the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling for a gradual abandonment of the Mercator projection, the map that has dominated our perception of the world for more than four centuries, and a move towards maps that more accurately represent spaces. 164 countries supported the resolution, 6 abstained, while the United States stood alone in opposition, considering the resolution unnecessary.
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It was not a "veto" in the legal sense, as no country has the right to veto in the General Assembly, but it gave the scene a striking symbolism, as there is a world that almost entirely agrees on redrawing its image or correcting it to be precise, and one superpower says "no," but hasn't that been the case for many years? Consider the Palestinian issue, for example, and all the developments regarding it during the past years.
In Africa, the vote looked more like a long-awaited symbolic victory, as African countries did not view the issue as merely a technical dispute between cartographers. Togo, with the support of the African Union, spearheaded a campaign to push the resolution as an attempt to restore Africa's true size in the global imagination, after centuries during which the continent appeared on school walls and screens around the world much smaller than it actually is.
"For the campaign's supporters, happiness was simple in appearance but profound in meaning."
For the campaign's supporters, the happiness was simple on the surface but profound in its meaning. For the first time, Africa wasn't growing larger on the map; the map simply stopped shrinking it. But to understand the depth of this, we need to pause for a moment to grasp the secret of African happiness and resilience in the face of American indifference. This pause will take us back to the traditional geography lessons taught in schools.
a sphere, like the globes you see in gift shops, though the latter are, of course, much more regular. This spherical model on maps is indeed ideal, but it can't serve us all the time. For example, while traveling by ship, or while studying geography, we would prefer to have a paper map in front of us on which to measure distances with a ruler, or perhaps we would want to write annotations next to it in books, or transport those maps from country to country for study. Of course, you wouldn't travel from place to place on a giant wooden ball.
Here we will ask Carl Friedrich Gauss, the most famous German mathematician, to solve this problem for us: How can we convert a three-dimensional spherical map into a two-dimensional flat image?
The man will simply answer us: From a purely mathematical standpoint, we cannot transfer the image of the Earth's continents from the sphere to flat maps with absolute accuracy. To understand this, you can try cutting an orange and removing its outer peel, then trying to make a flat plane out of it. When you do that, you will discover that you cannot convert it into a flat shape in any possible way; there will always be some error.
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