Speaking of maps...

[David]

I have a new sig.

[Jos Elkink]

I like this one ...

It reminds me of a class I had in college (a course on national stereotypes and nationalism) where we had to draw a map of the world. In the class were Dutch students, but also foreign students from different places on the world.

Most Dutch people carefully started drawing their map ... the Netherlands, Germany, France, England .... and then discovered that there was a bit little space on the sides of the paper left for US, China, ...

The US students started drawing a big Northern America on the middle of the map, and then somewhere far on the sides were some other areas.

The lecturer also showed us a Chinese and an Australian world map, which looks really odd from our perspective ...

And indeed, the whole southern hemisphere got very little space/attention.

I never knew Europe was *that* small ...

[David]

On many maps the size of North America and Greenland are hugely distorted in relationship to Africa and South America. Some of it is cultural bias and some of it is the way the map is projected... which I guess is determined by culture in what way its decided to be projected so it comes back to the same reason... hmmm I'm not sure if this map is entirely to scale but it is much closer than many... let me see if I can find one of those "true" maps.

[David]

Here is a true map by Buckminster Fuller:

[kroner]

i love that map

[rklenseth]

I remember that type of map from middle school back in the day that they use to teach us all about the different types of map. I think I remember that it is the most accurate to scale next to a globe though a globe isn't really a map.

[Sho]

The maps they have in Japanese schools look nicer. Perhaps it's because they don't have Kamchatka sticking incongruously out of a corner.