Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a two-ton block of cheese. It was there, for any and all who were hungry, it was there for the voiceless.

So... government cheese?

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

Probably seen that clip a dozen times and this was the first time I noticed Whitford manspreading in the middle of the clip and Janney batting his leg back. By the look on his face, it seems improvised to get a laugh out of her.

it’s a huge stretch to claim there was no bias involved. the biais is in putting europe front and center and at the top. Have you seen maps that place the americas in the center? How about maps with north and south swapped?

Almost no one lives in the south so they are never swapped.

Maybe more accurate is that there wasn’t some nefarious bias that was meant to oppress people.

Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.

The vast majority of items are manufactured in Asia now, especially globes. By your logic, should they unilaterally start printing Asia in the center?

Unilaterally? If they want to use maps that center Asia in their education and work, who is stopping them? In fact I'd wager they start their education by learning about the geography of Asia first.

I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".

Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...

Saying there is a bias is not an accusation of wrong doing or "demonization".

It's crazy how populists and misinformation agents have successfully convinced people that any mention of a potential bias is an "woke" attack on their whole personality and world view.

Only if you count bad evangelists as "misinformation agents". There are unfortunately plenty of bad actors who have persistently tried to use it as a social cudgel and an excuse to fight for social dominance, shield oneself from being questioned (including self-reflection), and to write others off. To be frank, it is no wonder people view it as an attack when that is exactly what it has been used for.

For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!

Not necessarily, but usually. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422476 linked a clip from the West Wing that blames biased Eurocentric maps for perpetuating colonialism.

Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem. And no, they should not be printing any part of the world in the center of the globe!

> Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem.

They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:

https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...

This isn’t my logic, it’s the logic of the map designers.

It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.

I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.

First you said the center is decided by who made the maps.

Then you changed it to who designed the maps.

In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.

Make up your mind?

>Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.

IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as

1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)

2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)

3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.

4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"

I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order

Fyi China calls itself 'Zhongguo' — literally 'Middle Kingdom' (Country)

I'd argue that, by coincidence, putting Africa/Europe in roughly the centre happens to be the most sensible. Extraterrestrials with no knowledge of humans would probably do this.

The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.

You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.

[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...

Maybe instead of putting Europe in the middle we could do something sensible like put the split left-right edges down the middle of the widest ocean.

Sorry, but what does this have to do with my comment?

If you nake a map for your navigation, what would you put in center?

Your starting point or any other point?

Actually, in China I saw a map where the cut was in the Atlantic Ocean. I am not sure how wide spread that is but I would say it makes sense for any world map used in Eastern Asia.

I recall that being reasonably common in New Zealand when I was growing up.

That is the default map in Japan, just search google images for 世界地図

It makes things further from the equator appear huge. There's no conspiracy or biases involved, unless of course you're proposing that the Mercator projection was developed to give Antarctica a false sense of superiority.

One of the common maps used in schools cuts off the bottom quarter of the map, including Antarctica making the southern hemisphere half the size of the northern

Except Mercator wasn't German.

He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator

"5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594"

Everything was a bit complicated in that region in the medieval period. In the C16, you immediately come up short with the concept of "Germany".

Germany the state - indeed, but German as a culture/language/nationality(in the contemporary definition) was definitely there.

Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the XX century.

My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define one's identity.

The video quality on that clip was so bad I uploaded a new 1080p version to YouTube: https://youtu.be/C4fgvLLzaB4

If you want to avoid YouTube, here's just the video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/szn691fdcgvxwh8/map_proj...

It ends too soon. The funniest part is when they talk about the northern hemisphere being on top and then them putting it on the bottom and her saying it is freaking her out.

Doh! Thanks for the spot. The 2nd part is actually from a different scene, but I combined them both and updated the links above.

It's fascinating how we're expected to believe senior White House officials are such perfect strawman doofuses that they have never seen a globe or the Mollweide projection, or were ever reprimanded by a geography teacher for saying "up" instead of "North". The only thing that scene is missing is for her to fall over in shock and disbelief at hearing that the Earth is round.

They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.

It is fiction. Relax and enjoy the show.

The only way I could enjoy that farce is after multiple, life-alteringly serious concussions.

This clip is always hilarious to me. Smugly declares "it's where you've been living this whole time," as he stands in front of a projection that is just as flawed, as all projections are, as the Mercator. The only priority of that map projection is attempting to account for the accurate area of landmasses, sacrificing correct shape of landmasses, as well as a ton of navigational utility.

A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!" Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe projection when you zoom out far enough.

This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at parties.

A globe is not a map projection.

With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.

And that’s the tradeoff of using a globe, whereas the tradeoff of the Peters projection is that the map is distorted in various ways, and the tradeoff of Mercator is that the map is distorted in other ways.

Which is why that West Wing clip is, frankly, pretentious, because it doesn’t discuss the negatives of Peters, wrongly implies that it’s “the” correct way to view the world, and makes no mention of other major projections, or even a globe.

Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers, which is typically great for the continental US, but I probably wouldn’t use it so much if I regularly made maps of other places!

To be fair, the West Wing was pretentious in so many other ways that this is one of the few clips that borders on genuinely educational. Flawed? Yes. But it's not an educational show, it's a bizarre hyper-liberal hour-long lecture to the viewer where for some reason every single character talks like an over the hill Jewish man with the same verbal tics and expressions.

And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.

A globe IS a map projection. It's the projection of the surface of the planet onto a sphere.

> as well as a ton of navigational utility

Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?

No I mean like when you open your maps application and want to go somewhere with GPS, latitude and longitude will be vertical and horizontal and proportionally spaced due to the map using a projection like Mercator...