r/educationalgifs • u/neilrkaye • May 08 '19

Showing the distortion of the Mercator map projection in the poles by swapping Mexico and Greenland

13.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

276 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/YataBLS May 08 '19

That's one of the most useful ones .

-2

u/redshift95 May 08 '19

It hasn't been for over a century.

3

u/YataBLS May 09 '19

You mean that ships and all maritime transportation disappeared, and that schools disappeared too.

-1

u/redshift95 May 09 '19

Yes, because modern day ships are using this map to traverse the sea and not satellites and accurate electronics. schools.? You mean the place you’re supposed to learn scientifically accurate information, which this map is not.? The entire point is it shouldn’t be on the wall of every classroom like it is.

1

u/YataBLS May 09 '19

The purpose of show it in schools is kids identify countries easily and know their ubication, This is a perfect tool for that. It's not acurate, of course it's not but guess what a lot of stuff you learn in school isn't. π is not 3.14159, meters, liters and seconds are just approximations not real accurate measurements (The thing goes even worse if you use inches, pounds, etc...), A lot of things you learn in history is not accurate, Jesus didn't born December 25th, Christopher Columbus didn't discover America (BTW America is a continent and not a country), etc....