Maps of the World

Maps have always fascinated me – I can stand staring at them for hours. Or at least, minutes. Whether it’s a small map of the area, or something covering the whole globe. There’s a few in particular that stand out as interesting, partly for their political background, and others for their technical approach. The first two, the Peters Projection, and the Mercator Equal-Area Projection, are attempts to illustrate the real area of the world’s land masses, and the last one is Google Earth, which provides a dynamic way to view the planet, including the facility to zoom into locations with satellite and aerial imagery.

Gall Peters Projection

Gall-Peters Projection Small

The Gall-Peters Projection (often known just as the Peters Projection) of the map of the world, also known as a cylindrical projection, is one that’s become popular with many socially aware groups. Mainly because it helps to reassert that the world’s poorer countries take up rather more of our land mass than many people realise.

Although the distortions are a little odd, especially east-west as you near the poles, the map does help to provide a truer picture of the size of many countries than most flat projections.

Mercator Real-Area Map

The better real area map, at least for taking measurements from, is the sinusoidal projection (shown below), but that’s harder to look at. In reality, no projection of a globe onto a flat surface can be perfect.

Sinusoidal Real Area Projection

Google Earth

Now Google is a big commercial company – powerful on the internet, and sometimes not that wonderful, but generally they’ve so far been a force for good. And one of my absolute favourites of theirs is the Google Earth application. I’ve spent many a happy hour zooming into countries and cities, checking out locations, and enjoying the ability to see some of the world’s sights from my computer. It’s an incredible application and I can recommend it to anyone. You can download it from http://earth.google.com/ and it works great on most reasonable computers.

Alternatively a globe makes a great piece of interior decor and doesn’t break when the internet goes down….

Credits: Peters-Projection care of NASA/Wikipedia and is in the public domain and can be used by anyone. Sinusoidal Projection care of Wikipedia and is a creative commons licensed image. Please visit the Wikipedia site for more information.

Cuban bathrooms

Cuba has, shall we say, a more relaxed approach to electrical safety than some other countries. In part because it’s poor – good electrics are expensive – but also, I suspect, because of some ignorance and lackadaisical enforcement too.

But I was still surprised to see this shower in our first B&B:

Cuban Shower

I will say one thing, however – in a lot of the finer houses the bathrooms remain as they were in the fifties, prior to the revolution. It’s an interesting perspective on design standards of the time, and mostly things were pretty good if you could afford good tiles. The fact that a lot of these bathrooms are still serviceable fifty years on is pretty impressive.

Anatomy of a Traffic Jam

I’ve just spent far far too long doing these two illustrations. The first shows a traffic jam that’s a problem, caused by people not using up all the road. The second shows what happens if the two self appointed guardians of the road move up a little, don’t block people, and if other road users don’t all try and keep to the left.

Basically, during busy periods, it’s much much better if people use all of the road. Yet in Britain it’s a common scene to see a mile of empty right-hand-lane prior to roadworks. Consequently the traffic jam is far longer than it needs to be and, in many cases, the jam will go far enough back that it blocks a junction – causing a lot of people extra delays and frustration.

So let’s all try and help others on not by obsessively queueing politely in traffic jams, but by using as much of the road as possible.

Anatomy of a traffic jam, part one of two

Anatomy of a traffic jam, part two of two

Footnotes

Since the page went up I’ve been made aware of the following two links which are very interesting and have animations of some traffic problems:

Wave motions and how to prevent them
How increased spacing helps improve merging

Thanks to brangdon @ cix for those.

I’ve resized the images slightly in the browser to help them fit better on this theme.  If you want to view them full size or in better quality, right click (or do whatever Mac owners do) on the image and click ‘view image’ to see the full unadulterated version.

I’ve also added this post to the Campaign for Thinking… just because