Comment by sbaiddn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbaiddn | Hacker News Reader

Another "Europeana are racist ergo Mercator".

The Mercator projection is popular for one very important reason: ease of navigation [1]. If you know nothing but your location on Earth you can sail, walk, fly, paddle wherever you want with a Mercator map and a compass.

Thats it.

Before fancy navigation aids this was huge. Sure, trade winds and great circles were important consideration. But, at the end of the day, if poop hit the fan (think Shackleton expedition) and all you had was a row boat, a compass and a sextant with 800 mi of South Atlantic to cross, you could still make it home.

But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves. Here I agree, as the author is clearly projecting his white savior complex

[1] the author doesn't even get right the reason why the Mercator excels for navigation: constant rhumb lines. You set your course and you'll get to your destination without needing to correct (a great circle requires constant correction). "Small features are preserved" what croc!

This comment repeats a point made prominently in the article itself, and draws out one detail of the post while ignoring the bulk of it, which includes a bunch of interesting stuff, like the somewhat mind-bending sinusoid from Pakistan to Kamchatka that represents a navigable straight sailing line. It derails any interesting or curious conversation we can have about map projections in order to elevate a tendentious political argument, and dismisses anything interesting about map projections as if "Mercator is useful for navigation" was somehow dispositive.

This isn't conversation so much as it is rhetorical arson.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's quite common to comment on a subset of the article, no? And given this point was prominently made in the article, that should be more reason to receive attention in the comment section.

I also see an interesting sibling thread developing, so further discussion has been instigated by this parent comment...

The guideline speaks for itself here.

> The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves.

I’d like to see the Venn diagram of insecure white men and insecure white men who feel better about themselves because of the Mercator project.

What a strange flex.

Perhaps we could approach the issue with intellectual curiosity, as HN asks us, instead of dismissing it (complete with a psychoanalysis of the author).

Blindly accepting something is no more intellectually curious than blindly rejecting it.

> But no, the purpose of a chart is not as a practical aid to getting around. The purpose of a chart is for insecure white men to feel better about themselves.

Obviously, what is being said is not that Gerardus Mercator designed, in the 1500s, a map with the express purpose of misrepresenting the relative size of places in order to further a 21st century geopolitical cause of eurocentrism. That would be a very stupid thing to say, and I'm sure you're not that stupid.

It is perfectly possible, however, that a map projection originally conceived for navigation is (unintentionally) a misrepresentation of the world that does further such an agenda of eurocentrism and does misrepresent e.g. the size of Africa, in a way that is unsuited for educational purposes.

I don't even understand the relevance of arguing "but it's so great for navigating if you're shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific", which is obviously a vanishingly small use-case of this map.

I think we should rename it to the magnetic field map. Would make it less arbitrary, no offence to Mercator.

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