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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Preserving the relative proportions of the continents while also emphasizing how the continents nearly form one giant supercontinent is why I prefer the Dymaxion projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

It works by projecting the earth onto an icosahedron (a D20) and then unfolding it. Distortion is fairly low and roughly equal across all the continents; here's a graphic that demonstrates the relative distortion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...

Honorable mention to the Peirce quincuncial projection, which both tiles the plane and also cleverly arranges the continents to concentrate distortion into the oceans, as an alternative aesthetic projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection

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Of discontinuous projections, I prefer Waterman over Dymaxion, it feels more regular and is more intuitive to see how it wraps around a sphere (or geoid). While Waterman might have more distortion in some absolute sense, the regularity of the distortions makes it still more pleasing (subjective, I know). One weird thing about Dymaxion is how the 70° parallels around both north and south poles are distinctly lumpy.

But really the biggest problem I have with Dymaxion (and with all discontinuous maps to some degree) is how difficult it is to grasp how the different landmasses are located in relation to each other across the discontinuations; the worst-case example is probably estimating the path from South-America to Australia or Africa which requires some degree of mental gymnastics to accomplish.

I see that you like Isaac Asimov, XML, and shoes with toes.

https://xkcd.com/977/

XML gets a bad rap, and I agree that efforts to crowbar it into being a data interchange format were ill-advised relative to just making it a good text-based markup language, but it had plenty of good ideas, and it took decades for data interchange via JSON to reinvent things like schemas and XPath that XML had from the start!

I prefer a similar one, the Cahill-Keyes projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahill%E2%80%93Keyes_projectio...

It uses fewer major triangular sections, has a more regular pattern to it, and best of all tries to keep the equator more or less horizontal.

I printed the Dymaxion SVG on A3+ card paper. Makes a great icosahedron!

Dymaxion map: one island, one ocean.

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