The UN challenges five centuries of cartography (not-ship.com)

That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.

It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.

> Mercator useful for sailing

This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.

That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.

The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.

That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.

K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."

All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.

If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.

"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"

Solid logic, mate.

I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.

I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.

You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.

https://files.catbox.moe/k11gqq.avif

  The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.

There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...

Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.

Equal Earth is basically Robinson with a more straightforward formula and accurate areas.

I have a Waterman on my wall :)

I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.

Both kids in Europe and Africa will actually end up with a more correct idea of how large both their continents are.

They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important. It was certainly not a Mercator projection by the way, Greenland was still a reasonable size on that map on the wall in the classroom).

Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.

I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.

The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.

Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!