• ZpbkPEcaHhIveqdR@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    I don’t think that’s the true size. You’ll find all those countries are actually a lot bigger than presented on that map and scaled down to fit on a screen

  • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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    19 hours ago

    How much do you wanna bet Trump wouldn’t be so gung ho on Greenland if he saw this map? He probably thinks he is going to double the size of America.

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.

    And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.

    The reason it’s Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn’t stray too far East or West will be very accurate.

    Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    This is why Trump wants Greenland so bad. He sees it, and says “It’s big, I want it. Get it for me!” and gets all Veruca Salt about it.

    All because he doesn’t understand what a Mercator Projection is, on account of he beat up some nerd to do his homework that day, like every day.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.

      Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump’s legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that’s all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that’s his entire ethical framework.

      What does Miller want from it? No idea, he’s utterly, inhumanly insane. He’s just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        24 hours ago

        The Dems need to make a major case out of PeeWee Himmler for the Midterms. Expose him, and add him to the list of horrors that we are running against.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          I feel strongly part of why he’s even more “shrieky” and unhinged than normal is because the GOP broadly has NO plan right now for when Trump keels over. They tried so desperately hard to parade JD Vance around to get him ready to take the reigns, but so far MAGA haaates him, he talks like a politician, he has all that inhuman proceduralism that made people embrace Trump’s open hatred and malice.

          So Miller is slowly realizing once Trump dies, which could be any moment, that he’s going to potentially face charges, and all the comparisons to people who met their end on a rope are likely dancing around in the back of that huge, empty skull.

      • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        wormtongued

        I don’t want people associating Stephen Miller with a Brad Dourif character.

        Mr. Dourif is a saint, and mensch, and doesn’t deserve that smoke.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          The good news is Dourif is such a good actor and played such an iconic character in that role, that I doubt anyone is going to connect him to the apt-term that is already spreading through public lexicon.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
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    14 hours ago

    Maybe show this to taco trump and he’ll realize Greenland is small and level leave it be.

    Edit fixed typo

  • observes_depths@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    I’ll add that we use the mercator projection because it preserves shapes but not scale. There’s other projections that preserve scale but not shapes.

    • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Acquiring Greenland would move the USA up 2 places in the list of largest countries (past Canada and China). That’s probably why he wants it.

        • Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          He wants to embed himself in the history as some kind of victor. It’s his sick phantasy to be presented in history books as a hero. That’s why he is doing everything he can to irreversibly leave his legacy wherever he can. That’s why he’s building the Epstein ballroom. That’s why he renames buildings and places after himself. That’s why he wants to create new colonies. He’s a narcissist.

      • tomiant@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        It is quick becoming a very important strategic hub in the Arctic due to shipping lanes opening up due to global heating. Greenland is also continuously opening up to natural resource extraction as ice disappears, and they have vast quantities of a lot of very valuable shit under the ground that keeps getting easier to access for the same reason, like rare earth elements, oil, natural gas, copper, gold, zinc, uranium, lithium, tungsten, the list goes on…

        Controlling and exploiting that land is a major strategic interest for all the big (and small) powers. That’s why he wants it, and everyone else too. Fuck his fat fucking ass though.

        • foo@feddit.uk
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          1 day ago

          The dissonance with Trump is astonishing. The Arctic is recently becoming more important strategically due to ice disappearing, and yet he’s one of the biggest and most stubborn climate change deniers.