CJ: Well... where else would you put the Northern hemisphere but the top Dr: On the bottom *switch* CJ: Well, you can't do that Dr: why not? CJ *Visibley Shaken* cause it's freaking me out. Always loved the dialogue in this episode from Leo's big block of cheese speech to this
@@kindnessfirst9670 Absolutely. The classic medieval European representation of the world (top half, since they were aware they lived on a globe but also aware they didn't know what the other side looked like) has east at the top.
You can turn it any way you want. You could put the North on the left and the South on the right, or vice versa. Since the space that Earth exists in has no directional axis, it doesn't matter how you orient (ha!) the map so long as you know what the parts of it are depicting. 😄
As someone who has academically studied cartography, GIS, and land surveying, I can share that what's presented in this episode is true. It's cool to see something cartographic featured in primetime entertainment TV. Sad part, though, is most viewers probably thought this was fictional writing to illustrate the quirky, niche groups a presidential administration has to suffer through and indulge.
I think schools should use the dual polar projection maps. They force you to think in 3D and eliminate the 'north is up' fallacy. Nobody has used parallel navigation for ocean crossings since the invention of the chronometer, there is no need to subject kids to maps designed for it.
@@DocFlamingo Thanks you for your blanket opinion, with no supportive argument, no basis at all. Meanwhile actual real life cartographers have said for ages that the Mercador map is inaccurate, and that maps such as the Peters projection are more accurate. Science being science, sometime in the future an even better representation will come out.
@@iffracem Didn't see how it needed any. The fact is any flat representation of a round object requires distortions be made. This one is not a magic solution to the problem--it just claims to be--which is obnoxious. As a navigational map (which is what it was designed to be) the Mercator is superior. If scale is what you are interested in than the Robinson or Tobler are better still as they have far less than the Peters. There--happy, lefty? Also, flipping the map because 'the north is evil' thing is... how shall I put this? Psychotic.
I work in management for a home health company. We have big block of cheese days where any of our employees can come into our main office and speak with management, all the way up to our owner. Because workers who are always on the road can go months without ever being in the same room as their supervisors, it’s easy for there to be a disconnect between them and us. So we do big block of cheese days and let them come in to talk about whatever’s on their mind. Big block of cheese days are my favorite because people tend to be sitting on some really good ideas, but they don’t voice them until you ask.
no it's not. people have been fighting for equality, and progressive things for years. society just likes to mitigate, silence, white wash, and erase them. Same reason you'll never learn about John Brown in elementary school. Or all the racial massacres throughout early american civil rights history. Same reason civil rights photos are often in black and white, when color photography existed (to make it seem long ago) how you'll never learn the history of the black panthers, the rainbow party. the native american occupation of alcatraz/red power movement, the various "brown power" latino movements in california. Or how in every decade since the 50's there's been movements for women, minorities, and even gay LGBTQ people. the concept of the map in this episode was first suggested in the 1850's the "peters" version popularized in the 1970's boston actually requires this map in it's public school books. and according to the wikia. nebraska of all places... is slated to being using this map in 2024-2025 school year.
@@sharathsh9987 Exactly correct. Gall-Peters is a political project, not a cartographic one. Robinson is my favorite as well, but my students knew all of the major ones, and the flaws of each.
I was so very CJ when I saw this episode....I knew it had to be incorrect....ridiculous....I was taught that map, I have lived in 19 countries and traveled to many more.....and yeah - it "freaks me out" I was never right about where I was ....
Seeing the conventional map flipped upside down is a stark reminder that the idea that south is down and north is up are ideas with no other basis then human perspective. I think the point they’re making is legitimate. Also, you don’t want kids to not know proper geography.
And even then human perspective is pretty open to maps that don’t have north=up. Plenty of city or metro maps don’t use north=up because it’s harder to look at that way. Or shift it a little bit off the compas for space or for aesthetics
please remind yourself that opposite magnetic poles attract and different push. so the north needle of compass points towards the south pole which is at the North pole
I remember asking my 7th grade social studies teacher in class why the map didn't make sense. he asked me what i meant and i said if you look at a globe the size of the countries were different and proceeded to ask him who decided that the map wasn't upside down? in space there is no up down left or right. he just looked at me with on odd look and said, "You know all my years of teaching no one has ever noticed that or even asked that question".
North pole is positive, positive represents up. Hence the orientation. Also to perform navigation, you need one fixed point of direction to determine location...so a fixed point like north, the map is oriented to align with it.
@@christopherissler5587 What do you mean by "North pole is positive" but any assignment of positive and negative is only a convention which can be reversed.
@@B2Roland "Up" may be meaningless, but the practical issue of getting from one place to another is NOT meaningless to millions of people. Europe made the first maps that included most of the world when other cultures were not particularly concerned with extra-hemispheric travel or didn't have the cartographic skills to express anything they might have learned. Someone was going to get there first, and the explorers (and exploiters) of Europe did that, so their perspective was generally adopted because, by and large, it WORKED.
(I don't know anything about any of this, I literally was just curious after reading your comment and looked it up on Wikipedia, and I understand that Wikipedia is Wikipedia) What a weird thing to get wrong. I guess he spent the last 30 years of his life in a town that is now part of modern Germany, but it still doesn't really make sense to call him German. (Thanks for the suggestion btw)
Yes, but the average American hears that someone is Flemish and they go looking on the map for Flemland or Flemghanistan. Turns out Miss South Carolina, 2007, was right.
@@stevenbennett3805 ...cus, you know, maps. lol As a map geek, I laughed way to hard at that 2007 moment...but she was right in her own, very, very special way. Bless her heart.
Weird. In high school geography class, back when they really taught it, we spent one period with the Mercator Projection, then buried it under a bunch of other ones and thereafter only displayed the Orange Peel Projection (or so we called it), which from my distant memories is closest to the Hobbs Eumorphic projection now listed on the “List of map projections” page on Wikipedia. In any case, use globes, stupid, not world maps.
In most West Wing episodes, Bartlett and his team are portrayed as "The smartest people in the room". In this scene, you can see how uncomfortable they get when it turns out that they are not.
i don't care what you think about the 2 types of maps, which should be which, etc just the info in this presentation, like CJ and Josh looking, blows your mind in learning what is wrong and right about the map. Peters projection map you can actually look at and get a correct size of landmasses.
The Peters Projection demonstrates accurate size of countries and continents but massively distorts the shape of said landmasses to do so. So them saying it gives accurate geographical projections (so you can accurately locate a place) is flat out wrong.
Yes, it is fundamentally impossible to have a rectangular map of a spherical globe that is accurate in size, position, and shape simultaneously. Peters is not even considered a particularly good compromise version. The reason is famous is because Peters (not a geographer) wrote a book in the 70s claiming he'd invented a solution (was actually invented by a man named Gall in 1850) and was just a really good salesman.
@@andrewz5981 then throw in the fact that the Earth isn't a pure sphere, but is actually larger when the circumference is measured around the Equator than it is when measured through the (geographic) poles
That feeling when you learn Dr. Phlox was a time-traveling Denobulan who went in disguise to 20th century Earth in order to add geography and cartography to his list of degreed accolades.
@@randomobserver8168 I had the same thought, though in practice it's slightly more complicated because you can't exactly have a globe inside a text book (for homework purposes)
Oh my sweet fairy, our hearts did us wrong But rudders of bodies doth carry us on And more moons than our eyes can recount and store Yet they bid that we see the same things Sweet they bid that we swim in their seas
I still can't figure out why I should have a map projection that is more eye-distorting and less useful to me than a familiar one, simply because some other people seem to think the size of Africa [or any other place] on a flat projection somehow indicates its "importance" in some larger political or moral sense and they also think I have never seen a globe. If I want to assess the relative importance of Africa I need charts indicating its population growth since the 1950s, its output of various natural resources, where those resources are compared to the population, GDP also compared to population location, contributions to technology, and military capacity. Those would provide appropriately contrasting indicators from which an aggregate picture could be formed.
I am wondering why I was always presented with a composite of the two maps. Always knowing the correct sizes, but never having seen either map presented here! It would seem the the scene was contrived to produce the maximum dramatic effect. The agenda being to falsely attach socially equality to the subject seeing how most people don't give these concepts a thought in their daily lives!
The Mercator projection also does not put Germany in the center. Usually one uses 0° Latitude and 0° Longitude as the center. Which is to the west of the African coast. The map they used in the scene leaves out the south pole (and anything else south of south America) which shifts everything downwards making Europe the center on the vertical axis. Horizontally Germany should still not be the center since 0° Longitude goes through London (Greenwich to be specific). Other than 0° Latitude which is defined by the earth and its rotation itself 0° Longitude was defined arbitrary by British scientist whose laboratory was in Greenwich. They decided to use its location as 0°.
cartographers, with an o, then an a. And the presenters are correct. The Mercator is good for navigation but crap for showing relative geographic land mass. Pretty important in politics
Pretty important in politics? How so? The Mercator is good for navigation. Was that the intent for Mercator originally? What does Social Equality have to do with Peters projection.
Which by the way is solely responsible for some of the issues they mentioned. Europe is in the center because of that. On a full map even in Mercator projection the center is usually 0° Lat 0° Long which happens to be in the sea to the west of the African coast. So on a full map the continent closest to the center is Africa not Europe.
We always had a globe and were taught that relative size on a 2d map was an illusion. Even using a globe it's hard to wrap one's mind around how large Africa is but Africa is not less developed because it was below Europe on our maps. Africa is less developed in large part due to geography. There are other videos here that explain that. You orient a map with North at the top because all maps are oriented that way and if you published a map oriented the other way and someone tried to use it they'd get lost. Of course, we don't really use that map for navigation except when looking for something on the map. Changing its orientation, and don't fool yourself, you're not going to change the orientation of all maps, would only confuse and make your map less useful.
You don't even need to flip the map upside down just rotate and make arbitrary top n bottom. Like make France the top and show it from that view, still same Earth.
So “top to bottom” creates an unfair hierarchy. But then how would flipping it upside down help? Wouldn’t that make it seem like Europe and the north is less important than the south?
You can't do that.. Why not? Cause it's freaking me out. I have been looking at this map for my entire life! And you're going to just turn it upside down? ARRGGGHHHH! What's next? Dogs and cats mating?
I don't watch much TV, so this is the first thing I've ever seen from the West Wing. Anyway, as a former geography teacher, I have to push back on a couple of things. First of all, I don't think *anyone* has used the Mercator projection as the primary world map for decades; I knew about its flaws back in the 1960s, *because my teachers told me back then about its distortions* . But the Gall-Peters projection (like *every* projection) has flaws as well, such as its great distortion of the shapes of continents. The fact is, every projection is imperfect, and so as teachers we need to make sure our students know any 2-D projection has problems, and then teach those problems. This is easily teachable to middle school students and probably younger. Anyone pushing a single projection as *the* best is selling something, including the "Cartographers for Social Equality". As my introduction to the West Wing I am dismayed by the apparent lack of education by Kevin Spacey's senior White House aides.
This is an important topic, but the Gall-Peters map is just horrifically ugly and massively distorts the shape of the landmasses in order to preserve size. It's possible to proserve size while still making a fairly asthetically pleasing map, such as the Equal Earth projection.
They start out by mentioning that the Mercator map was invented as an aide to navigation, they then proceed to completely ignore the fact that the main reason maps exist is...navigation
My cartographic hot take is that map projection as a field is pointless in the modern era. Literally just use a globe. Everyone walks around with a phone in their pocket anyway, and a phone can show a dynamic 2d projection of a globe that is always locally accurate (equivalent to physically looking at a real globe). Map projections only mattered because people used to put maps on paper
The thing is, 90% of the world's population is in the Northern Hemisphere. (Especially because of China and India). So the reverse-flip, while technically not "wrong" isn't practical and we're not viewing Earth from an extra-terrestial perspective, which I think would have it the way it is. That said, correcting the Greenland, and other misnomers, means either better 2D maps, or just use Globes and 3D maps more regularly, as is now very possible.
There is no right or wrong with the different types of maps. They are all mathematical mappings of a sphere onto a plane. It doesn't matter which one you use as long as you understand the math behind the mapping
Which most people don’t understand. You gotta dumb down things for everyone if you are gonna make everyone use that thing. Even the bubble had dumbed down versions or edits. Even for children versions or to stop regular adults from rebeling or thinking the wrong things.
Just curious..... how come, with the word "cartographers" spelled so clearly several times onscreen during this excerpt, how Mr. Robinson manages to mangle the spelling so badly in the introductory title of this review? "Cartagrophers" sounds hilariously like a wagon ("cart") full of gophers ("grophers", close enough). A "cart" o' "grophers". And then the introductory text continues, calling the program "one of the greatest who's of all time." The greatest "who"?? As in "Horton Hears A Who"? Seems a wee spot of proofreading before hitting SUBMIT would have benefitted this particular stretch of text . . . . .
The depressing part of this episode is that it takes a decent argument about looking at different maps to get perspective on geography and projects social engineering stupidity on to it. The reality is that the Gall-Peters Projection map is just as distorted, it just distorts in different ways. While it does show the correct sizes of countries, the countries are stretched horizontally near the poles and vertically near the Equator. If you want to see what the world really looks like, just buy a globe. That's what they're for.
Is there nothing being taught today about maps being good but not perfect? We were always taught the shortcomings of Mercator projections, globes, etc., it was basic stuff, from grade school onward. Sadly this looks like a bunch of cobbled-together information that just distorts the truth and then proposes a solution which is actually not a solution.
The Northern Hemisphere is not at the top of the map because maps are racist or eurocentric, it's at the top of the map because the Earth's magnetic field runs south to north and magnetic opposites attract, which is why compasses point northward. If the magnetic field was reversed then compasses would point south and the Southern Hemisphere would be at the top of the map.
No. I agree it's not racism, but it is because the major colonial powers were in Europe. Ancient Egyptian maps went south to north because or the Nile. I've heard Australia does it too because they got tired of being in the *ss end corners of the map.
I love how the scholars casually concede that the point of the Mercator was to make navigation at sea safer especially in a time of exploration, then go on a diatribe about the political merits of a certain projection (meant for navigation). They then propose a projection that is inferior to the Mercator in every practical application for what maps are used for - NAVIGATION - in order to project their view of equality. Ahhhh academics. Gotta love 'em.
You maintain that modern ship captains are navigating the oceans using charts? These scholars are pointing out that people other than navigators learn their concepts of world geography with the wrong maps. And that the distortions of position and size feed into perceptual biases.
@@bjb7587 Sorry if I triggered you Professor. But you shouldn't infantilize people. We had a globe in my elementary classroom and every kid understood the distortion from projecting the surface of a sphere onto a two dimensional map. That they made Josh Lyman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and a Harvard and Yale Law Graduate so ignorant of this is in the story is insulting. This isn't quantum mechanics. But it is an effort to label everything racist and divide people. And yes, as a naval officer, modern ship captains use paper charts.
@@jpm5205 They weren't talking about people looking at globes and navigation. Rather taking about people looking at maps. Like seeing a map on a tablet or TV screen or in a newspaper. I feel safe in saying that people see 2d Mercator maps far more often during their lives than the number of times they looked at globes in grammar school. And hardly anyone looks at globes otherwise. (Full disclosure I have one within arm's reach right now next to my desk.) You served in the Navy, where I expect that navigation was a basic skill. But I think you have unrealistic expectations of educational levels in the US general population. From an 3/2/22 article on US News According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 130 million American adults read below a sixth-grade level. Now, consider how that number represents more than half the adult U.S. population. These people don't remember much about geography. I knew some of them. I worked with poor people and mentally ill people for twenty years. They weren't infants, but most surely were uneducated.
Hot take: this does nothing except make non euro countries look even worse. Your telling me these tiny ass countries took over MUCH larger ones for centuries? At least when we looked similar it seemed more of a fair fight rather than a cakewalk
There was a girl from Hungry that got a globe for Christmas. She began to cry, and her father asked what the matter was. The girl responded by saying she wanted a globe with only Hungry on it.
I often wonder about the size of UK relative to all those maps on the News that are always one TV screen wide. Size of Israel, Italy, Indiana are all the same! Canada, Cambodia, Crete; Whoa enough already.
@@philipoakley5498 Takes 12-14 hours to drive from northern part of UK to the most southern part....if i were to drive North Bay Ontario from London Ontario for the same amount of time i would still be in the same Province i started in......in fact i could save time by taking a short cut through the fucking USA lol....
@@Shifty51991 Reminds me of the size of the universe in Hitchhikers Guide "..big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts.."
There is no 'up' in space. You think of North as 'up' because that's what you were taught and how our current maps work. If we decide to make South mean 'up' and flip all maps and teachings of direction on their heads that's the way it is. And the bias he's talking about when he mentions top and bottom attitudes is very real. This whole thing sounds ridiculous but it's really REALLY not.
They sell souvenir maps in Australia showing that country in its "rightful place". The map is both "upside down" and has Australia in the center of the map instead of off to one side. A buddy of mine had one of these displayed in his office for years. It was a major conversation piece!
@@hansverhaegen8406 It was Ptolemy in the 2nd Century AD who established the convention of placing India and China to the right, thus "orienting" world maps with north at the top. This Grecocentric point of view is partly why the Mediterranean is called the Mediterranean; it is the "middle of the world." By convention, astronomers label the direction of spin around the major axis of any body, even a meteor or comet, as "east" with the "north" pole rotating counterclockwise when viewed from above.
Another weird moment in the Sorkin-verse where smart people don't know stuff they would've learned in middle school. CJ sounds astounded to learn that Greenland and Africa aren't the same size.
I . . . didn't learn that in middle school, growing up. The comparison of sizes weren't really touched upon, actually, just relative locations and then moving on because the class needed to pass those tests the state issued to determine who's going to get the money next budget cycle. I mean, to make sure the children were learning. Yes. That was it.
Well, high school certainly didn't tell me that, and I'm studying Geography at uni right now (actually, my uni set this for me as one of the videos to watch as a supplementary this week, haha!). From what I've been told, Geography as a subject has a very poor standing in the US education system aside from the notion that it's for cartography (which I suppose, this video doesn't exactly disprove...xD but it's still untrue.) But yes, I had to find this out on my own when I was prepping for university.
The reason why the Northern Hemisphere should be on top is pretty obvious, 87% of people live here and 2/3ds of all land is here. Even if we wanted to flip it for the sake of giving importance to 'nations of color', the nations that would benefit the most from such a change would be New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and Chile (Majority white countries) as well as Brazil (47.7% White, 43.1% "Pardo" with mostly white ancestry). Most Asians, MENA, indigenous Americans, South Asians/Desi, and black people live north of the equator. I'd even wager the percentage of white people in the Southern Hemisphere is higher than in the Northern. As for the Peters projection, its only purpose is to preserve the landmass of countries, and so it fails every purpose of a map. It makes many countries unrecognizable when compared to a globe, unlike the Mercator which preserves the shape of individual countries fairly well. There are other projections that I would favor for teaching World Geography, or preferably a globe, but the Mercator gets so much stupid hate for simply fulfilling the original purpose of a map - navigation. I'm sick of self-righteous people who think they've seen through the Matrix when they discover information that was never secret nor suppressed. And in true Sorkin style, the usually intelligent characters featured in this clip are temporarily dumbed down so that the character Sorkin is preaching through can provide basic, flawed arguments while acting smug.
Look the writers gave them the wrong replacement map, but they were right that Mercator distorts the map. They even explained the logical reasons why, to help explain why it shouldn't be a teaching map
*2:35* "What the hell is that?" "It's where you've been living the whole time" (her being quiet because she had actually just noticed something called 'Australia' on the map for the first time ever)
CJ: Well... where else would you put the Northern hemisphere but the top
Dr: On the bottom *switch*
CJ: Well, you can't do that
Dr: why not?
CJ *Visibley Shaken* cause it's freaking me out.
Always loved the dialogue in this episode from Leo's big block of cheese speech to this
There are lot's of maps from centuries ago where north is not on top.
@@kindnessfirst9670 Absolutely. The classic medieval European representation of the world (top half, since they were aware they lived on a globe but also aware they didn't know what the other side looked like) has east at the top.
One of my favorite episodes
You can turn it any way you want. You could put the North on the left and the South on the right, or vice versa. Since the space that Earth exists in has no directional axis, it doesn't matter how you orient (ha!) the map so long as you know what the parts of it are depicting. 😄
Dr Flox is the perfect person to play this type of nerd. His deadpan delivery of dialogue fits him perfectly
Phlox. But yes, I agree entirely. He's a great actor.
Nice to see he had roles before Star Trek
This is just an Enterprise time travel episode in my headcanon.
"Gotta wrap this up. Time to feed my Alderian fruit bats. "
As someone who has academically studied cartography, GIS, and land surveying, I can share that what's presented in this episode is true. It's cool to see something cartographic featured in primetime entertainment TV. Sad part, though, is most viewers probably thought this was fictional writing to illustrate the quirky, niche groups a presidential administration has to suffer through and indulge.
I took a intro geography course in college as a filler course (and for an easy A+). Instead, I kind of got my mind blown by stuff like this.
I think schools should use the dual polar projection maps. They force you to think in 3D and eliminate the 'north is up' fallacy. Nobody has used parallel navigation for ocean crossings since the invention of the chronometer, there is no need to subject kids to maps designed for it.
Pretty sure it's cartagrophy
@@shaunelliott8583 It isn't.
@@finnmcool2 but the title...
I first saw the Peters Projection in the West Wing. And it blew my mind. And then I couldn't find it for ten years until I went to university.
I have one hanging in my office at work and everytime someone new walks in, they freak out. Love it.
It's inferior.
For yrs I thought this scene was made up for laughs
@@DocFlamingo Thanks you for your blanket opinion, with no supportive argument, no basis at all.
Meanwhile actual real life cartographers have said for ages that the Mercador map is inaccurate, and that maps such as the Peters projection are more accurate. Science being science, sometime in the future an even better representation will come out.
@@iffracem Didn't see how it needed any. The fact is any flat representation of a round object requires distortions be made. This one is not a magic solution to the problem--it just claims to be--which is obnoxious.
As a navigational map (which is what it was designed to be) the Mercator is superior.
If scale is what you are interested in than the Robinson or Tobler are better still as they have far less than the Peters.
There--happy, lefty? Also, flipping the map because 'the north is evil' thing is... how shall I put this? Psychotic.
"Indeed you are" - I have to remember to use that when someone introduces themselves.
I once said this to the Hon Willie L. Brown.
I really love the idea of Big Block of Cheese Day. It is an interesting act of democracy.
Of course Andrew Jackson was for the common man as long as he was not African, or native, or not a man.
They really do this!!!!! The Obama Administration did it every year, and Trump stopped it.
@@shesadg1 shocker 😂
I work in management for a home health company. We have big block of cheese days where any of our employees can come into our main office and speak with management, all the way up to our owner. Because workers who are always on the road can go months without ever being in the same room as their supervisors, it’s easy for there to be a disconnect between them and us. So we do big block of cheese days and let them come in to talk about whatever’s on their mind. Big block of cheese days are my favorite because people tend to be sitting on some really good ideas, but they don’t voice them until you ask.
This clip is crazily ahead of its time haha
Many things we’re dealing with today started the decade before this show. Sorkin’s kinda brilliant
no it's not. people have been fighting for equality, and progressive things for years. society just likes to mitigate, silence, white wash, and erase them. Same reason you'll never learn about John Brown in elementary school. Or all the racial massacres throughout early american civil rights history. Same reason civil rights photos are often in black and white, when color photography existed (to make it seem long ago) how you'll never learn the history of the black panthers, the rainbow party. the native american occupation of alcatraz/red power movement, the various "brown power" latino movements in california. Or how in every decade since the 50's there's been movements for women, minorities, and even gay LGBTQ people.
the concept of the map in this episode was first suggested in the 1850's the "peters" version popularized in the 1970's boston actually requires this map in it's public school books. and according to the wikia. nebraska of all places... is slated to being using this map in 2024-2025 school year.
I'm a fan of the Winkel Tripel Projection myself: it addresses the major issues without turning everything on its head.
Same. But I also don't mind the Robinson. Anything other than the Mercator is already loads better.
@@sharathsh9987 Exactly correct. Gall-Peters is a political project, not a cartographic one. Robinson is my favorite as well, but my students knew all of the major ones, and the flaws of each.
I was so very CJ when I saw this episode....I knew it had to be incorrect....ridiculous....I was taught that map, I have lived in 19 countries and traveled to many more.....and yeah - it "freaks me out" I was never right about where I was ....
OMG it's Dr. Phlox!!
This was in my top 10 favorite scenes from the entire series :)
Seeing the conventional map flipped upside down is a stark reminder that the idea that south is down and north is up are ideas with no other basis then human perspective. I think the point they’re making is legitimate. Also, you don’t want kids to not know proper geography.
And even then human perspective is pretty open to maps that don’t have north=up. Plenty of city or metro maps don’t use north=up because it’s harder to look at that way. Or shift it a little bit off the compas for space or for aesthetics
please remind yourself that opposite magnetic poles attract and different push. so the north needle of compass points towards the south pole which is at the North pole
The unspoken interaction between CJ and Josh just after 3:00 is some of the best acting in the entire show.
CJ always gets the weird assignments and Josh likes to watch
I remember asking my 7th grade social studies teacher in class why the map didn't make sense. he asked me what i meant and i said if you look at a globe the size of the countries were different and proceeded to ask him who decided that the map wasn't upside down? in space there is no up down left or right. he just looked at me with on odd look and said, "You know all my years of teaching no one has ever noticed that or even asked that question".
North pole is positive, positive represents up. Hence the orientation. Also to perform navigation, you need one fixed point of direction to determine location...so a fixed point like north, the map is oriented to align with it.
Were you in special ed.?
@@christopherissler5587 What do you mean by "North pole is positive" but any assignment of positive and negative is only a convention which can be reversed.
@@christopherissler5587 positive being up is also a convention. The point is that 'up' is meaningless in space.
@@B2Roland "Up" may be meaningless, but the practical issue of getting from one place to another is NOT meaningless to millions of people. Europe made the first maps that included most of the world when other cultures were not particularly concerned with extra-hemispheric travel or didn't have the cartographic skills to express anything they might have learned.
Someone was going to get there first, and the explorers (and exploiters) of Europe did that, so their perspective was generally adopted because, by and large, it WORKED.
I love showing this early on in Geography class -- it starts a semester long conversation
When one toils away at an unappreciated or ill-understood subject and finally gets some public understanding, it has to be pretty cool!
In my first GIS course at Uni, they showed this video and I was low-key freaking out cause I love TWW
Oh I loved it! Her exclamation at the end.
I got such a good laugh from it.
The way she delivered her lines.
Outstanding.
She is the Jackal.
Australia thus becomes "The Land Up Over".
And it's the rest of the world that's upside down, not us.
You can't say things like that.
Where women glow and men... turn-over?
its so cool that this episode was made before we went to the moon and saw pictures of the earth from space.......oh......
Anyone else remember globes! Mine lit up and made a great nightlight! Someday I will have one that will contain a small liquor bar!
I know it was big block of cheese day. But this one instance. I was like "why not?".
1) Gerardus Mercator was Flemish. Not German.
2) there is a great video on this subject on Jay Foreman's RUclips channel in the 'Map Men' playlist.
☮
(I don't know anything about any of this, I literally was just curious after reading your comment and looked it up on Wikipedia, and I understand that Wikipedia is Wikipedia)
What a weird thing to get wrong. I guess he spent the last 30 years of his life in a town that is now part of modern Germany, but it still doesn't really make sense to call him German.
(Thanks for the suggestion btw)
Yes, but the average American hears that someone is Flemish and they go looking on the map for Flemland or Flemghanistan. Turns out Miss South Carolina, 2007, was right.
@@stevenbennett3805 ...cus, you know, maps.
lol
As a map geek, I laughed way to hard at that 2007 moment...but she was right in her own, very, very special way. Bless her heart.
Weird. In high school geography class, back when they really taught it, we spent one period with the Mercator Projection, then buried it under a bunch of other ones and thereafter only displayed the Orange Peel Projection (or so we called it), which from my distant memories is closest to the Hobbs Eumorphic projection now listed on the “List of map projections” page on Wikipedia.
In any case, use globes, stupid, not world maps.
Exactly
but but... what about the phlatt erfers?
@@iffracem ferget 'em. They are just phlatt rong
Great scene.. kind of eye opening..
In most West Wing episodes, Bartlett and his team are portrayed as "The smartest people in the room".
In this scene, you can see how uncomfortable they get when it turns out that they are not.
and the part when they realize it.
Even then, one of the two of them appears smarter than the other.
A great clip from a great show.
i don't care what you think about the 2 types of maps, which should be which, etc just the info in this presentation, like CJ and Josh looking, blows your mind in learning what is wrong and right about the map. Peters projection map you can actually look at and get a correct size of landmasses.
The absolutely BEST part about this is that NONE of the properties they attribute to the Peters projection are correct.
Tell me what's wrong.
The Peters Projection demonstrates accurate size of countries and continents but massively distorts the shape of said landmasses to do so. So them saying it gives accurate geographical projections (so you can accurately locate a place) is flat out wrong.
Yes, it is fundamentally impossible to have a rectangular map of a spherical globe that is accurate in size, position, and shape simultaneously. Peters is not even considered a particularly good compromise version. The reason is famous is because Peters (not a geographer) wrote a book in the 70s claiming he'd invented a solution (was actually invented by a man named Gall in 1850) and was just a really good salesman.
@@andrewz5981 then throw in the fact that the Earth isn't a pure sphere, but is actually larger when the circumference is measured around the Equator than it is when measured through the (geographic) poles
Reminds me of the observation that the best way to fight bullshit is not more bullshit. But The West Wing sure packages its bullshit attractively.
That feeling when you learn Dr. Phlox was a time-traveling Denobulan who went in disguise to 20th century Earth in order to add geography and cartography to his list of degreed accolades.
The thing is, this is taught in grade school. Even if it wasn't all it would take is comparing a globe to a map to see the problems.
If they only had a map placed upon a sphere they would have the exact size and placement... Call it a globe for lack of a better name.
Genius! That's what we need to have in the schools!
@@randomobserver8168 I had the same thought, though in practice it's slightly more complicated because you can't exactly have a globe inside a text book (for homework purposes)
That's silly -- a sphere would distort the true nature of the flat surface of the Earth. (kidding!)
Don’t be a smartass, you can’t just hand every kid a globe for a test.
You can't put a globe in a book.
I just LOVE this episode.
Hey it’s Dr. Phlox!
literally the most honest the show got about anything, and it doesn't even finish discussing it.
CJ is definitely the best. I have no doubt.
7 years later, still using the same maps
While they listen to this Leo is stripped to the waist eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery
Oh my sweet fairy, our hearts did us wrong
But rudders of bodies doth carry us on
And more moons than our eyes can recount and store
Yet they bid that we see the same things
Sweet they bid that we swim in their seas
How many moons do you see, bud, and why are you letting them boss you around?
@ 1:18 why is CJ flipping them off?
One of the best scenes! And the one with the root canal.
*woot canaw
I still can't figure out why I should have a map projection that is more eye-distorting and less useful to me than a familiar one, simply because some other people seem to think the size of Africa [or any other place] on a flat projection somehow indicates its "importance" in some larger political or moral sense and they also think I have never seen a globe.
If I want to assess the relative importance of Africa I need charts indicating its population growth since the 1950s, its output of various natural resources, where those resources are compared to the population, GDP also compared to population location, contributions to technology, and military capacity. Those would provide appropriately contrasting indicators from which an aggregate picture could be formed.
I am wondering why I was always presented with a composite of the two maps. Always knowing the correct sizes, but never having seen either map presented here! It would seem the the scene was contrived to produce the maximum dramatic effect. The agenda being to falsely attach socially equality to the subject seeing how most people don't give these concepts a thought in their daily lives!
"The German cartagropher Mercator..." Nope, he was a Belgian/flemish 😉
The Mercator projection also does not put Germany in the center. Usually one uses 0° Latitude and 0° Longitude as the center. Which is to the west of the African coast. The map they used in the scene leaves out the south pole (and anything else south of south America) which shifts everything downwards making Europe the center on the vertical axis. Horizontally Germany should still not be the center since 0° Longitude goes through London (Greenwich to be specific). Other than 0° Latitude which is defined by the earth and its rotation itself 0° Longitude was defined arbitrary by British scientist whose laboratory was in Greenwich. They decided to use its location as 0°.
Globes work better than 2D maps.
Affirmative action at its finest.
Great video, great series!
Wagner VIII projection is the best :)
Dymaxion Projection is the best choice
For navigation?
Holy biscuits dad this has really blown up!
cartographers, with an o, then an a. And the presenters are correct. The Mercator is good for navigation but crap for showing relative geographic land mass. Pretty important in politics
Pretty important in politics? How so? The Mercator is good for navigation. Was that the intent for Mercator originally? What does Social Equality have to do with Peters projection.
While the Peters is good for sizes, but absolute crap when it comes to showing shapes.
It's not better-it's just wrong in a different way.
That map is still wrong in the east-west direction then we have the same map crisis in 20-30 years.
I love this scene!
I know this was supposed to be seen as a joke (and I absolutely hate Josh's reaction in the scene), but they absolutely have a point.
Apparently Antarctica doesn't even exist to social cartographers.
Which by the way is solely responsible for some of the issues they mentioned. Europe is in the center because of that. On a full map even in Mercator projection the center is usually 0° Lat 0° Long which happens to be in the sea to the west of the African coast. So on a full map the continent closest to the center is Africa not Europe.
Why would social cartographers concern themselves with Antarctica. Not much going on there. Socially.
"...Mexico is larger by point-one-million square miles." So, one hundred thousand square miles?
point oh oh oh oh one billion, please
We always had a globe and were taught that relative size on a 2d map was an illusion. Even using a globe it's hard to wrap one's mind around how large Africa is but Africa is not less developed because it was below Europe on our maps. Africa is less developed in large part due to geography. There are other videos here that explain that.
You orient a map with North at the top because all maps are oriented that way and if you published a map oriented the other way and someone tried to use it they'd get lost. Of course, we don't really use that map for navigation except when looking for something on the map. Changing its orientation, and don't fool yourself, you're not going to change the orientation of all maps, would only confuse and make your map less useful.
cartographers...
Most people don't find their place in this world by looking at maps.
You don't even need to flip the map upside down just rotate and make arbitrary top n bottom. Like make France the top and show it from that view, still same Earth.
So “top to bottom” creates an unfair hierarchy. But then how would flipping it upside down help? Wouldn’t that make it seem like Europe and the north is less important than the south?
My kind of people
You can't do that.. Why not? Cause it's freaking me out. I have been looking at this map for my entire life! And you're going to just turn it upside down? ARRGGGHHHH! What's next? Dogs and cats mating?
Big block of cheese day!
Remember when this was a joke? Now there are Congressional committees studying it. All are fully staffed and funded.
What does point one million even mean?
It's just a really bizarre way of saying "one hundred thousand".
I don't watch much TV, so this is the first thing I've ever seen from the West Wing. Anyway, as a former geography teacher, I have to push back on a couple of things. First of all, I don't think *anyone* has used the Mercator projection as the primary world map for decades; I knew about its flaws back in the 1960s, *because my teachers told me back then about its distortions* . But the Gall-Peters projection (like *every* projection) has flaws as well, such as its great distortion of the shapes of continents. The fact is, every projection is imperfect, and so as teachers we need to make sure our students know any 2-D projection has problems, and then teach those problems. This is easily teachable to middle school students and probably younger. Anyone pushing a single projection as *the* best is selling something, including the "Cartographers for Social Equality".
As my introduction to the West Wing I am dismayed by the apparent lack of education by Kevin Spacey's senior White House aides.
This is an important topic, but the Gall-Peters map is just horrifically ugly and massively distorts the shape of the landmasses in order to preserve size. It's possible to proserve size while still making a fairly asthetically pleasing map, such as the Equal Earth projection.
They stole that "lean forward with interest about something obscure" from Twin Peaks.
They start out by mentioning that the Mercator map was invented as an aide to navigation, they then proceed to completely ignore the fact that the main reason maps exist is...navigation
No they didn't, when they showed the Peters Projection map they explained it's "fidelity". Besides, nhavigation is just one function of a map
Hello doctor Phlox
My cartographic hot take is that map projection as a field is pointless in the modern era. Literally just use a globe. Everyone walks around with a phone in their pocket anyway, and a phone can show a dynamic 2d projection of a globe that is always locally accurate (equivalent to physically looking at a real globe). Map projections only mattered because people used to put maps on paper
The thing is, 90% of the world's population is in the Northern Hemisphere. (Especially because of China and India). So the reverse-flip, while technically not "wrong" isn't practical and we're not viewing Earth from an extra-terrestial perspective, which I think would have it the way it is. That said, correcting the Greenland, and other misnomers, means either better 2D maps, or just use Globes and 3D maps more regularly, as is now very possible.
What about a globe?
There is no right or wrong with the different types of maps. They are all mathematical mappings of a sphere onto a plane. It doesn't matter which one you use as long as you understand the math behind the mapping
Which most people don’t understand. You gotta dumb down things for everyone if you are gonna make everyone use that thing. Even the bubble had dumbed down versions or edits. Even for children versions or to stop regular adults from rebeling or thinking the wrong things.
Haven't these adults ever seen a globe?
Dr. Phlox!
Anyone who can't spell even cartography shouldn't be arguing about the accuracy of maps.
Just curious..... how come, with the word "cartographers" spelled so clearly several times onscreen during this excerpt, how Mr. Robinson manages to mangle the spelling so badly in the introductory title of this review? "Cartagrophers" sounds hilariously like a wagon ("cart") full of gophers ("grophers", close enough). A "cart" o' "grophers".
And then the introductory text continues, calling the program "one of the greatest who's of all time."
The greatest "who"?? As in "Horton Hears A Who"?
Seems a wee spot of proofreading before hitting SUBMIT would have benefitted this particular stretch of text . . . . .
The depressing part of this episode is that it takes a decent argument about looking at different maps to get perspective on geography and projects social engineering stupidity on to it. The reality is that the Gall-Peters Projection map is just as distorted, it just distorts in different ways. While it does show the correct sizes of countries, the countries are stretched horizontally near the poles and vertically near the Equator. If you want to see what the world really looks like, just buy a globe. That's what they're for.
Is there nothing being taught today about maps being good but not perfect? We were always taught the shortcomings of Mercator projections, globes, etc., it was basic stuff, from grade school onward. Sadly this looks like a bunch of cobbled-together information that just distorts the truth and then proposes a solution which is actually not a solution.
The Northern Hemisphere is not at the top of the map because maps are racist or eurocentric, it's at the top of the map because the Earth's magnetic field runs south to north and magnetic opposites attract, which is why compasses point northward. If the magnetic field was reversed then compasses would point south and the Southern Hemisphere would be at the top of the map.
No. I agree it's not racism, but it is because the major colonial powers were in Europe. Ancient Egyptian maps went south to north because or the Nile. I've heard Australia does it too because they got tired of being in the *ss end corners of the map.
Spelled ‘cartographers’.
I love how the scholars casually concede that the point of the Mercator was to make navigation at sea safer especially in a time of exploration, then go on a diatribe about the political merits of a certain projection (meant for navigation). They then propose a projection that is inferior to the Mercator in every practical application for what maps are used for - NAVIGATION - in order to project their view of equality.
Ahhhh academics. Gotta love 'em.
You maintain that modern ship captains are navigating the oceans using charts?
These scholars are pointing out that people other than navigators learn their concepts of world geography with the wrong maps. And that the distortions of position and size feed into perceptual biases.
@@bjb7587 Sorry if I triggered you Professor. But you shouldn't infantilize people. We had a globe in my elementary classroom and every kid understood the distortion from projecting the surface of a sphere onto a two dimensional map. That they made Josh Lyman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and a Harvard and Yale Law Graduate so ignorant of this is in the story is insulting. This isn't quantum mechanics. But it is an effort to label everything racist and divide people.
And yes, as a naval officer, modern ship captains use paper charts.
@@jpm5205 They weren't talking about people looking at globes and navigation. Rather taking about people looking at maps. Like seeing a map on a tablet or TV screen or in a newspaper. I feel safe in saying that people see 2d Mercator maps far more often during their lives than the number of times they looked at globes in grammar school. And hardly anyone looks at globes otherwise. (Full disclosure I have one within arm's reach right now next to my desk.)
You served in the Navy, where I expect that navigation was a basic skill. But I think you have unrealistic expectations of educational levels in the US general population. From an 3/2/22 article on US News
According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 130 million American adults read below a sixth-grade level. Now, consider how that number represents more than half the adult U.S. population.
These people don't remember much about geography. I knew some of them. I worked with poor people and mentally ill people for twenty years. They weren't infants, but most surely were uneducated.
Hot take: this does nothing except make non euro countries look even worse. Your telling me these tiny ass countries took over MUCH larger ones for centuries? At least when we looked similar it seemed more of a fair fight rather than a cakewalk
There was a girl from Hungry that got a globe for Christmas. She began to cry, and her father asked what the matter was. The girl responded by saying she wanted a globe with only Hungry on it.
As a Canadian, I say no.... just no, eh.
I often wonder about the size of UK relative to all those maps on the News that are always one TV screen wide.
Size of Israel, Italy, Indiana are all the same!
Canada, Cambodia, Crete; Whoa enough already.
@@philipoakley5498 Takes 12-14 hours to drive from northern part of UK to the most southern part....if i were to drive North Bay Ontario from London Ontario for the same amount of time i would still be in the same Province i started in......in fact i could save time by taking a short cut through the fucking USA lol....
@@Shifty51991 Reminds me of the size of the universe in Hitchhikers Guide
"..big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts.."
As amazing as this whole set up is, they loose me with the upside down map.
Let's just go with mandatory globes 🌎
There is no 'up' in space. You think of North as 'up' because that's what you were taught and how our current maps work. If we decide to make South mean 'up' and flip all maps and teachings of direction on their heads that's the way it is.
And the bias he's talking about when he mentions top and bottom attitudes is very real.
This whole thing sounds ridiculous but it's really REALLY not.
Tighten up.
They sell souvenir maps in Australia showing that country in its "rightful place". The map is both "upside down" and has Australia in the center of the map instead of off to one side. A buddy of mine had one of these displayed in his office for years. It was a major conversation piece!
Globes taken off their stands do give a much more useful perspective!
@@hansverhaegen8406 It was Ptolemy in the 2nd Century AD who established the convention of placing India and China to the right, thus "orienting" world maps with north at the top. This Grecocentric point of view is partly why the Mediterranean is called the Mediterranean; it is the "middle of the world."
By convention, astronomers label the direction of spin around the major axis of any body, even a meteor or comet, as "east" with the "north" pole rotating counterclockwise when viewed from above.
I love this show. But I always found Josh's superiority complex irritating. He was so quick to sneer and put people down. He lacked empathy.
Well, most schools have a globe. Even Google Earth is right there. Just stop bothering with 2D projections.
Another weird moment in the Sorkin-verse where smart people don't know stuff they would've learned in middle school. CJ sounds astounded to learn that Greenland and Africa aren't the same size.
So was I.
I . . . didn't learn that in middle school, growing up. The comparison of sizes weren't really touched upon, actually, just relative locations and then moving on because the class needed to pass those tests the state issued to determine who's going to get the money next budget cycle.
I mean, to make sure the children were learning. Yes. That was it.
Well, high school certainly didn't tell me that, and I'm studying Geography at uni right now (actually, my uni set this for me as one of the videos to watch as a supplementary this week, haha!). From what I've been told, Geography as a subject has a very poor standing in the US education system aside from the notion that it's for cartography (which I suppose, this video doesn't exactly disprove...xD but it's still untrue.) But yes, I had to find this out on my own when I was prepping for university.
I mean, "smart people" doesn't mean "people who know everything." It usually just means they excel in their chosen field.
@@MichaelAronson She also didn't know the chemical formula for table salt.
Always hated the condescension the staff showed to these different groups
*Cartographers
Its fucking 2022. We don't need 2d maps anymore
I blame the Germans lolll
The reason why the Northern Hemisphere should be on top is pretty obvious, 87% of people live here and 2/3ds of all land is here. Even if we wanted to flip it for the sake of giving importance to 'nations of color', the nations that would benefit the most from such a change would be New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and Chile (Majority white countries) as well as Brazil (47.7% White, 43.1% "Pardo" with mostly white ancestry). Most Asians, MENA, indigenous Americans, South Asians/Desi, and black people live north of the equator. I'd even wager the percentage of white people in the Southern Hemisphere is higher than in the Northern.
As for the Peters projection, its only purpose is to preserve the landmass of countries, and so it fails every purpose of a map. It makes many countries unrecognizable when compared to a globe, unlike the Mercator which preserves the shape of individual countries fairly well. There are other projections that I would favor for teaching World Geography, or preferably a globe, but the Mercator gets so much stupid hate for simply fulfilling the original purpose of a map - navigation. I'm sick of self-righteous people who think they've seen through the Matrix when they discover information that was never secret nor suppressed.
And in true Sorkin style, the usually intelligent characters featured in this clip are temporarily dumbed down so that the character Sorkin is preaching through can provide basic, flawed arguments while acting smug.
Am I being naive? But surely photos from space would correctly identify land mass….am I missing something?
Where was Germany? Hitler and Kaiser Bill wouldn't have liked this.
Josh annoyed me. He was condescending toward these people.
Look the writers gave them the wrong replacement map, but they were right that Mercator distorts the map. They even explained the logical reasons why, to help explain why it shouldn't be a teaching map
Josh was condescending to EVERYONE, including at time the President
*2:35*
"What the hell is that?"
"It's where you've been living the whole time"
(her being quiet because she had actually just noticed something called 'Australia' on the map for the first time ever)