Maps Memes

Posts tagged with Maps

The Great Cartography Debate
Earth-science Science Geology
1 day ago 2.7K 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.

New Chiral Compound Just Dropped
Chemistry Science
2 days ago 2.9K views 0 shares
New Chiral Compound Just Dropped
The map of Europe is upside down! This is a brilliant chemistry joke about chirality - molecules that are mirror images of each other but can't be superimposed. Just like your left and right hands, they're non-superimposable mirror images. In chemistry, we call these enantiomers, and they can have wildly different properties despite having identical chemical formulas. Flipping Europe upside down creates its "chiral partner" - a perfect visual pun on "new compound dropping" that would make any stereochemistry professor snort coffee through their nose. The real kicker? Many drugs only work in one chiral form while the mirror version is useless or even harmful. Nature has a strict preference, just like how this upside-down Europe feels deeply unsettling to our geography-trained brains!