — Australia, Brazil, and Canada rotated various ways & superimposed on continental USA. And Japan off the east coast.
We need more things like this. Globes are great, but we need globes with removable stickers, like this.
😍