the.com/cartography
the ancient art of flattening a sphere and lying just enough to be useful
means Cartography is the science and art of making maps — drawing the world's surface to scale with symbols, lines, and labels so others can find their way through it.
from From the French 'cartographie,' stitched together in the 19th century from two older threads: 'carte' (a map or card, from Latin 'charta,' a leaf of papyrus or paper, itself borrowed from Greek 'khartēs') and '-graphy,' from Greek 'graphein,' to write or draw. So at heart the word means simply 'paper-drawing' — a humble name for the grand business of putting the planet on a page.
- the lie
- every flat map distorts size, shape, or distance
- greenland
- looks bigger than Africa, is fourteen times smaller
- here be dragons
- appears on just one surviving historical globe
- projection wars
- Mercator vs Peters sparked real political fights
- oldest map
- a 14,000-year-old stone slab in Spain
mercator projection — 1569 map by gerardus mercator that distorts polar regions but preserves navigation angles
mappa mundi — medieval world maps like the hereford mappa mundi (1300) that placed jerusalem at center
zheng he's maps — chinese admiral's nautical charts from 1405-1433 voyages covering indian ocean and east africa