Month: March 2015

An ignorant American cartography professor and Apple-Maps developer was teaching a class on Gerardus Mercator, known DST advocate. “Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Mercator and accept that he was the most highly-evolved cartographer the world has ever known, even greater than James Gall and Arno Peters!” At this moment, a brave, logical European Redditor who was a long-time contributor to sporcle.com and understood the superiority of cylindrical equal-area projections stood up and held up a globe. “What is the largest continent, pinhead?” The arrogant professor smirked quite Euro-centrically and smugly replied “Greenland, you stupid pleb! Can’t you see how much larger it is than Africa?” “Wrong,” said the student, and drew a perfect circle encompassing Greenland (which isn’t even green smh), “if Greenland is so big, how come there are more people outside this circle than inside?” The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata. He stormed out of the room crying those distorted conformal Mercator tears, his world collapsing around him. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Alphons J. Van der Grinten, wished he had received a European education and become more than yet another distributor of lies in our flawed education system, and was kicking himself for never noticing that India has a greater north-south extent than Finland. The students applauded and all subscribed to /r/mapporn that day and accepted the Peirce Quincuncial projection as the coolest projection ever. There was a school-wide renouncement of outdated colonialist maps, and south-up maps (like the ones they definitely 100% use in Australia) were hung up across the northern hemisphere. God himself showed up and enforced geography as a mandatory subject in schools nationwide. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He committed suicide and his body was tossed into the Mariana trench. And that student’s name? Harry Beck, creator of the London Tube map.

(Not mine, but so good I had to share!)