Cartography Memes

Posts tagged with Cartography

The Infinite Coastline Paradox
Math Earth-science Oceanography Geology
12 days ago 4.5K views 0 shares
The Infinite Coastline Paradox
Behold the mathematical trickery of coastlines! Purple countries have exactly ZERO meters of coastline (landlocked nations), while yellow countries have INFINITY meters! This isn't a geography error—it's the mind-bending Coastline Paradox in action! Measure a coastline with a 1-kilometer ruler, you get one number. Use a 1-meter ruler that catches all the tiny inlets? The measurement explodes! Go microscopic and it approaches infinity because coastlines are essentially fractal in nature! Mother Nature: "You want to measure me? Good luck with that, puny humans!" *maniacal scientist cackle*

Four Colors Are Indeed Enough
Math
1 month ago 4.5K views 0 shares
Four Colors Are Indeed Enough
Someone's trying to disprove the 4-Color Theorem with this diagram, but they've played themselves! The theorem states that any map can be colored using just 4 colors without adjacent regions sharing colors. This diagram uses 4 colors (red, yellow, green, burgundy) but creates a false "gotcha" by making regions touch at the inner circle. Classic mathematical trolling! The theorem actually accounts for this - regions that only meet at a point (not along a border) can share colors. It's like watching someone try to checkmate mathematics with a pawn.

The Great Cartography Debate
Earth-science Science Geology
1 month ago 5.6K views 0 shares
The Great Cartography Debate
The perfect illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect in cartography! That curved blue line represents the shortest path between two points on a globe (a geodesic), but mapping it onto a flat projection creates this apparent curve. The bell curve shows three perspectives: the confident-but-wrong crowd ("it's straight!"), the technically correct experts ("it's bent around Earth's curvature"), and my personal favorite—the person who just uses their eyeballs ("I can clearly see it's not straight"). What makes this extra hilarious is that the 20,000,000 km distance shown would actually be about 50 times Earth's circumference—so nobody's right! The ultimate cartographic mic drop for anyone who's ever argued about the "best" map projection.

When Your "Straight Line" Depends On Dimension
Earth-science Science Oceanography
3 months ago 6.5K views 0 shares
When Your "Straight Line" Depends On Dimension
The meme beautifully captures the collision between map projections and spatial reasoning! The original tweet claims you can sail from India to the USA in a "straight line" without touching land, showing a curved path on a flat map. But here's the mind-bender: that curved line is actually geodesically straight in 3D space! When sailing across a spherical Earth, the shortest path (a "straight line" in navigation terms) follows what's called a great circle. On flat Mercator projections, these great circles appear curved because... well, you're squishing a sphere onto a rectangle! The commenters missing this concept is pure comedy gold. It's like watching someone argue that the Earth is flat while standing on a globe!