this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
709 points (98.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
9172 readers
2330 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
in case there are others like me who have to see what it looks like on a Mercator projection map:
Can we have a map projection/grid system where this uh, great circle, is the prime meridian, defines the new 'poles' via another 90 degree orthogonal great circle that touches both actual poles?
Wow. I can't believe my perspective of the world is that distorted. It makes me want to only look at it in 3D. If we've all mainly looked at Mercator projections our whole lives our sense of where everything is relative to everything else and what direction is completely off.
People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken. I think the average person knows it's off and people think there is an error factor to consider that a really straight like might be a little squiggly. But nope. This made me realize the Mercator gives pretty much zero accurate sense of direction if real distance is involved.
With respect, this is silly. People complain about the proportional sizing of the Mercator projection because disproportionate sizing is literally the only problem with the Mercator projection.
The sense of direction being off has got literally nothing to do with Mercator. That's an inherent drawback of trying to project a three dimensional globe onto a 2D image. Literally every single projection has this exact problem, in one form or another. It is considered ot be an acceptable trade-off for not having to work with globes all the time.
Stop looking for yet more baseless reasons to bash the Mercator projection, which is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable projection to use within its intended usecase (which this specific example literally is).
Short distances are fine, and obviously directly east/west are fine. Directly north/south is also pretty alright, but, as you move further from the equator, any east or west movement is covering less distance, and vice versa.
Right. That is the size issue. I'm saying there is a substantial direction issue as well.
So would there be turning involved still orrrrr?
You're constantly, gradually turning downward, technically.
Actually not turning would be falling. You are constantly being turned upward.
what
no, that's a straight line
No. Similarly, if you look at how planes fly, they fly in what looks like arcs, going north and then back south. On a mercator projection in looks longer, but it is the shortest straight (ignoring the curve of the earth) line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_distance