A personal webpage.
To help myself understand how the area of Web Mercator tiles varies across the globe, I extended my map visualization . I find it a helpful reminder of how, despite having equivalent sizes on the mercator map, the tiles are actually far from equally sized. This has several implications in the realm of analytics. Web Mercator’s tiling scheme covers the majority of the globe in regular, power of 2…
Summary I created a blog post around a vizualization I created to communicate how map projections distort the true earth. Often, people are unaware of how a visualization presented as a map can distort the truth. I wanted to be able to quickly get a feel for a given projection. It’s also quite interesting and fun to play with the tool.
Mandatory Accompanying Playlist TL;DR. Every map you see in 2D is some kind of tradeoff between different types of distortion. It’s not always immediately obvious what tradeoffs are being made because we have been conditioned to seeing the world as a 2D projection of a 3D object. i.e. A globe unrolled onto a piece of paper. This tool helps you explore the Mercator projection to better understand…
Mandatory Accompanying Playlist The World The world is round. Google says so . The problem is, spheres can be hard to get your head around… Imagine we want to see a map of the whole world. We might try something like this. I’m not sure about you but I’m feeling distinctly underwhelmed. Only the countries in the center are undistorted and I can’t see the whole map. People used to put this on…
Mercator Madness What if I told you that you aren’t seeing the whole map? Here is a Mercator map in a form you are familiar with. I have added 5˚ circles drawn on the surface of the planet. Each circle has a radius of around 555km. Here is a slightly different looking Mercator map. The only difference with the one above is that I have trimmed less of the top and bottom of the map off. On this one…