#james gall

[ssoiitgoess]

How world maps distort our view of the world

[weetweetie]

The Gall-Peters projection

An amusing passage from West Wing, presenting the Gall-Peters map projection.

The point is well taken that for depicting the sizes of countries, population densities etc. one should use an equivalent, i.e., equal-area, projection. Mercator is just not fit for this job.

However, the projection invented, and promoted with much fanfare, by German cinematographer Arno Peters in 1973 as an instrument of international social justice, had been invented and published already in 1885 -- under the name ``orthographic projection'' -- by the British clergyman and astronomer James Gall! And it is just one of over a dozen different equivalent projections to choose from, including half a dozen cylindrical equivalent projections like Gall-Peters!

Talking about re-inventing the wheel... the folks depicted in this video are just the tiresome kind that also in real life have been peddling this stuff.