Self-Smart Yourself

I'm sure you've seen the self-smarted video - you know, the guy who doesn't need books or things, but is just self-smarted by himself...

So, to prevent you from reading books (which for to be can make you dead) to learn some more stuff about the world around you, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the blog - and maybe just blow your mind. But don't worry - I'll save some room for oxygen and, like, stuff.

One episode of the West Wing (WW) was recently brought to my rememberance - it was one of the "big block of cheese day" (BBOCD) episodes. On the BBOCD, as Leo likes to explain it, the White House (WH) opens its doors to those groups who typically would not get an audience with members of the WH Staff. Several WW fan sites report the following information:

Big Block of Cheese Day is a fictional workday on the television program The West Wing. On Big Block of Cheese Day, the White House Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, encourages his staff to take meetings with fringe special interest groups that normally would not get attention from the White House. Big Block of Cheese Day is "celebrated" in episodes 105 and 216.

White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler refers to it as "Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About Day," and Deputy Communications Director Josh Lyman refers to it as "Total Crackpot Day".

Get the idea?

I was reading my morning slice of knowledge from my company's library team and skimming for recent reports or articles that were of interest to me. One of the proffered articles included a discussion of events in a different part of the world, and included an image showing a map of the area with other details.

It was looking at this map that reminded me of this discussion that C.J. Cregg has with a [fictional] group called the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality (OCSE).

Now, you're probably used to seeing a map that looks like this:

The US is on the left-hand side, Greenland takes up a good chunk of the top-middle, and then the former Soviet Union stretches out across most of the rest of the map. This map is a Mercator projection map, based on "a cylindrical map projection presented by the [...] cartographer Gerardus Mercator, in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course [...], as straight segments."

Well, that's good, right? We want to be able to travel around and sail the high seas! However, the encyclopedia article points out some drawbacks to this method: "While the linear scale is constant in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite."

The challenge with making maps is that the Earth is a sphere,

(although slightly "smushed" [yes, that's an appropriate term to use when self-smarting yourself], which is why some individuals got together and created a system to help locate yourself on the Earth and navigate around it accurately, since the shape was more ellipsoid that spheroid. In the 1950s, the US Department of Defense (DoD) "began to develop the needed world system to which geodetic datums could be referred and compatibility established between the coordinates of widely separated sites of interest". This led to the creation of the World Geodetic System (WGS), which has updated and modified since by the DoD, going through several revisions (WGS-1966, -1972) to get to where it is today -- WGS 84. This system, like several others, was developed by the military, but benefits you as a citizen today [what would life be like without checking out the world through satellite photos incorporated into Google Earth, or without being able to plug in an address to your GPS unit and get directions to somewhere new?].)

and maps are obviously flat. You probably did the hands-on lesson in school, trying to peel and orange and lay the peel out flat...

But there are other ways to depict the Earth's spheroid surface on a two-dimensional plane. Diversophy has a great article about map projections, focusing on the Peters World Map. It too starts off by showing a Mercator map:

and then by presenting this discussion relating to the distorted proportions mentioned earlier as a drawback:

The Mercator is also a "conformal" map projection. This means that it shows shapes pretty much the way they appear on the globe. The mapmaker's dilemma is that you cannot show both shape and size accurately. If you want a true shape for the land masses you will necessarily sacrifice proportionality, i.e., the relative sizes will be distorted.

Africa: 11.6 million square miles

Greenland: 0.8 million square miles

Do you see that? Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, but is actually a fraction of the size when you compare land mass (million square miles).

Diversophy continues:

The Mercator projection creates increasing distortions of size as you move away from the equator. As you get closer to the poles the distortion becomes severe. Cartographers refer to the inability to compare size on a Mercator projection as "the Greenland Problem." Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa's land mass is actually fourteen times larger (see figure below right). Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles it is common to crop Antarctica off the map. This practice results in the Northern Hemisphere appearing much larger than it really is. Typically, the cropping technique results in a map showing the equator about 60% of the way down the map, diminishing the size and importance of the developing countries.

This was convenient, psychologically and practically, through the eras of colonial domination when most of the world powers were European. It suited them to maintain an image of the world with Europe at the center and looking much larger than it really was. Was this conscious or deliberate? Probably not, as most map users probably never realized the Eurocentric bias inherent in their world view. When there are so many other projections to chose from, why is it that today the Mercator projection is still such a widely recognized image used to represent the globe? The answer may be simply convention or habit. The inertia of habit is a powerful force.

A different type of projection is an "Equal-Area" projection. This shows sizes in proportion while sacrificing true shape. The Peters Projection is one type of equal area map. Is it the only one? No, there are hundreds of others, but only a handful of others are in common use. The Mollweide projection, developed in 1805, is commonly used for displaying distributions (people, telecommunications equipment, the world's religions, etc). Karl B. Mollweide (1774-1825) specifically sought to improve upon the weaknesses of the Mercator projection. The Eckert IV is another equal area projection developed in the 1920's by Max Eckert (1868-1938). This has the advantage of less shape distortion near the equator and the poles. A fourth equal-area map is Goode's Homolosine created in 1921 by J. Paul Goode (1862-1932). This interrupted map looks like an orange peel (see figure below) and has less shape distortion than the other equal area maps.

Is one projection "better" than another? No! There are simply different ones for different purposes. The Peters projection is commonly used in contrast to a Mercator projection, and is visually engaging because it is so jarringly different. At ODT, Inc. we prefer it above other equal area projections because it shocks viewers into questioning their assumptions, about maps specifically and about life in general. It helps people to "think outside of the box" by exploring how what they see is predicated on what they expect to see.

So let's look at some of these other projections mentioned:

Peters

Mollweide

Eckert IV

Goode's Homolosine

Continuing the Diversophy discussion:

Other projections in use today include "Compromise" ones: projections that try to show shapes more or less as they are on the globe without distorting relative sizes too badly. The Van der Grinten projection was developed in 1904 and was the official projection of the National Geographic Society from 1922 to 1988. From 1988 to 1998 the National Geographic Society used the Robinson projection (created in 1963 by Arthur H. Robinson). Recently the National Geographic Society adopted the Winkel Tripel projection. Oswald Winkel developed this projection in 1921, and it has the advantage of minimizing shape distortion in the polar areas.

Here's a Van der Grintern:


I'm sure you're aware of the power of images. The 1960 debates between Nixon and Kennedy highlighted the power of the television image. According to the CNN AllPolitics website, "What everyone remembers is the first debate, where the telegenic Kennedy won the image battle over Nixon who, recovering from the flu, appeared pale and refused make-up."

What we see and what we believe are interconnected. A book I read in college, called Ways of Seeing by John Berger, begins:

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages, when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today.

Our minds and our eyes are interesting organs. Here's another example -- maybe you've seen this in your inbox:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

So - where am I going with all of this?

Have you ever thought about your "place" in the world? What if your world was flipped upside-down?
Like this,

or this:

This second map is a Peter's projection map that has been rotated 180-degrees. It shows the positions and the relative sizes of the continents more accurately than the Mercator map from the beginning. With the world upside (and some countries less "in the spotlight"), how do you think about the world now? Why should North be "up"? Isn't the person standing at the South Pole "on top" of the Earth, since his feet point towards the center?

Deep stuff.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, watch C.J. meet OCSE, and ask, "Why are we changing maps?" Pretty much everything I wrote above, summed up in about 3 minutes 49 seconds.