Best map of the world

[LazyPooky]

I didn't know we still used a map from the 16th century where all continents are distorted. Africa is not happy.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa...ze-2025-08-14/

The African Union has backed a campaign to end the use by governments and international organisations of the 16th-century Mercator map of the world in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa's size.


"It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not," AU Commission says the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was "marginal", despite being the world's second-largest continent by area, with over a billion people.

Such stereotypes influence media, education and policy.

Criticism of the Mercator map is not new, but the 'Correct The Map' campaign led by advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa has revived the debate, urging organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which tries to reflect countries' true sizes.

"The current size of the map of Africa is wrong," Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, said. "It's the world's longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop."

I have a few suggestions.



The other side of the earth:

[chuft]

It's interesting, I worked with a guy from South Africa. He would ask people to draw on a piece of paper a rough map of the world. People always greatly exaggerated the size of India and underestimated the size of Africa, because of the size of the Indian population. But Africa is far larger.

[chuft]

The future belongs to Nigeria, which has gone from 80 million to 320 million people in just a few decades. Look at their demographic pyramid.




I think half the population is under age 20.



Compare to China.

[LazyPooky]

It's interesting, I worked with a guy from South Africa. He would ask people to draw on a piece of paper a rough map of the world. People always greatly exaggerated the size of India and underestimated the size of Africa, because of the size of the Indian population. But Africa is far larger.

They have enough space in Africa for a growing population, not so much in India. Populations in first and second world countries are shrinking. The diagram shown for Nigeria was what was like in the 50/60s in Europe, sort of pyramid shape, and now it's the opposite - less young and more older people. Here is a prediction diagram for Italy, population shrinking:

DOUBLE CLICK FOR FULL VIDEO

[LazyPooky]

True projections of countries.
USA, Canada, China, Australia, Russia, Middle-East, Europe, Brazil, South-East Asia etc. all looks quite equal in size. On the other hand, the population density of these areas is so much different.

[chuft]

Weird

[boredjedi]

I had come across something about that a few days ago.
Projecting a round planet onto a flat plane. There's going to be distortion.
There's a terminology for that but it escapes me. Your best bet is to just use an
actual globe.

[chuft]

Greenland is the strangest. Although I don't see Antarctica. Russia is pretty weird too.

[LazyPooky]

Scandinavia is now so small too. I already noticed that when I was there and traveled through these countries. I thought those were so large countries that it could take forever to get to the other side, but the opposite was true. Before I knew it I was in the northern region coming from the south. Didn't expected that because I had this distorted map in my mind.

[chuft]

Yeah that's strange. These areas are always so large in wargame maps. But they shouldn't be.

[chuft]

Every wargame map has a scale, e.g. 100km to the hex. They must know the Scandinavian and Russian hexes are not actually that big in the north. But I think they keep things the same as Mercator because Scandinavian and Russian roads were dirt roads and logistics were crappy with almost no paved roads or limited railroads etc. It is much easier to move an army in Western Europe than in the East or North due to all the paved roads and railroads.