the.com/mapping
the art of flattening a round planet and lying just enough to be useful
means The act of representing or correlating one set of things onto another — whether plotting terrain, charting data, or pairing each element in one group with an element in another.
from From 'map' plus the '-ing' that turns a noun into an act. 'Map' itself comes from Latin 'mappa,' meaning a cloth or napkin — specifically the 'mappa mundi,' the 'cloth of the world,' since early charts were painted on fabric. So every act of mapping carries a faint memory of someone spreading a sheet flat and declaring the world drawn upon it.
- impossible flat
- No flat map preserves both shape and size
- greenland lie
- Mercator inflates it to Africa's apparent size
- brain version
- Your hippocampus maps space with grid-like neurons
- here be dragons
- One real old globe actually bears that warning
- map ego
- North-up is convention, not cosmic law
google maps — launched 2005, now covers 220+ countries with real-time traffic and 99 billion images
openstreetmap — collaborative mapping project since 2004 with 1.3 million contributors creating free geographic data
usgs topographic maps — u.s. geological survey produced detailed elevation maps of all 50 states starting 1884