Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com

According to Google Analytics... we're getting a half-dozen hits a day from Dehli, India....

HI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I the first month since the re-launch, we've had visitors from 122 different countries. We're lacking in central Africa and some of the Balkan states though... so, if you know anyone there, give them a nudge, would ya???

Where's the love from Greenland?!???!?!

You got Ireland...that's all that really matters! And why isn't that in shades of Brown or Orange??? What's this GREEN crap???

Is it just me or is Alaska disproportionately large on that map? It looks to be roughly 2/3 the size of the rest of the US, if not more.

It has to be that big. If it weren't they couldn't see Russia from there.....

Ydfalcon wrote:Is it just me or is Alaska disproportionately large on that map? It looks to be roughly 2/3 the size of the rest of the US, if not more.

Unfortunately, I'm going to try to answer this with a somewhat accurate answer that I can remember, so I may ruin the fun by putting facts to this. I believe things look out of proportion because of the map style being used. The Earth is a globe, so to stretch the map to a rectangular shape means stretching things out at the poles. If you notice, all lines of longitude touch at both poles, where here they are parallel to each other, or would be if they were shown. A more accurate depiction is one where they actually try to cut parts out and paste them in weird angles. I'll try to find an example of this and post it below.



There are better ones out there. The point is, to cut apart a sphere and paste it onto a flat surface is impossible without cutting at many different points and pulling things apart, or by stretching things to make it flat.

Oh yeah, I generally understand how making a curved globe into a flat map sometimes skews things, but this just seemed even more than usual. I don't know, just a casual observation really.

The relative distortion you are seeing in this map is due to it's projection, or in other words the two-dimensional depiction of the earth's surface relative to it's three-dimensional reality. In this case, the map is presented Mercator projection, which is a cylindrical representation of the earth's surface (imagine the earth's surface unglued, flattened out, and wrapped around the outside of a tube). So, everything near the poles is greatly distorted because the latitudinal lines are all parallel, and thus theoretically go on into infinity. As I recall, this projection is used for navigational purposes because it allows for accurate depictions of distance.

Why does my geography minor only come in handy when I'm slightly drunk? Either way, I'm a nerd. No comments.

Bleeding Orange wrote:The relative distortion you are seeing in this map is due to it's projection, or in other words the two-dimensional depiction of the earth's surface relative to it's three-dimensional reality. In this case, the map is presented Mercator projection, which is a cylindrical representation of the earth's surface (imagine the earth's surface unglued, flattened out, and wrapped around the outside of a tube). So, everything near the poles is greatly distorted because the latitudinal lines are all parallel, and thus theoretically go on into infinity. As I recall, this projection is used for navigational purposes because it allows for accurate depictions of distance.

Why does my geography minor only come in handy when I'm slightly drunk? Either way, I'm a nerd. No comments.

It could be worse; you could have been a geography major! And from what I remember, you are absolutely correct!

USGFreddie05-06 wrote:

Bleeding Orange wrote:The relative distortion you are seeing in this map is due to it's projection, or in other words the two-dimensional depiction of the earth's surface relative to it's three-dimensional reality. In this case, the map is presented Mercator projection, which is a cylindrical representation of the earth's surface (imagine the earth's surface unglued, flattened out, and wrapped around the outside of a tube). So, everything near the poles is greatly distorted because the latitudinal lines are all parallel, and thus theoretically go on into infinity. As I recall, this projection is used for navigational purposes because it allows for accurate depictions of distance.

Why does my geography minor only come in handy when I'm slightly drunk? Either way, I'm a nerd. No comments.

It could be worse; you could have been a geography major! And from what I remember, you are absolutely correct!

Hey, think of it this way - you and I are among the .0005% of the world's population who knows what the Coriolis Effect is. So we have that going for us. Which is nice.