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Podcast: History Unplugged Podcast
Episode: Maps Have Bigger Problems Than the Mercator Projection. They Invent Mountain Ranges and Usually Eliminate New Zealand
Description: Maps have always had problems. Five hundred years ago, maps were wildly inaccurate simply because cartographers were drawing the edge of the known world, limited by slow ships and nonexistent satellite data, resulting in continents that were too large, too small, or entirely misplaced. All of those problems have been solved thanks to new technology, but now there are new ones. Even though we know the exact dimensions of Earth, our maps are still "wrong" because we force a three-dimensional globe onto a flat surface, leading to mathematical distortions like the Mercator projection, which wildly exaggerates the size of...