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I've never understood why they do this.

It ends up with Jersey being the same size on the TV screen as half of Scotland.

this applies to a lot of maps of the world. Especially the older ones where colonized countries and continents where mapped smaller that the colonizing countries or continents. In modern times this is based on economic power rather than imperialist power.

http://www.exposingtruth.com/misled-erroneous-map-world-500-years/

Edited by EddardStark
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I remember when the BBC weather map came out. They said they'd bought the software from New Zealand and it automatically did this, they couldn't help it. But after complaints they altered the viewpoint slightly. Believe it or not the distortion used to be even worse.


However the new weather map was so pish I had to start getting hillwalking weather forecasts from the internet rather than the news, which was the beginning of the end of me using the BBC TV news as a serious resource. I still use the BBC website, but haven't watched BBC TV news for years.

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this applies to a lot of maps of the world. Especially the older ones where colonized countries and continents where mapped smaller that the colonizing countries or continents. In modern times this is based on economic power rather than imperialist power.

http://www.exposingtruth.com/misled-erroneous-map-world-500-years/

In that case surely Scotland should be bigger than England

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this applies to a lot of maps of the world. Especially the older ones where colonized countries and continents where mapped smaller that the colonizing countries or continents. In modern times this is based on economic power rather than imperialist power.

http://www.exposingtruth.com/misled-erroneous-map-world-500-years/

What a load of old toss. Land masses nearer the poles were stretched in the Mercator projection to provide a continuous 2D image. The result being that the well known imperialist powerhouse Greenland appears absolutely massive on most old maps. The fact that most imperial states were from the temperate zones, and therefore closer to the poles than many colonized areas, is an accident of geography, not an evil cartographic conspiracy (though their temperate latitude was probably a significant factor in their relative development - better climate for agriculture, disease less prevalent etc).

This also, of course, means that Scotland appears disproportionately larger than more southerly parts of Britain in Mercator projections. Was the old BBC weather map based on a Mercator projection?

Edited by DonnyTJS
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5,581 (mainland England) according to this -

http://www.cartography.org.uk/default.asp?contentID=749

That's 7360 miles V 3412 miles.

I think I remember reading (in a book about fractals) that coastlines are notoriously difficult to measure - at what scale does one begin so that you're not measuring round every pebble?

That bellacaledonia figure does seem daft though.

Edit: Just looked at Charlie's link where it's explained well - the bellacaledonia numbers don't make sense at all.

Edited by DonnyTJS
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I think I remember reading (in a book about fractals) that coastlines are notoriously difficult to measure - at what scale does one begin so that you're not measuring round every pebble?

That bellacaladonia figure does seem daft though.

Aye, "it depends" is a quote from one cartographer.
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I think I remember reading (in a book about fractals) that coastlines are notoriously difficult to measure - at what scale does one begin so that you're not measuring round every pebble?

That bellacaledonia figure does seem daft though.

Edit: Just looked at Charlie's link where it's explained well - the bellacaledonia numbers don't make sense at all.

Interestingly (or maybe not..) I was charged with writing some software 30 years back to represent the coastline of Scotland on a graphics display (Chromatics as it happens) using as few data points as possible. This was a time when memory was weighed in KB not MB or even GB so size was everything (ooh err..). 6 or 7 data points were enough then just "jaggify" the lines between. point being the length of coast could range between say 10 units to infinity, just make it jaggier.

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