Back when I was a kid, I saw some programs of National Film Board shorts shown in a cinema on Sunday afternoon. There were a lot of great ones there! I think my favourite was The Impossible Map, a short showing the challenge of trying to make a map of the whole world’s surface, which can't be done without some distortion somewhere.
Recently I was thinking about the best way to draw a map of the world. They’ve determined that the longest straight line you could sail on the sea before reaching land would start near the coast of Pakistan. Then you’d sail southwest through the Indian Ocean, the Mozambique Channel between Africa and Madagascar, the south Atlantic, the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica, and the Pacific Ocean up to Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
Why do I mention this? Because the world map I’d draw would be shaped like the number 8 on its side, or the view through binoculars, using this line as the border of both halves! The advantage of this is that most of the distortion would be near the borders, and since that’s all ocean there’d be little distortion of land areas. The left half would contain Europe, Siberia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas—most of the world’s dry land. But the east half would contain China, India, southeast Asia, Australia, Antarctica and Oceania, accounting for about half the world’s population.
The main problem with it is, which direction would be up? You could have north up on the western half, but then it’ll point to the upper left on the eastern half. Or you could have north up on the eastern half, then it’ll point to the upper right on the western half.
As you can see, I’m a bit of a geography nerd.
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