Honestly, I don’t think humanity is ready for the technology we had a century ago. It’s far too easy to kill on a massive scale for our maturity.
Sure, that’s why I qualified with “for its intended purpose”. It’s not a great classroom map but it is perhaps the most historically important projection. The problem is this idea of “Mercator bad” has entered public consciousness. For example, the start of this thread mentioned “how not-great the mercator is” without any such qualifications.
https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=EJI98A0zZR6zkURc Im sure there were people who felt this way before this episode, but it really exploded in public consciousness afterward.
Yeah, it’s actually a really great map for its purpose of navigation, which is a pretty damn important aspect of map usage. I’m tired of everyone shitting on it because of that scene in west wing.
On the one hand, Mauna Loa is misspelled and misplaced. On the other hand, the big island is now the bigger-than-Texas island, and I enjoy that.
My grandfather (Japanese) asked over and over again for our family to take him to one of the few restaurants that still serve whale meat. He just wanted to eat it once more before he died (about 10 years ago). He grew up eating it all the time as he was part of a blue collar family and it was a cheap meat that everyone ate. He loved it and hadn’t had it in decades.
The family always refused and he never got to eat it again. I always felt bad for him; what Japan did in limiting whale meat consumption would be something like the US eliminating 99% of pork consumption in the matter of a few decades. Is it for the best? Absolutely. Still wish he was able to eat it one last time, though.