This is exactly how to teach people. There's no substitute for practical experience. Putting string on a globe is something everyone can grasp, and so easy.
Of course, this isn't really teaching anyone any geography at all. It doesn't matter to Alan Davies if a flight from London to LA flies this way or that. The whole point of this clip is to teach it s Westerners, yet again to be ashamed of ourselves and the smallpox we brought to this US, and our maps which belittle the equatorial people. We don't need that shaming, it brings nothing to the table.
@@WilliamSmith-mx6ze I just watched it again, and I didn't get any of that. Just a practical exercise about distances on a curved surface and facts about Mercator projection.
@@PhilipStorry Actually, I was flying from Milan to Chicago. The cheapest flight I could get had a stopover in Warsaw. All I've seen of Warsaw is the airport. And I preferred it to Milan Malpensa, which is a shithole of an airport.
I always thought teachers were arseholes for doing that. Just a really petty thing to do. It's just a colour. Get a life. Sorry, that is obviously a contentious issue for me 🤣
@@EebstertheGreat My 9th grade math teacher almost flunked me because i wasn’t showing my work and they thought I was cheating. It was incomprehensible to them that I could do it in my head. Had to sit down with multiple observers who watched me take a math test. Some people just shouldn’t be educators.
They actually weren't showing a true mercator projection in the video, they were showing a Miller projection, which is an adjusted mercator to reduce the polar distortion :)
@@grahamlive I'd imagine it's because there are two common spellings of the name, and without paying close attention, it's an easy, and innocuous mistake, which is hardly worth pointing out. Still it gives passive aggressive pedants something to do I suppose.
@@jenniferpearce1052 I was thinking more along the lines of embellished mental acuity and downplayed waistline. But double entendre has so many possibilities...
Ambergis - Even Jacinda got involved in making a video. ruclips.net/video/HynsTvRVLiI/видео.html (Guardian News) ruclips.net/video/are0lqDQOtM/видео.html&ab_channel=NUkiwi (Oliver)
@@joanne4758 Coincidentally Rhys Darby was on a different QI episode J - Justice with Brian Cox and Jason Manford. I feel like I have gone full circle (a full great circle ohhhhhh)
The Mercator Projection does not squish things close to the equator, in fact it's just the opposite! The closer you get to the poles, the more stretched out things become. Things on the equator (and with in several degrees) are actually their correct shape. This is why Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, because it's been stretched, not because Africa was squished.
I actually knew this from my geography class. I did fail that semester but I don't think that's important. But I do know why I actually retained that information. It's because I would fly back and forth as a kid from the States to Greece to go between visiting parents who were divorced and I always wondered why when you chose the flight progress monitor the line was always curved and when my geography teacher in college explained the whole round earth vs flat map thing I was like oooooooooooooooooooooh.
@@pronkb000 Series M aired in 2015/16 (probs recorded Feb/March 2015) so it still would be fresh in people's minds given the independence referendum was September 2014.
@@Mythraen the SNP which is a yellow political party has won a landslide in Scotland for the past few elections. As someone else has correctly pointed out this was filmed just after the SNP lost an independence referendum, and at the time only had a few constituencies (similar to US states for election purposes)
Yeah, the Mercator projection is supposed to make Greenland far bigger than Australia, but this makes them similar sizes. Still not accurate, but nowhere near Mercator inaccurate. It looks like it might be the Miller cylindrical projection.
@@havardmj Greenland is too tall for that. Equirectangular makes the northern extremes the right height but far too wide. The Miller cylindrical projection keeps everything _closer_ to the correct shape, but not the right size. A balance between Mercator and equirectangular.
Me too! - I have 'merch' which is ostensibly from the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality... though, admittedly it is sitting next to my collection from Phil Baharnd, King of Auto Sales in Fargo, ND - that guy can sell a car like, well, anything!
They followed lines of latitude, especially after it was figured out that if you knew the latitude and knew the time (given a good chronometer [clock]) you could figure out the longitude from the sun.
Not necessarily lines of latitude, they followed rhumb lines (I.e. followed a constant heading). This was the easiest with the technology of the time - a compass could tell them their current heading, and they could adjust to keep the heading they wanted. That was what led to the Mercator projection: its key property is that rhumb lines on the globe are drawn as straight lines on the map. And it's very easy to draw a straight line on the map and read off from it what heading you need to follow, in order to follow that path. When air travel became common, but before GPS, rhumb lines were still the only paths that could be easily followed. Flight paths were planned as approximations of great circles, by choosing a route that consisted of a line of waypoints roughly on a great circle, and following rhumb lines between them
Man. People actually getting Canadian geography right, plus lessons in spherical geometry (including geodesics). As a Canadian physicist, I have no choice but to "like" this video :D
@Cara Salusc Thanks for your kind remarks. If I take a critical look at my country, I would say that there ways in which some of the Scandinavian nations are doing better in terms of quality of life, income inequality, social safety nets, and education.* But for whatever areas of improvement we have, I'm still thankful to be here.
Yeah, kind of. A curve in the plane y = f(x) can be considered as a level curve of a function of two variables (z = f(x, y) = constant). And a surface in 3-D, described by a function of two variables, can be considered as the level surface of a function of three variables. So in general if you constrain a function in n+1 variables to a set value, you get something that can be described in only n variables. Or in other words, a surface given by n variables is a level (or "flat") portion of one in n+1 variables.
A bit disappointed they didnt show a map where the continents are properly displayed. Ive always known this since i was a child because my mother had a map like that. It always fascinated me.
When you are watching the plane journey on the in-flight system it can wig you out to see how a straight line can look so unstraight. Flying from NYC to MEL via Abu Dhabi was freaky
@@rosiefay7283 if you want to make a parralel youtube show called Map Women, i will gladly watch it. If you need inspiration find Map Men on Jay Foreman's channel, its funny AND educational. What could be better?!
Just when I think I must’ve seen them all by now.... BAM another new one. Cheers, QI! “Here’s to you 🍻 And here’s to me 🍻 I hope we never disagree 🤬 But if we do, to hell with you,👹 And here’s to me!”🍻
You are 100% correct. The only way to arrive in Montana is to fly over Montana’s airspace. Even if Steven inferred that the plane should land on the closest molecule within Montana (the Montana molecule), it still crossing over Montana.
I'm going to be that guy... "Those blue continents are in fact not using Mercator projection. Looks more like the Miller projection." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
I've remember reading somewhere that the modern flat earth movement started out as a joke on the internet designed to ridicule the scientifically illiterate. And like a lot of jokes on the internet, this one also got a bit out of hand.
@@danf4306 no i mean many people like me can speak n understand English,but we can't catch up with their speed and accent so we miss many words,so having subtitles would be very helpful
I guess some people might think you'd be passing Montana completely but I saw it as if you are going to land in Montana you'd be flying over it in some capacity.
You do fly over an American state that starts with M when flying to Montana, though. You fly over Montana. At least a little bit of it. Even if you somehow find a flight from Madrid to Glasgow, MT (the middle of flipping nowhere near the Canadian border, but it has long runways because it's used by Boeing to test airliners in winter weather conditions), you will inevitably pass over at least a little bit of Montana. ;-)
Sail from England to New Zealand directly without hitting land was something I found hard to fathom the way I see maps. Maybe the flat earthers just refuse to have their minds changed which is a sign of the opposite of intelligence
When I went from the UK to Mexico (North West Mexico) we flew over Canada and back down because it's the route with the most land incase they need to make an emergency landing.
@@bartholomewdan I was on a Dreamliner with Tui. We had TVs on our seats and it showed us the flight path and me and my boyfriend were like why the hell are we flying over Canada, and then the Stewardess told us why. It was my first time ever on a plane aswell, only a 10 hour flight 😅 not going to lie I pooed my pants on the first take off.
She may have told you that, but it is patently wrong. You flew over Canada because it was the shortest route. A lot of which was barren ice and snow without a major airport. If they worried about making an emergency landing then you would fly via Gander and over the bulk of the US. As @Bartholomew Dan said, with today's ETOPS (originally Extended Twin-engine Operations now just Extended Operations since it applies to quad engine types in some circumstances) rating they can fly up to 370 minutes from an airport (more than six hours). It depends on the type of airplane and could change over the life of the aircraft type as more experience was gained with the aircraft and its engines. The Airbus A350XWB was ETOPS-180 (180 minutes from the nearest diversionary airport) originally and then went up to EROPS-370. Depending on the configuration, the Boeing Dreamliner is up to ETOPS-330.
What I would give to challenge Fry on this. "So you like this map, Fry? Why? Because it diminishes the European continent? The continent that gave civilization to the world. Why ignore it?"
The answer to the question, then, is, "Nothing is wrong with the world map." The world map is drawn the way it is because it's still the easiest and most convenient way for us to navigate the oceans, and ocean trade is still the driving force behind most of the world's commerce.
Nope. The center is the mediterranean. The only reason is that europe was and is seen as most important for trade. Navigation would be just as easy if the center was at the equator. But that would mean that europe would be squashed, while regions "less" important for trade would be bigger. And even more, you don't use these maps for navigation, you use them to see how the earth's surface looks. Your view is almost exactly why it is problematic.
@@beageler no, the Mercator projection is the only one in which rhumb lines are drawn as straight lines. The longitudinal "centre" can be anywhere, and I've seen many examples where it's in the Americas or in Asia. The latitudinal "centre" can only be the equator, never Europe - the only way it could appear otherwise is if the bottom or the top of the map is chopped off. How important this still is for navigation is debatable. I would imagine that in these days of gps, most ships also follow great circles. The other nice property of the Mercator projection is that it preserves the shapes of countries very well, which can't be said for area-preserving projections. But if you want something realistic, the only real option is to look at a globe
As with most maps the equator is not in the middle but disproportionately towards the bottom so making the northern hemisphere look larger and the southern look smaller. Just saying from godzone downunder.
Isn't that because most people have very little interest in the interior of Antarctica so it gets cut off? And it's bigger than the central part of the Arctic ocean?
One other reason you wouldn’t cross over any US states on such a flight is that it doesn’t exist! There are no direct flights from Madrid to any airport in Montana.
Yes, people talk about how the map is inaccurate, for instance Greenland seems to be as big as Africa and Europe is represented much bigger than it is, therefore, the Europeans were trying to make themselves seem more important. Surely, that would mean that the world put much more store and respect into Greenland!
Projecting onto a useful flat map that maintains heading has the side effect of squishing the equator countries. The equator countries happen to be poorer. It's not the motivation behind doing it. It's a side effect.
If we put North at the bottom of the map, then Europe, Russia, Greenland, and Canada would still look unusually large because they are so far from the equator. There is a lot more land north of the equator than south of it. Even the southern end of Africa (which is already the smallest part of it) is still nowhere near Antarctica.
@@Statalyzer That's clearly not the point. Its that north is centrally located, its where your eyes naturally tend towards, it signifies power (top storey, leader above all men etc). The only reason why you'd put the north at the top is because the map is European/Northern hemisphere biased. The size thing is irrelevant.
Yeah the great circle route should have been more pronounced than it was and it would have been if the globe was fully inflated and curved. That flat bit kind of ruined the demonstration.
Me on a plane going to LA from London: Oh look, Iceland... but Iceland is North of UK and LA is South 🤷 Of course a direct flight to New Zealand could go over anywhere. Best to avoid Russia just now though...
It's a perfectly good, recently updated map of the world. All borders have been removed, in accordance with the new One World government. That's what's wrong with that map !!
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Shoutout to Map Men for teaching me all about this.
Map men, map men, map map map men. Men.
@@VanessaMagick i like your singing
I learnt that Greenland is actually the size of Greenland
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH
We're the men and here's the map
"Are you wrestling with the world there?"
"Aren't we all, Stephen."
Too damn true.
Goodjob you have ears
Quoting part of the video to highlight it was fun is a valid idea, unless you're a miserable contrarian.
@@Damian_1989 Agreed, and I'm normally a miserable contrarian!
i am not "wrestling" with it because my first language is English.
@@civlyzed no you're not
This is exactly how to teach people. There's no substitute for practical experience. Putting string on a globe is something everyone can grasp, and so easy.
Of course, this isn't really teaching anyone any geography at all. It doesn't matter to Alan Davies if a flight from London to LA flies this way or that. The whole point of this clip is to teach it s Westerners, yet again to be ashamed of ourselves and the smallpox we brought to this US, and our maps which belittle the equatorial people. We don't need that shaming, it brings nothing to the table.
@@WilliamSmith-mx6ze I just watched it again, and I didn't get any of that. Just a practical exercise about distances on a curved surface and facts about Mercator projection.
@@WilliamSmith-mx6ze 🧇
Everyone is cool till they hear Stephen fry say "very well done, its the riiiight answer" you can just tell by their faces how happy it makes them
I was once flying from Warsaw to Chicago. We passed by the southern tip of Hudson's bay, and I have never seen a more desolate landscape.
And that's coming from someone who's also seen central Warsaw and the suburbs of Chicago! 😁
(I'll get my coat...)
Technically speaking, Hudson Bay (and James Bay) are part of the Arctic Ocean. They're its southernmost extent.
Soooo, you've never been to Scunthorpe, then......?
@@PhilipStorry Actually, I was flying from Milan to Chicago. The cheapest flight I could get had a stopover in Warsaw. All I've seen of Warsaw is the airport. And I preferred it to Milan Malpensa, which is a shithole of an airport.
@@MegaFortinbras ehh. I still say that Chicago airport is the worst airport ever constructed.
The land is colored blue. My 4th grade teacher would have failed me for that.
I always thought teachers were arseholes for doing that. Just a really petty thing to do. It's just a colour. Get a life.
Sorry, that is obviously a contentious issue for me 🤣
My 4th grade teacher failed my test because the margins were the wrong size. Sometimes you can never win.
...your teacher failed you, or did you fail them?
@@EebstertheGreat One might even say you where marginalized.
@@EebstertheGreat My 9th grade math teacher almost flunked me because i wasn’t showing my work and they thought I was cheating. It was incomprehensible to them that I could do it in my head. Had to sit down with multiple observers who watched me take a math test. Some people just shouldn’t be educators.
If you're on a flight from Montana to Madrid you'd fly over an American state starting with M called Montana.
Literally the same thing I was thinking 🤣🤣
@@adamdickinson2894 but you would not fly all the way over it.
@@yerdasellsavon2073 But it was never stated that you had to go all the way over, just "over".
into it not over it lol
They actually weren't showing a true mercator projection in the video, they were showing a Miller projection, which is an adjusted mercator to reduce the polar distortion :)
Alan at 2:24 "just going to colour in Scotland yellow" ... cheers mate!
I didn't get it tbh
@@atrumluminarium Yellow is the colour of the Scottish National Party. They want to hold an hold an independence referendum ;-)
@@wendydunnett-dagg9023 ah ok
I like how flights look on a flat map. It looks like they go up and come back down again.
I have been binge watching these videos without mercy lol. Stephen is amazing
Gotta remember that line: *"The great circle route is a roundabout way of traveling in a straight line."*
"Because it's flat, and.. the Earth is round."
Oh... here 'they' come....
Klaxons should have sounded. Its an oblate spheroid
@@Paul-A01 an oblate spheroid is round, it's just not a perfect circle.
@@fredsmith-kingofthelunatic7810 *sphere
We all know it's shaped like a velociraptor
Say that three times and they will crawl out from the sewers.
And now I'm off to rewatch some classic Map Men videos!
2:23
Is it cuz of the SNP and how they're coloured yellow
yes
'myopic nationalist separatism' has a colour?
Nichola's getting her pots of tartan paint at the ready as we speak, the wee nastie.
@@phily8093 Do people don't like Nicola Sturgeon spell her name wrong intentionally, or are they just illiterate?
@@grahamlive I'd imagine it's because there are two common spellings of the name, and without paying close attention, it's an easy, and innocuous mistake, which is hardly worth pointing out. Still it gives passive aggressive pedants something to do I suppose.
Mercator is also a very highly used principle for male online dating profiles: exaggerate the upper and lower regions and underestimate the middle.
😂Big feet and big head and small...
@@jenniferpearce1052 I was thinking more along the lines of embellished mental acuity and downplayed waistline. But double entendre has so many possibilities...
@@magnushultgrenhtc Well, two
No it's just simply that the father you get away from the belly button the greater the distortion
Loove this comment🤣🤣🤣
My first thought, it's missing New Zealand. But they actually avoided the usual mistake!
Ambergis - Even Jacinda got involved in making a video.
ruclips.net/video/HynsTvRVLiI/видео.html
(Guardian News)
ruclips.net/video/are0lqDQOtM/видео.html&ab_channel=NUkiwi
(Oliver)
@@joanne4758 This is hilarious!
@@joanne4758 Coincidentally Rhys Darby was on a different QI episode J - Justice with Brian Cox and Jason Manford. I feel like I have gone full circle (a full great circle ohhhhhh)
Alan was on fire during this round!
The Mercator Projection does not squish things close to the equator, in fact it's just the opposite! The closer you get to the poles, the more stretched out things become. Things on the equator (and with in several degrees) are actually their correct shape. This is why Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, because it's been stretched, not because Africa was squished.
Squish in the sense of make smaller. It makes the things near the equator relatively smaller.
"I'm not shorter than you, it's just that you are taller!"
I actually knew this from my geography class. I did fail that semester but I don't think that's important. But I do know why I actually retained that information. It's because I would fly back and forth as a kid from the States to Greece to go between visiting parents who were divorced and I always wondered why when you chose the flight progress monitor the line was always curved and when my geography teacher in college explained the whole round earth vs flat map thing I was like oooooooooooooooooooooh.
It's something that's hard to wrap your head around until you see it demonstrated on a globe, like they did here. Then suddenly it all makes sense.
@@wloffblizz exactly. It just clicks when you get the visual.
@@wloffblizz I feel it’s pretty straight forward to understand if you imagine a globe in your head.
“I’m just gonna color Scotland in yellow” oh the irony...
I'm from the US. I have no idea what this means.
Scotland had a vote for independence some years ago, I'm assuming shortly after this episode was taped or aired.
@@pronkb000 Series M aired in 2015/16 (probs recorded Feb/March 2015) so it still would be fresh in people's minds given the independence referendum was September 2014.
@@Mythraen the SNP which is a yellow political party has won a landslide in Scotland for the past few elections.
As someone else has correctly pointed out this was filmed just after the SNP lost an independence referendum, and at the time only had a few constituencies (similar to US states for election purposes)
@@davidharris2517 Thank you! Cheers from St. Louis, Missouri
Don't wanna be that guy but that's definitely not the Mercator projection
Yeah, the Mercator projection is supposed to make Greenland far bigger than Australia, but this makes them similar sizes. Still not accurate, but nowhere near Mercator inaccurate.
It looks like it might be the Miller cylindrical projection.
I thought that but did not want to say it first.
I thought it might be the equirectangular projection
@@havardmj
Greenland is too tall for that. Equirectangular makes the northern extremes the right height but far too wide.
The Miller cylindrical projection keeps everything _closer_ to the correct shape, but not the right size. A balance between Mercator and equirectangular.
he was talking about the one on the paper they have wasn't he?
2:10 - first time i have ever heard Stephen Fry referred to as Steve. He's definitely a Stephen with a "ph" - not Phsteven.
Well you can hardly call him "Steph".
Somewhere, CJ Cregg is shouting at her TV.
I love you.
ruclips.net/video/QMlp8BeBJgg/видео.html
ruclips.net/p/PLBv5y_xhrH9VR2ZS6bQn3q4H_7tKr8ZmX
Me too! - I have 'merch' which is ostensibly from the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality... though, admittedly it is sitting next to my collection from Phil Baharnd, King of Auto Sales in Fargo, ND - that guy can sell a car like, well, anything!
I wonder if they ever built that wolf-only highway for Pluie...
In a fortnight, she'll be back in the White House communications department, organising Big Block of Cheese Day. (Trump never had one. Obviously.)
Honest question: when sailors began crossing oceans did they follow some approximation of the great circle? Or did they follow lines of latitude?
They followed lines of latitude, especially after it was figured out that if you knew the latitude and knew the time (given a good chronometer [clock]) you could figure out the longitude from the sun.
Not necessarily lines of latitude, they followed rhumb lines (I.e. followed a constant heading). This was the easiest with the technology of the time - a compass could tell them their current heading, and they could adjust to keep the heading they wanted.
That was what led to the Mercator projection: its key property is that rhumb lines on the globe are drawn as straight lines on the map. And it's very easy to draw a straight line on the map and read off from it what heading you need to follow, in order to follow that path.
When air travel became common, but before GPS, rhumb lines were still the only paths that could be easily followed. Flight paths were planned as approximations of great circles, by choosing a route that consisted of a line of waypoints roughly on a great circle, and following rhumb lines between them
Man. People actually getting Canadian geography right, plus lessons in spherical geometry (including geodesics). As a Canadian physicist, I have no choice but to "like" this video :D
@Cara Salusc Thanks for your kind remarks. If I take a critical look at my country, I would say that there ways in which some of the Scandinavian nations are doing better in terms of quality of life, income inequality, social safety nets, and education.* But for whatever areas of improvement we have, I'm still thankful to be here.
@Cara Salusc That seems so Canadian, lol. Not at the top in any one category, but uniformly high in all of them.
It's nice, that feeling of smug intellect, when you know what the video is about just by reading the title.
If a curve in 2 dimensions is a straight line in 3 does a curve in n dimensions produce a straight line in n+1 dimensions?
Yeah, kind of. A curve in the plane y = f(x) can be considered as a level curve of a function of two variables (z = f(x, y) = constant). And a surface in 3-D, described by a function of two variables, can be considered as the level surface of a function of three variables. So in general if you constrain a function in n+1 variables to a set value, you get something that can be described in only n variables. Or in other words, a surface given by n variables is a level (or "flat") portion of one in n+1 variables.
A bit disappointed they didnt show a map where the continents are properly displayed.
Ive always known this since i was a child because my mother had a map like that. It always fascinated me.
1.) The weather may make them go a different route
2.) They may dip down into the US earlier because NavCanada charges by the KM for ATC.
One thing you really don't want to do in an aeroplane for too long is fly in a straight line.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
When you are watching the plane journey on the in-flight system it can wig you out to see how a straight line can look so unstraight. Flying from NYC to MEL via Abu Dhabi was freaky
That seems quite reasonable. Certainly not an extreme example.
Map men! Map men! Map! Map! Map! Men! Men!
Men.
I commented the same just now!
And women!
@@rosiefay7283 I think this will help you understand the in joke ruclips.net/video/jtBV3GgQLg8/видео.html
@@rosiefay7283 if you want to make a parralel youtube show called Map Women, i will gladly watch it. If you need inspiration find Map Men on Jay Foreman's channel, its funny AND educational. What could be better?!
I'm trying to get to Babylon.. where are we?
16th century earth does appear to have been heart shaped
Just when I think I must’ve seen them all by now.... BAM another new one.
Cheers, QI!
“Here’s to you 🍻
And here’s to me 🍻
I hope we never disagree 🤬
But if we do, to hell with you,👹
And here’s to me!”🍻
If the world was flat the cats would already have pushed everything off of the edge.
Not enough of it is pink anymore, they really haven’t made maps like they used to since 1945 smh.
This is one of the more impressive usernames I've seen in some time. Well done.
@@UstedTubo187 I reckon he's hoping it will get him in the top of the queue for the vaccine !!! Cheers.
watching this and realising that the most direct route between any two points on the globe is NEVER along a line of latitude. mind = blown
@@jumblejumbo great point
Let me blow your mind again by pointing out that between two points on the equator, the shortest path *is* a line of latitude!
Always nice to see my Home state mentioned!
Flat-earthers around the world must be foaming at the mouth from this...
They do that any way.
It's a natural side effect of their parents being brother & sister.
The flat earth society has members all over the globe
“Regina” 😆😆
And I’ve been there and eaten some good Thai food so I hate laughing.
You had the Hot Thai Regina experience did you?
Ooh err
The Lost One So you're telling us that you've eaten out in Regina?
0:34, They say none, and say its correct, but surely the correct answer is one, Montana.
You are 100% correct. The only way to arrive in Montana is to fly over Montana’s airspace. Even if Steven inferred that the plane should land on the closest molecule within Montana (the Montana molecule), it still crossing over Montana.
Maybe if it lands in Canada and taxis to Montana?
You are going TO Montana. That means you just have to touch the boundary of Montana to GET to Montana without having to fly over Montana.
@@jpaxonreyes But even if you go exactly to the Montana border you're still flying over Montana.
Like I said, just land outside and taxi in. No flying over it.
Gerardus Mercator was from county of Flanders(so Dutch) not English.
When we flew from London HRW to Cancun we crossed the Atlantic over towards Newfoundland and then went down the American east coast .
This works in the middle of the disc but not the edges
The shortest route would actually tunnel into the earth. Stephen never said tunneling wasn't allowed.
Yeah, but tunnelling is slow, so it takes a lot longer.
A tunnel would prove a tricky route in a plane.
I'm going to be that guy... "Those blue continents are in fact not using Mercator projection. Looks more like the Miller projection."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
Mmmmmm, Hotine Oblique Mercator.
Fun fact we still use this for digital maps for some reason
Montana has an airport with direct flights to Madrid?
Anything has direct flights to anywhere if you're flying private.
Happy they remembered New Zealand for a change!
I wonder if someone will post this in a flat earth forum
I’m from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Cool! I spent a month there one week :-)
Seriously, though, I did enjoy my time there.
I've remember reading somewhere that the modern flat earth movement started out as a joke on the internet designed to ridicule the scientifically illiterate. And like a lot of jokes on the internet, this one also got a bit out of hand.
Please add subtitles to your vedios,it would be great for non English speaking audience
Open Google translate at the same time
@@danf4306 no i mean many people like me can speak n understand English,but we can't catch up with their speed and accent so we miss many words,so having subtitles would be very helpful
@@abrar_sy_pyar I bet you have fun when Ross Noble is on the panel, Abrar😉
@@CHIL2903 yes of course but without subs I miss so many things
I love hearing Sue Perkins pull out her RP accent.
This is one of those things where I knew tbe answer, & was sure I knew what the q was eluding to from the title
If you drill underground I think it's even shorter again.
Personally I just open a wormhole to my destination and cut the distance to zero
Hard to believe how much smaller europe is than all the flyover countries!
Ricardo Montalban....Love it Sue Perkins.
Technically. you'd fly over Montana, an American state beginning with m.
Not if you're trying to get to Montana. If you're trying to get to Montana and you fly over Montana, then you're already done.
@@jpaxonreyes indeed you have missed your destination.
maybe i am missing the joke here, but montana is a canadian state?
@@alexmuller6752 love and respect. the thought was that this part of the USA was Montana and could not be flown over if that was the destination
I guess some people might think you'd be passing Montana completely but I saw it as if you are going to land in Montana you'd be flying over it in some capacity.
The great circle route is a great ROUND about way to go in a straight line! XD
Why is he colouring Scotland yellow?
I was hoping they would say that the world map basically has something wrong with it.
Ayee knew this one, all of it!!!
You do fly over an American state that starts with M when flying to Montana, though. You fly over Montana. At least a little bit of it. Even if you somehow find a flight from Madrid to Glasgow, MT (the middle of flipping nowhere near the Canadian border, but it has long runways because it's used by Boeing to test airliners in winter weather conditions), you will inevitably pass over at least a little bit of Montana. ;-)
And the true size of countries is so distorted, Greenland for example is actually smaller than India - by about 1,000,000 sq km
Sail from England to New Zealand directly without hitting land was something I found hard to fathom the way I see maps. Maybe the flat earthers just refuse to have their minds changed which is a sign of the opposite of intelligence
When I went from the UK to Mexico (North West Mexico) we flew over Canada and back down because it's the route with the most land incase they need to make an emergency landing.
I thought Easter wad tbe dagger option, well sometimes, depending on the body of land or water
@@kurtsudheim825 Easter was the dagger? What chu talking about? 😅
What aircraft were you flying on? Modern airliners have such ridiculous ETOPS ratings that they can fly pretty much anywhere.
@@bartholomewdan I was on a Dreamliner with Tui. We had TVs on our seats and it showed us the flight path and me and my boyfriend were like why the hell are we flying over Canada, and then the Stewardess told us why. It was my first time ever on a plane aswell, only a 10 hour flight 😅 not going to lie I pooed my pants on the first take off.
She may have told you that, but it is patently wrong. You flew over Canada because it was the shortest route. A lot of which was barren ice and snow without a major airport. If they worried about making an emergency landing then you would fly via Gander and over the bulk of the US. As @Bartholomew Dan said, with today's ETOPS (originally Extended Twin-engine Operations now just Extended Operations since it applies to quad engine types in some circumstances) rating they can fly up to 370 minutes from an airport (more than six hours). It depends on the type of airplane and could change over the life of the aircraft type as more experience was gained with the aircraft and its engines. The Airbus A350XWB was ETOPS-180 (180 minutes from the nearest diversionary airport) originally and then went up to EROPS-370. Depending on the configuration, the Boeing Dreamliner is up to ETOPS-330.
What I would give to challenge Fry on this. "So you like this map, Fry? Why? Because it diminishes the European continent? The continent that gave civilization to the world. Why ignore it?"
He'd make a fool of you considering you missed the point entirely.
I didn't get the colouring in Scotland yellow joke
Yellow is the colour of the SNP (Scottish National Party) of Scotland which has a majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament.
I feel like this is something everybody already knows 🤷🏻♂️
Fun fact: Every single person on this panel (except for Alan Davies) has not reappeared since, including Stephen Fry.
The answer to the question, then, is, "Nothing is wrong with the world map." The world map is drawn the way it is because it's still the easiest and most convenient way for us to navigate the oceans, and ocean trade is still the driving force behind most of the world's commerce.
Nope. The center is the mediterranean. The only reason is that europe was and is seen as most important for trade. Navigation would be just as easy if the center was at the equator. But that would mean that europe would be squashed, while regions "less" important for trade would be bigger. And even more, you don't use these maps for navigation, you use them to see how the earth's surface looks.
Your view is almost exactly why it is problematic.
@@beageler no, the Mercator projection is the only one in which rhumb lines are drawn as straight lines.
The longitudinal "centre" can be anywhere, and I've seen many examples where it's in the Americas or in Asia. The latitudinal "centre" can only be the equator, never Europe - the only way it could appear otherwise is if the bottom or the top of the map is chopped off.
How important this still is for navigation is debatable. I would imagine that in these days of gps, most ships also follow great circles.
The other nice property of the Mercator projection is that it preserves the shapes of countries very well, which can't be said for area-preserving projections. But if you want something realistic, the only real option is to look at a globe
As with most maps the equator is not in the middle but disproportionately towards the bottom so making the northern hemisphere look larger and the southern look smaller. Just saying from godzone downunder.
Isn't that because most people have very little interest in the interior of Antarctica so it gets cut off? And it's bigger than the central part of the Arctic ocean?
One other reason you wouldn’t cross over any US states on such a flight is that it doesn’t exist! There are no direct flights from Madrid to any airport in Montana.
Surprised not to see any comments from the flat earth community here. How refreshing
Map Men, Map Men, Map Map Map Men Men
It's a shame they didn't show the Peterson projection.
The Peters projection isn't actually better, it's just wrong in a different way.
Wish they had mentioned the Peters Projection
God this channel is brilliant at reuploading the same old videos all the time.
Yellow!! I used to be a fan.
Rhumb Line for the WIN!!!
Oh no. Flerfers will see this and explode in pedantry.
Yes, people talk about how the map is inaccurate, for instance Greenland seems to be as big as Africa and Europe is represented much bigger than it is, therefore, the Europeans were trying to make themselves seem more important. Surely, that would mean that the world put much more store and respect into Greenland!
But they did have a choice to put Europe in the north. Its def Northern-hemisphere centric.
Projecting onto a useful flat map that maintains heading has the side effect of squishing the equator countries. The equator countries happen to be poorer. It's not the motivation behind doing it. It's a side effect.
If we put North at the bottom of the map, then Europe, Russia, Greenland, and Canada would still look unusually large because they are so far from the equator. There is a lot more land north of the equator than south of it. Even the southern end of Africa (which is already the smallest part of it) is still nowhere near Antarctica.
@@Statalyzer That's clearly not the point. Its that north is centrally located, its where your eyes naturally tend towards, it signifies power (top storey, leader above all men etc). The only reason why you'd put the north at the top is because the map is European/Northern hemisphere biased. The size thing is irrelevant.
No, the way in which europe was enlarged, enlarged greenland even more. Although I'm pretty sure you just act stupid, for trolling.
I love Alan Stephen and Sandy! Can't help but crack up!!!
I suppose that Mercater is responsible for flat-earthers to as represented on his maps.
Space Time !
👍😉
It bothers me to see that Alan's inflatable globe is not inflated to its full firmness potential!
Yeah the great circle route should have been more pronounced than it was and it would have been if the globe was fully inflated and curved. That flat bit kind of ruined the demonstration.
@@dunbar9finger You'd hope QI might have been able to afford to rent a rigid non-inflatable globe.
i've never understood the idea that it was an imperialist thing. "look at how small the territory we conquered is!"
It was the Greenlandics wanting to look bigger!
Shoutout to Winnipeg!
Here because Winnipeg is mentioned.
Nope, the problem is they always forget antarctica
Me on a plane going to LA from London:
Oh look, Iceland... but Iceland is North of UK and LA is South 🤷
Of course a direct flight to New Zealand could go over anywhere.
Best to avoid Russia just now though...
At least New Zealand isn't missing
So, is the Earth flat or round?!
round
Spherical definitely, technically an oblate sphearoid but only by a tiny percentage. 100% not flat.
"Where's Madrid?"
And that's where the show would have to be paused in the USA....
It's a perfectly good, recently updated map of the world. All borders have been removed, in accordance with the new One World government.
That's what's wrong with that map !!
1:30 Oh a string! Does anyone here have a pin that I can borrow?
It's not round, it's flat😊
Are you wrestling with the world? Aren't we all Stephen? 😂😂😂