Why Every World Map Is Wrong

The idea that the world maps are wrong — all of them — is hardly controversial. It’s a mathematical fact that turning a globe (or an oblate spheroid) into a two-dimensional object will result in unavoidable distortions. In the TED-Ed lesson above by Kayla Wolf, you’ll learn a brief history of world maps, starting all the way back with the Greek mathematician Ptolemy, who “systematically mapped the Earth on a grid” in 150 AD in order to create maps that had a consistent scale. His grid system is still in use today — 180 lines of latitude and 360 lines of longitude.
Most of the world maps we knew come from the Mercator Projection, “a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569,” writes Steven J. Fletcher.
This map projection is practical for nautical applications due to its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians…. the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. 
Mercator’s innovation allowed for the shipping routes that created the modern world (including those through the now-unblocked Suez Canal). But the projection has its problems: 14 Greenlands, for example, could fit inside the continent of Africa, says Wolf, but “you wouldn’t guess it from most maps of the world”  in which the two land masses are almost the same size.





“In 2010,” Adam Taylor notes at The Washington Post, “graphic artist Kai Krause made a map to illustrate just how big the African continent is. He found that he was able to fit the United States, India and much of Europe inside the outline of the African continent.”
Geographical misperceptions “shape our understanding of the world,” Nick Routley writes at Business Insider, “and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever.” We are no longer primarily using maps, that is to say, to chart, trade with, or conquer formerly unknown regions of the world — from locations assumed to be the natural centers of commerce, culture, or religion.
Non-Mercator world maps have, over the last few decades especially, attempted to correct the errors of cylindrical projection by unfolding the globe like an orange peel or a series of interlocking triangles, as in Buckminster Fuller’s 1943 Dymaxion Map. These have proved nautical miles more accurate than previous versions but they are useless in navigating the world.
Why create new, more accurate world maps? Because the Mercator projection has given the impression of Euro-American geographical supremacy for almost 500 years now, Wolf’s lesson argues, simply by virtue of the location of its origin and its original purpose. But it is now not only inaccurate and outdated, it is also irrelevant. Maps play a vital role in education. The practical utility, however, of flat world maps is usually beside the point, since GPS technology has mostly eliminated the need for them altogether.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch the Classic Silent Film The Ten Commandments (1923) with a New Score by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips) & Scott Amendola

For Passover 2021, the culture nonprofit Reboot has released “a modern day score to Cecil B. Demille’s 1923 classic silent film The Ten Commandments with Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips) and Scott Amendola.”
Reboot writes: “Berlin, Drozd and Amendola created a momentous new score for the Exodus tale, musically following Moses out of Egypt and into the Dessert where he receives the Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille’s first attempt at telling the Ten Commandments story was in the Silent era year of 1923. The film [now in the public domain] is broken up into two stories: the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and a thinly related ‘present day’ melodrama.”
Enjoy it all above.
via BoingBoing
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Watch the Classic Silent Film The Ten Commandments (1923) with a New Score by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips) & Scott Amendola is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Hear the Beautiful Isolated Vocal Harmonies from the Beatles’ “Something”

How many songs did Pattie Boyd — fashion model, photographer, muse, and wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton — inspire? It’s hard to say, since some of the lyrics purportedly written for her, like those in Harrison’s breakout “Something,” may have been for someone else, then diplomatically attributed to Boyd. Or, in the case of “Something” — the first Harrison song to come out as a Beatles A-side single and the song that convinced the world of his formidable songwriting talents — they might have been about a big, blue supernatural something.
According to Joe Taysom at Far Out magazine, Harrison “became obsessive in his studies of Krishna Consciousness when he wrote the song, and more specifically, its original intent was as a devotion to Lord Krishna.” Harrison “insisted that the original lyric was ‘something in the way HE moves,’ but he changed it.”





The masculine pronoun would have removed all speculation about Boyd but also would have confused listeners in other ways. In any case, Something‘s ambiguity, inherent in the title, made it a classic. Frank Sinatra once called it “the greatest love song ever written.”







Harrison, as usual, demurred: “The words are nothing really,” he said in 1969. “There are lots of songs like that in my head. I must get them down.” The song first came together during the 1968 White Album sessions. “There was a period during that album,” he remembered, “when we were all in different studios doing different things trying to get it finished, and I used to take some time out. So I went into an empty studio and wrote ‘Something.’” Lacking confidence in his ability to persuade the band to record it, he first tried to give the song to Apple Records artist and old Liverpool friend Jackie Lomax. The song, he felt, came too easily and might not be good enough, and he had lifted the opening line directly from James Taylor.
Lomax went with another Harrison tune for his first single, and the Beatle continued to work on “Something,” recording a demo of the finished song in February of 1969. But he still didn’t think of it as Beatles-worthy and gave it to Joe Cocker instead, who released his version that year, with Harrison on guitar. (Harrison later claimed to have written the song with Ray Charles in mind.) Whatever his reservations, he did, of course, finally record “Something” with his bandmates, with results familiar to all and everyone. But you’ve probably never heard the song as you can hear it here, with isolated vocal harmonies “you can’t put a cigarette-paper between,” writes Julian Dutton on Twitter. “Totally in simpatico; a synergy that began I suppose all those years ago on the school bus.”







At the top, hear the multitrack vocals that made the Beatles’ “Something” such an incredible recording (including a fun, yelping sing-along to the guitar solo at around 1:50). Further up, hear the whole song deconstructed into its parts (with timestamps for each one at the video’s YouTube page.) And just above, hear the band figure out the harmonies in a studio demo of the song. It was, John Lennon conceded after Abbey Road came out, “about the best track on the album, actually.” Paul McCartney said of the Harrison classic that “it’s the best he’s written.” And Bob Dylan later remarked that “if George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody,” a thesis Harrison got to prove the following year with his surprisingly amazing All Things Must Pass.
via Julian Dutton
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear the Beautiful Isolated Vocal Harmonies from the Beatles’ “Something” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Udacity Running a 60% Off Sale on Online Courses Through April 13

A quick heads up: Udacity is running a 60% off sale through April 13 in the US (and April 20 in all other countries). Founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, Udacity partners with leading tech companies and offers an array of courses (and Nanodegree programs) in data science,  cyber security, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and autonomous systems. To get the 60% off discount, click here, select a course/program, and then use the code CYBER60 during the checkout process.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Udacity. If readers enroll in certain Udacity courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Udacity Running a 60% Off Sale on Online Courses Through April 13 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

A Spellbinding Drone Journey Through a Bowling Alley

A now for something that’s right up your alley…
Using an FPV drone, YouTuber “jaybyrdfilms” takes you on a somewhat dizzying tour of Bryant Lake Bowl, a vintage bowling alley in Minneapolis. As CNET puts it, “It’s an impressive bit of filmmaking as the … drone flies down bowling lanes, nuzzles close to the pins and then soars back toward the bowlers. Crisp, atmospheric audio — of people chatting, bowling balls rolling on wood, pins clanging, glasses clinking — adds to the immediacy.” Enjoy.
via Kottke
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A Starling Murmuration Magically Makes the Shape of a Bird

“After months of chasing these birds around Lough Ennell, Co. Westmeath [a lake in Ireland], James Crombie and I captured a unique display, writes Colin Hogg on YouTube. He’s referring to the video above, which–for one ever-brief moment–captures a murmuration of starlings forming the shape of a giant bird. It’s a pretty meta concept.
Crombie also captured the moment with a photograph that graced the cover of The Irish Times. View it here. The newspaper provides some interesting backstory on the video and photograph here.
Find more murmuration moments in the Relateds below.
Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere.
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via Twisted Sifter
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A Starling Murmuration Magically Makes the Shape of a Bird is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.