Cool, and definately awesome for a print.

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Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible.

Thank you.
Let's see how long it takes them to get it approved.

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Usually within a day. Although one of my prints, the RATM took them a week or so to qualify.

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Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible.

hhmmm


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Mi serĉas uzuloj kiuj scias Esperanton
Vidigu vin.
EO forumo en dA [link] EO babilejo en dA [link]

Hhhmm?


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I feel compelled to reply. It's DeviantART comment engine's fault, not mine.

Wow, really awesome piece. It reminds me of something i heard, that most flat maps are actually printed in a way that makes the northern most parts of the Earth appear larger than it actually is, and the southern areas appear smaller, just in the way they flatten the globe to fit a paper image. You'll notice, even on this map, that scandinavia looks the same size as India, yet is much smaller.

I'm also amused by the Esperanto title. I remember hearing about that a while back.

Good work.

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Too much liquor's like salt on a slug.

konoway tillicums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee illahie

Well, I don't think that is intentional, but what you say is true.

See, the world is (approximately) a sphere. But to project it on a plane, either we have to do it in slices (such as some maps you may have seen, where the world looks as if it were some kind of sawteeth, or slices of an orange), or we have to use some sort of distortion, which has the disadvantage of twisting the size and shape of continents, but keeps everything in one piece.

One of the most used ways is the Mercator projection ([link]), one where the earth is put inside a cylinder and every spot on its surface projected onto the cylinder, just as if a lightbulb illuminated the globe from inside, and the oceans were translucid and the continents opaque (or the other way around). If you get the mental picture, you will see that things near the equator are quite nicely drawn, but the higher north, or the lower south, you go, the more distorted they get. The extreme situation comes at the poles, which seem to run all along the top of the map and be long, elongated masses, while they actually just cover the top and bottom of the earth.

Now, it also happens that most of the continents on Earth are cramped in the northern hemisphere and near the equator. In the southern one there is much less landmass. As a result, we have the tiny bits of land in the rich world appear larger than other, less favoured lands. One would say that we are priviledged even for nature herself.

Ahem, and hereby I end my lecture.

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I feel compelled to reply. It's DeviantART comment engine's fault, not mine.

i do understand the basics of mapmaking, but i didn't used to. See, the map, however it is portrayed, literally shapes our view of the world, and if i think that Scandinavia is as big as India, that really affects how i think about those two places. I don't think it's wrong to make a map, however people just need to know about it, kinda like how side mirrors on cars say "objects in mirror may be closer than they appear."

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Too much liquor's like salt on a slug.

konoway tillicums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee illahie

Well, of course.

But then, people should always be aware (and should always try to be aware) of the science and the technology and the logic behind the things they use. Knowledge is freedom, because it will allow you to see through deliberate or unintended (but very real) lies. There is nothing wrong with the Mercator projection, but we need to be aware that it distorts the continents, yes.

Incidentally, that will be an important fact if you try to measure distances in a north-south direction, because the scale will be logarythmic, not lineal... I guess that cartographers keep that in mind when they do their calculations.

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I feel compelled to reply. It's DeviantART comment engine's fault, not mine.