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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps.

I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?

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One example map, and to me a pretty typical example of the genre, shows Alaska on a about half the scale of the contiguous states. Compare the by the scale markings:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_U...

This is not simply projection effects, this is explicit downscaling.

Another comparison, Wikipedia lists the area of Alaska as 1,717,856 km^2 and that of the contiguous United States 8,080,400 km^2, so on a map with only projection correction Alaska should be around 1/4 of the size of the lower 48, this is clearly not true on the wikipedia example shown above, and for any other map in the same style.

So no, Alaska is not scaled down for the sake of accurately depicting its size.

Great response. I was going to take a different tack because the Alaska issue seems so obvious, but then I remembered that some people out there don't have maps [1], at least not state maps of the United States.

[1] Including many U.S. Americans

Wouldn't Alaska be scaled up on maps being far to the north?

Have only really seen maps using Mercator myself though.

If it's a shape preserving projection, the usual ones, the opposite happens.

The closer to the focus of the map, the better it's area representation.

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