Pronunciation (split from “Most widely used projections”)

[PeteD]

I don't want to stray too far off topic here, but I will note that I basically don't acknowledge the existence of the schwa as a vowel in English. Instead, I treat that vowel, when it is indicated in a dictionary, as some short vowel, such as a short u, a short i, or a short e, still fully sounded.

In that case, what I wanted to say was that it's interesting that the second "i" vowel in your perception of your pronunciation of the word "rhythm" appears to be what caused you to misspell the word as "rhythym" in standard, non-phonetic English. Other speakers, even if we only consider those who, like you, perceive a second vowel in the word and don't acknowledge the existence of the schwa, could just as easily have misspelled the word as "rhythem" or "rhythum" depending on their perception of their own pronunciation.

Incidentally, there's a word "riddim" in Jamaican Patois that refers to the instrumental background of a song and is derived from the English word "rhythm", so you're not alone in perceiving the second vowel as an "i" sound.

I promise this is the last thing I'll say about pronunciation.

[Milo]

I don't want to stray too far off topic here, but I will note that I basically don't acknowledge the existence of the schwa as a vowel in English. Instead, I treat that vowel, when it is indicated in a dictionary, as some short vowel, such as a short u, a short i, or a short e, still fully sounded.

It's a matter of phonemes versus sounds. You can argue that English vowels always have a phonemic non-schwa value, even when it isn't actually pronounced, as evidenced (in some but not all cases) by how other derivations of the same root "bring the vowel into focus" and reveal what it was. But I'd say something is weird with your accent if you never have any words where the vowel's value is inaudible. Totally possible, though: English is spoken by so many people, so widely distributed across the world, that pretty much everyone has a weird accent in the ears of someone else!

Like, temperature isn't a thing-per-area metric (in the sense that a 200-square-kilometer area isn't twice as hot as a 100-square-kilometer area, although you might argue it does have twice as much heat energy...), but it can still be useful to know whether it's better to think of Earth as mostly warm with some cold spots, or mostly cold with some warm spots.)

In the case of a temperature map, you might also want to know the rate of change of temperature with respect to latitude, which would be easier to visualize using a projection with equally spaced parallels than using an equal-area projection (except the sinusoidal, but then you might have other reasons for not using that). With a good compromise projection, areal distortion should still be low enough to tell that the Earth is mostly warm with some cold spots, although it could admittedly cause you to overestimate the size of those cold spots.

Fair enough! There's always tradeoffs.

Incidentally, you just proposed an application where the equirectangular projection would be favored Well, that or Eckert III/V, I guess.