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bottled_poetoday at 1:07 PM2 repliesview on HN

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


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einpoklumtoday at 1:12 PM

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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willtemperleytoday at 1:20 PM

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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