Mapthematics Forums

I assume that it's "pseudo" in the sense that if the underlying data is from an ellipsoid rather than a sphere, it's not truly conformal, only approximately so. This can be a problem if you were actually counting on the Mercator's property of being conformal. I’ve heard this argument befo...

At least I read about him creating another perspective cylindrical that was called the Pseudo-Mercator(the same name applied to Web-Mercator). Slight rant: I don’t know why people refer to it as “pseudoMercator”. There is nothing “pseudo” about it. It’s just the spherical Mercator with a particular...

Most sources give 1998 as the year the National Geographic switched again, from the Robinson projection to the Winkel Tripel. But I came across a page on the National Geographic site which stated that this change happened in their April, 1995 issue. This surprised me. Why the discrepancy? It turned...

Milo wrote: ↑Fri Oct 17, 2025 8:40 pm If this was an alternate universe fiction, I would probably decry it as unrealistic.

Fiction has the unfair burden of having to seem realistic, while reality suffers no such constraint. Practically a day goes by that I don’t wake up, read the news, and say, “You couldn’t make this up.”

— daan

Not necessarily. The Kuomintang's capital before their retreat to Taiwan was Nanjing ("Southern Capital"). Mao moved the capital to Beijing ("Northern Capital") at the end of the war, though Beijing had also at times been the capital of Imperial China, along with many other citi...

To be clear, I’m not talking about any particular map. I’m talking about cartographic principles. I mentioned Taiwan’s claim over all of China as one extreme of “dispute”, where practically no one would consider it to be reasonable to show on a map, versus the Falklands, where the argument is very g...

Marking a territory as disputed would be inviting readers to form their own opinions. Marking Taiwan as simply a part of China means readers who aren't previously aware of the existence of a dispute will have no reason to even suspect there is something to form an opinion about. I don’t think “disp...

Since the CIA is an agency of the United States government, it is understandable that despite the disclaimer on the map that the boundaries on it are "not necessarily authoritative", it might be felt that the People's Republic of China would complain that the U.S. was being insincere in a...

The US position is officially ambiguous, and has been since 1979. The position consists of: • Acknowledging, but not endorsing, China’s claim to One China. • Official diplomatic relations with China; unofficial with Taiwan. Since 1982, the US officially does not acknowledge Chinese sovereignty over...