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AIM: maestrojed
YahooBiases in our current world maps. The world is not what it seems.
Where are you from? Down North? Up East?
Next time someone is giving you directions and they tell you to go North, pay attention. They will point up towards the sky. Vice versa, when they tell you to go South they will point downward. Why? North is not up, South is not down. Most likely it is because of the typical world map. I was recently given a world map by an educational software vendor. I hung it on my cubicle wall and looked at it with some coworkers. It was very similar to the map below. Examine it. I think most would agree that this is your every-day run-of-the-mill world map.
When I looked at the map that was given to me and then this one above, I saw nothing odd. It looked like any other world map I have seen. Then my coworkers and I took notice to where the equator lined up on the map. It cuts the map in half right? Nope. In fact the equator lies somewhere around here:
So I said, "Okay they just cut the Southern 20% of the map off. Antarctica is boring." But that wasn
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13. February 2005 at 17:27
I never thought of that at all. Its almost something we should consider correcting to give all countries equal representation of their political boundaries. I am not a cartographer, or capenter or court stenographer.
I think another interesting thing about maps is that they use political boundaries instead of geographic boundaries. Its again stange. And they use colors that are very similar on the value scale to try and not dimish or enhance countries. But with this whole perspective thing now being talked about it seems like we could just use any color and it wouldn’t matter. Maybe the same color.
I wonder what you will find in your work cubicle next week. I have some paper with a soft adhesive that allows me to leave notes about without getting tape to secure them.
Why don’t you give the people something to read? You spend enough time making these things. How about the fact that Tina Fey has made SNL "really" funny again.