Flat Earthers, rejoice :)

Flat Earthers rejoice, earth is flat, at least in the most accurate 2D map of our planet known to man. :)

The object here is to find map projections that minimize the sum of the squares of the errors—a technique that dates back to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. The Goldberg-Gott error score (sum of squares of the six normalized individual error terms) for the Mercator projection is 8.296. The lower the score, the smaller the errors and the better the map. A globe of the Earth would have an error score of 0.0. We found that the best previously known flat map projection for the globe is the Winkel tripel used by the National Geographic Society, with an error score of 4.563. It has straight pole lines top and bottom with bulging left and right margins marking its 180 degree boundary cut in the middle of the Pacific.

We seem to be reaching a limit on improving the Winkel tripel. When that occurs in science, one often needs a breakthrough, some out-of-the-box thinking, to make any radical progress. Richard Feynman once said that in physics when we are stuck, when all the old methods don’t work, then the new trick, the new method that is going to work, is going to look very different from anything we have seen before.

Yes indeed.

You gotta flip it to see the South Pole & its environs :)

But while the new map excels at addressing distortion, Dr. Kerkovits said it also introduced a new weakness. You can see only half of the planet at once, unlike the Winkel Tripel and Mercator. That undermines the basic premise of flaying out the whole world for inspection on a single page or screen.

The Winkel Tripel projection, which is so-called because it aims to minimize three kinds of distortion: area, direction and distance.Credit...Daniel R. Strebe, via Wikimedia Commons

A 1569 Mercator projection map.Credit...via Wikimedia Commons

Where it all began. :)