Thread by @starlightgeek

I'm having a bit of fun playing with the scale of things on thetruesize.com

let's start gentle: this map is actually a really good explanation of 1) how fucking big the lower 48 are and 2) why so few people in the US become fluent in a second language

Another one that tends to blow peoples' minds. (I mean, I knew long ago that Australia was about the same size as the lower 48, but I guess a lot of folks didn't learn that fact?)

In case you were unaware, the continent of Africa is MASSIVE.

And then there's China

And for my UK followers: this is the reason Americans give you hell when you say things like "My folks live so far away... more than an hour."

I was taught as a kid that France is about the same size as Texas.

P much checks out

"How big is Brazil, though?" you ask. Well, my friends, Brazil is an Absolute Unit

The Mercator projection fucks us all up SO HARD.

Look at Brazil over China and Mongolia and Russia

Friends, are you ready to see Russia to scale?

This is gonna really fuck with your heads. (I've also left in the full view of Mercator-Russia for total headfuckery)

Or perhaps it'll help to show Russia layered over the USA?

(There's a really good political joke in there but it's honestly too depressing to make)

Here's another one that will fuck with you, especially if you're used to the Mercator projection: Greenland

O Canada

You're still pretty big. You don't really need that boost from the Mercator projection, and yet here we are.

I thought it would be good to get an equatorial country in here, too. Here's Kenya over western Europe and Texas.

Basically, the Mercator projection is garbage. Google uses the Spherical Normal variant of the Mercator projection. (I actually really appreciate that when you zoom now in gmaps, now, you get a globe instead of this crap.)

People get into REALLY FIERCE debates about the best 2-D projections. There are even shitposting groups on FB for cartographers and cartographiles (I know because I'm in several).

And yet, the Mercator is so bloody prevalent.

If you didn't have a Mercator variant in your schools as a kid, you might have seen the "orange peel" (AKA Goode homolosine) projection instead

It's marginally better, although it splits Greenland in two

Maps inform our worldview -- and I mean that both literally and figuratively. The Mercator deliberately makes Europe and North America look SO MUCH BIGGER than they are. It makes them look more powerful as a result. This gets into peoples' heads. It's seriously fucked up.

"What's the best projection?" you ask?

I got news for you. It's a fucking globe.

You look at a traditional map and might wonder how the fuck the Norse explorers went SO FAR across the ocean

Look at this.

Don't get me wrong; nearly 3000 miles from Sweden to L'anse aux Meadows is not to be underappreciated

(please note the stops in Iceland and the southern tip of Greenland, where we know Norse communities were established)

The Mercator makes it look easily twice as far

If you want to peruse some of the various map projections out there, this is a fun place to start. Scroll through them, examine how each one changes your view of things.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m…

(I think perspective azimuthal maps are the most responsible ones out there but I obviously have Opinions about maps and map projections.)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who's dropped in on or RTed this thread. I hope you've found it enlightening.

Two final tweets: 1) yes, I've seen the West Wing clip multiple times. :) But always appreciate a good reference (great episode, btw)

Texas. Texas vs the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, the northeastern US, and Alaska.

Y'know, just for a bit of scale/perspective.

I LIED. I am back again. Why? I accidentally left off the most important map of all: the one that illustrates the linguistic diversity before colonizers arrived.

Taken from native-land.ca

Basically, what became the United States didn't used to be monolingual. The Native Americans and First Nations peoples who lived here were as linguistically diverse as you'd expect this massive of an area to be.

Colonizers (and that includes my ancestors) tried to destroy this.

Language is such an important part of cultural identity. It tells us about a culture, its history, its beliefs, and so much more.

Destroy language and you destroy a huge amount of what makes a people. So much has been lost -- deliberately, aggressively.

Anyway, I'm off for the evening. I appreciate every person who's freaked out at or been excited about what they've read in this thread.

Good morning, folks. This thing kind of blew up overnight.

First of all, I owe an apology to Indigenous people for the disservice I did in this thread: I'm sorry. I made it sound like all those languages were gone. They're not; many tribes were able to keep their languages

alive despite active efforts to suppress their languages and cultures (which, by the way, continue to go on even today). Native Americans and First Nations peoples are not relics of the past, but live and thriving communities.

Second, North America isn't monolingual. About 20% of US households speak a language other than English at home, and Canada has two official languages, and an entire province where French is the expected norm. To fail to clarify that was a disservice to everyone who read

the thread, but especially those who grew up in homes where English was not the default.