June 10, 2017 • 39 mins
In this week's SYSK Select episode, yes, your brain may have just flash-dried from boredom at the thought of learning about maps, but it turns out they are a lot more than just tools for navigation. Maps are two-dimensional representations of how we imagine our world, with imagine being the operative word since every map in existence is riddled with errors.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, This is Chuck again with another edition of
Stuff you Should Know. Selects are Saturday Classic Edition episodes
and uh, as you know, we're curating these one at
a time, and this week I got to pick, and
I picked How Maps Work? And uh I picked this
one because everyone knows I love maps, and so I
thought it was a good one to rerun. Plus I
(00:21):
get to talk a little bit about my old high
school best friend Rad, who was a cartographer and I'm
always happy to get the word out about his work.
So listen and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
(00:42):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clarkin, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and I just had a bunch of peanuts. So it's
Stuff you Know Time Circus Edition. Yep. I wonder if
we could get R. E. M. S. Maps and Legends
to play just subtly behind this entire podcast. I can
answer that for you. Nope, No, okay, what album is
(01:05):
that one? Where is that an album? Boy? That was
the early one? I think maybe like reckoning even No again,
people are at home screaming at me because I can't
call that to mind. Was that their first one reckoning
Let's just move on. I'm afraid to get anything wrong. Yeah,
it's cool. People who are in are um are really
(01:27):
in ari em maps and legends. Good song um chuck. Yeah.
Have you ever used a map? Um? I have? I
am a notoriously terrible with my sense of direction, like
literally almost all the time. If I say it's left,
isn't it? They say, no, it's right. We just talked
(01:48):
about this. And because if I try to trick myself
and go I think it's left, I'm gonna say right,
then it's left. Like it's terrible. I've talked about it before.
It's it's really yeah, we we did recently. I can't
place why or where. It's just my brain. Man, it
doesn't work that way. So yeah, I use maps, and
I'm one of those people as to turn the map
in the direction I'm facing, and I just it's tough
for me. So when you were using a map, you
(02:12):
could have also said or that you're terrible using maps.
You can say I'm terrible at using two dimensional um contorted,
grossly misrepresentative images that supposedly are um. They stand for
different data points of Earth. That's right, that's another way
(02:36):
you could put maps, because it turns out that they're
actually not so great, even though they are extraordinarily useful.
They're portable now that you can get them online, they're
more portable than ever, and we would be pretty much
nowhere without them as far as the imperial colonization of
the world went. But um, we still have not licked
(02:58):
some very fundamental sick problems with maps. Maps and legends
was on fables By the way, So did you didn't
even hear what I just said? I heard it all
and I agree. Well, the problem is, dude, is the
Earth is is not a flat piece of paper or
a computer screen. The Earth is uh sort of shape
(03:20):
like a pumpkin. Yeah, I didn't realize that. I didn't either.
Apparently the middle is getting bigger too. You know what,
I just realized what what Tracy who wrote this meant
by pumpkin? Like, she didn't mean the tall pumpkin. Well, yeah,
pumpkins come in all shapes, right, So which pumpkin was
she referring to? I think like the shorter, rounder, round pumpkin. Yeah,
(03:44):
but apparently I think the Earth is supposedly getting bigger,
expanding at its at its center, not in the center,
but it's getting more pumpkiny, I think more pumpkin like. Okay,
so maps are getting less and less accurate then maybe
because here here's the problem. Map, Like we said, it's
a two dimensional representation of something that's three dimensional. It's
(04:04):
hard to do. A map is flat and it's representing
something that's round, spherical. Um. And if you take like,
take a pumpkin, go to your pantry right now and
get one of the pumpkins that you have there, and
take a piece of paper off of a roll saying
newsprint and um, tear enough off to go all the
way around the pumpkin, and you will see that if
(04:27):
you if you take a pumpkin and mash the paper
around it so that the pumpkins completely covered, you're gonna
have something that's that's just grossly distorted. That's a map.
It's a gross distortion of what's real. So much so
that if you see a map that accurately represents what
the continents look like and how close they are and
(04:49):
the amount of size they each have, you'd probably be
pretty startled because it doesn't look like what we're used to,
which is called the ma cat projection. Yeah. Um, And
it's funny. When I was reading this, I remember thinking
to myself, like, you know, if you're gonna make cheats,
like make them in the ocean, and I think that's
a lot of times what they do. Yeah, these no
(05:09):
one would notice, you know, the good hommal homal design.
The good homal design good as in somebody's last name
with an e. It basically distorts or chops up the
world in the oceans, so it's real good for land mass.
It would be terrible if you're driving like a an
(05:31):
oil tanker across the sea. Yeah. You don't want to
navigate by these things. No. And so since there's different
ways to distort a map, there's different uses for different
types of maps or distortions, which we call projections. We'll
get into that a little more later on. Let's talk
about the basics of all maps, right. A map is
(05:51):
essentially a representation of, like we said, data points on Earth. Yeah,
and it can be it can represent whatever. There's different
attributes you can if you wanted to show a map
um distribution of UM Golden Retriever ownership, you could do
that on a map. You totally could. Or the GDP
(06:13):
of different countries or land use you know, like it's
basically an easy way. It's an easy language to show
someone in picture form, various attributes, you know, and uh,
maps are created by people called cartographers, which is great
and um, like we said there's some there's some basic
(06:35):
commonalities to all maps, right, yeah. I kind of collect
maps by the way. I know you told me, not
like a bunch, but I've got I've got like six
right maps, any pirate maps, no pirate maps, but my
my entire desk. I made my desk and it is, Uh,
I've got a map of the world on it. It's like,
you know, four ft by three feet and then I
shall act over that and that's like my you know,
(06:56):
the base of my desk. Yeah, it's really cool because
you know, i'd reference it a lot. Actually, I like
the uh yeah, you know I could stand to do
that a lot more New England no idea. Well, it's
like looking up a word in the dictionary when you
don't know it referring to an atlas. If you're like, hey,
where's Kuala Lampoor but I don't have a map, and suddenly,
(07:17):
oh my god, Miss teen South Carolina's answer has come
to pass like I don't have a map, and I'm
not I'm not bad with maps, and I think if
you gave me like a little time, I would be
able to find anything. Sure, but um, because I don't
have a map for easy reference, like I use online
maps now, but like if I had one for easy reference,
(07:40):
I think I would be a lot better at geography.
I think everybody forget your computer. That's very handy, but
I think everyone should own a globe and or a
map of the world just to have it right. It's
nice to have frame it, put it on your wall.
They're very attractive. It's art, all right. I like the
fifties sixties maps, like a kind you'd find at school. Yeah,
(08:02):
from that era. I just like the design of them
to look Yeah, Kevin Canaine that one of the comedians
I saw, Max fun was talking about his pillows and
how you unsheathed his pillow, how nasty it is and
it looks like an ancient map of the world. You know,
it's like brown with those like lines. Yeah, what is
that stuff? It's he basically is like you know, this
stuff is like leaks from your head like sleep. Uh,
(08:25):
it's funny. It's a funny bit. Okay, so the basic
commonalities of maps are number one, usually land masses or
bodies of water. So you're gonna have an outline of
what you're talking about or what you're trying to show. Yeah, um,
are you talking about like a physical map? Yeah, well,
I mean any map is going to have that, but
the physical map is physical maps are more like like
(08:47):
the terrain of an area, right, that's what a physical
maps concerned with. Yeah, and they use something called hipsometric
tents um variations of color to obviously, you know, usually
your water is blue and then the land can be
green to brown or white if it's like the Swiss Alps,
you know. Yeah, have you ever seen a map where
(09:07):
the water isn't blue? The one on my desk is
it's tan. What Yeah, it's the whole thing is reading
in background. Now there's no blue, it's all tan. Um, Yeah,
it's tan. I've never seen that, you know, like the
Tan globe. No, you've seen like the Tan globe where
the globe isn't like blue and green. That's basically what
(09:28):
this is. It's like, I'm still having trouble wrapping my
head around it. Next time you're in my home office,
I'll show it to you. Uh. You can have political
maps that display like different cultural information about countries. Um.
Thematic maps obviously have a theme like climate or g
DP like I said, or you can get really specialized
(09:50):
like hey, where's the internet available in the world. Let's
draw a map instead of listing a bunch of countries.
Got you know? Yeah? Um yeah, thematic maps those are
probably the ones you see the most, aside from using
a map for street directions. Yeah, thematic maps are the
ones you went across. Like it'll be all sorts of
(10:10):
things like you just mentioned population density or oil exports,
all that. All right, Josh, Let's talk about what they
call cartography conventions. And this is not when a bunch
of cartographers get together at you know, the the downtown
Hilton in Atlanta and talk about maps, although I'm sure
they do that. I'm sure there are real cartography conventions.
(10:33):
We're talking about conventions in the sense of often used
uh techniques, right. Um. One of them, which I have
already broken with my map, is that, like we said,
water is blue. That's so weird. I don't understand land
is screen vegetation screen or brown or tan land masses
that's just one of the comic conventions. So what color
(10:55):
is the land mask? Then if the water on your
map is tan, they're also uh tan and green and
and brown and yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
It's really not that big of a deal, you know.
I'll go look it up. I will post a photo
of this of my map um online on Facebook when
we do this, and everyone will go, oh, that doesn't
(11:17):
look so weird. All right. I feel like a jerk
now because my water is not blue. No, No, it's fine, Okay,
I'm just I'm just having trouble understand you. It's all yeah, um,
all maps to pick their subject matter from above. Yeah,
that's something that you just don't even really think of.
It's such a common convention. North is usually at the top, yeah, um, generally,
(11:40):
or if it's not, for some reason, they'll point you
in the right direction, say this is north, this is
southeast and west. They have legends a lot of times. Yeah,
maps and legends. Like we talked about with r a
M and UM scale is usually indicated, so like it
will be like one inch equals a hundred miles, or
there's like one to like there's a ratio or something
like that. Yeah, and this is all the the gobbity
(12:01):
book you find on the outskirts of the map. There's
usually lots of stuff written down that you may not
look at. That's where you'll find this information. And this
should include in the legend that like Hawaii and Alaska
are not actually right next to one another in the
South Pacific Ocean. Yeah, as it seems it's true. That's
just odd. Well, like we said, it's tough, you know,
(12:23):
when you got around or a pumpkin like world. Um,
coordinate system A lot of times they're not a lot
of times. Every time you'll see a map, there's gonna
be some kind of a coordinate system. If it's a
Thomas Guide, Like before the advent of online smartphone maps,
when I lived in l A, the Thomas Guide was
your best friend. Um. And that's just a simple grid system.
(12:45):
Like you look up, hey, I want to go to
to Panga Canyon, Go to page four hundred and look
up F six and then you'll just map your way
from there. Yeah. The alphabets across the top numbers run
down the side and you find F six and sink
someone's battleship. Um. If it's like a map of the
world they're probably gonna show you, um launch student latitude,
(13:09):
but not necessarily something you can navigate with, you know, no,
but it should it should be accurate as the point,
well accurate, but not like you don't want to take
a map of the world into the woods if you're orienteering,
you know, you want a topographical map. Tricky to read,
by the way, they ever looked at a topo map
like been camping and stuff, because you were talking about
hip symmetric tents to indicate different changes in altitude right
(13:33):
or elevation. Topographical maps use contour lines and yeah, you
better know what you're doing because it's not necessarily intuitive.
It's not intuitive at all. You just have to learn
it and then once you learn it, you can wrap
your head around it. Usually the closer the lines are
or every time, the closer the lines are together, the
more steep the change in elevation is right, and lines
(13:54):
that are kind of spread out indicate like a very
slow Yeah, I think that slope. Been a while since
I'm taking basic orienteering. Is that a word orienteering? Yeah?
I've not heard it really, Yeah, are you messing with
me on this episode? Now? Orienteering is when, like you,
they'd give you a map and a compass and send
you out in the woods. Yeah. I thought that was
(14:15):
called trailblazing. Sure you can. You're also trailblazing. Okay, well
hold on before we go any further. Um, it's time
for a message break. Okay. So we're back and we're
talking about map drawing conventions, believe it or not. And
there's a cool here's a cool experiment you can do
(14:37):
if you want to know how difficult it is to
draw a map and have it look accurate. Get a balloon,
blow it up, Um, draw whatever you want, but draw,
you know, the United States in Mexico and South America
in Canada, Canada in there, and then deflate that balloon
and see what it looks like. And that will give
(14:59):
you a little bit of insight into how tough it
is to be a cartographer. Right. I mean you mentioned
um lines of longitude and latitude. Right, those are coordinates
on any map, and since their coordinates on a map,
um people use them to navigate by. Right. But since
we're going from a sphere to a flat plane, you
(15:22):
have to figure out how to adjust for that, and
you're basically making a decision. You're gonna say, Okay, am
I going to make it so that the angles if
somebody draws a straight line, the angles are all going
to be the same along that line, Meaning you can
follow that line on a compass in the real world
and get there. It's called a rum line. Or are
the lines of latitude which are called parallels, Yeah, and
(15:47):
lines of longitude are meridians. They're going to be equidistant accurately. Like,
that's the conundrum. That's the big conundrum with maps typically, Yeah,
like where do you want your curiousy two be right?
Which is pretty weird. I never really thought about it though,
like that, you know, like you have to it's an
interesting job, and that you have to know that I
(16:08):
cannot you cannot draw a perfect map on a piece
of paper. So where am I gonna um fludge? Essentially?
And you do this. You figure this out with what
they call map projections, and that is basically the method
that you choose to project that severe onto a flat surface. Right, So, Josh,
you've cracked the code. I have not. This is a
This is a very kind of it's tough to to
(16:31):
think of because we're talking about now how distortions occur,
and um, so there's different ways to manipulate how something's distorted.
First of all, let's say you are making a new projection. Okay, right,
that's that's a different manipulation of distortion, right as a projection, um,
(16:51):
and you're making a brand new one. One of the things,
one of the tools you can use is called um
tisso's indoka tricks T I S S O, t apostrophe
s too. So those are the circles. Yeah, and what
you do is you just overlay the equal distant uh
(17:11):
exactly the same aka identical circles. It like a grid
of circles right over a globe. And then when you
make your projection, the circles will distort and you will
be able to see where your distortions are on different areas, um,
how they distort, like what direction they're going to distort it,
and get an exist an idea of how your your
(17:32):
projection is distorted. Right. Um. And the reason that maps
distort again is because you're taking a three dimensional spherical
representation and putting it on a two dimensional flat surface.
And the projection that we're all very familiar with the
one that we use almost across the board is the
Mercat projection. And there is a guy named gerardist Picator
(17:56):
who in fifteen sixty nine created a map of the world.
And Mark Hater decided that I'm gonna make my maps
for sailors, and he made a very important decision. He
made it so that rum lines where you measure between
two points on this map, and you can follow that
angle with your compass in real life and you will
(18:17):
get there. He made it so that those were precise,
but he gave up lines of longitude and latitude being precise.
And he figured out how to represent this very cleverly,
where on lines of I'm sorry, not lines of longitude
and lolatitude, just latitude since since the Earth gets narrower
(18:39):
at the top because it's a ball, and it's widest
at the middle, the anything above or below the equator,
as you get further away, the lines get the lines
between the latitudinal lines get bigger and bigger the spaces
between them, so like you would see on the globe. Maybe, yeah,
it's a it's a really clever representation of of what
(19:01):
happens when you take a piece of paper and put
it around a globe. A ball that's the Mercater projection.
And the way to figure out how he did this,
or to imagine how he did is to take a
cylinder like a piece of paper and roll it up
into the shape of the cylinder. This is a magic
piece of paper cylinder, and you have a balloon, and
(19:21):
it's a magic balloon. That's it's the same balloon we've
drawn our world on. It can be, but it's a
magic version of it because we needed to have our
world on it, drawing on it perfectly. And you blow
up this balloon until it hits um an edge of
the cylinder, right, so it's just touching the inside of
the cylinder on two points one on either side. What
(19:43):
that balloon has just become is tangent to the cylinder.
The sekin is where the cylinder would like intersect the balloon,
but right now it's just touching. And you take a
Mercader projection, and you've got a perfectly blown up balloon
inside a cylinder. And that's what you imagine is the projection.
You have to take it a little further. You blow
up the balloon until it completely fills up the cylinder.
(20:04):
So now all of the information on this balloon is
pressed up against the inside of the cylinder, the place
where it was tangent, where it touched naturally when the
blue was just filled up and it was just a sphere.
That's going to be undistorted. Okay, that makes sense. The
stuff that you're blowing up until the balloon is no
longer a spear but is filling up the cylinder, that
stuff becomes distorted. And the further toward the edges you go,
(20:27):
the more distorted. Is now we can pop our magic
balloon because all that information has been transferred on the
inside of this cylindrical paper. And you unroll it and
there's your Mercator projection. Pretty good? Yeah, I think I
get it? Do you really? I got it more than
I did than when I read this like eight times. Yeah,
you know, yeah, Uncle Josh coming through for me. But
(20:49):
in the center of a Mercator projection, the distortions are
going to be the least because it's tangent to the cylinder.
That's where it's just naturally touching the edges. It's not
distort it's not being forced into the cylindrical shape. Yeah,
that makes sense. We should call this one What maps
the Sun? Part two? Write. It is really hard to
(21:09):
wrap your head around. It is, especially when you're like
me and you're bad with maps. To begin with. Um,
so we talked about projections. Um. You know, depending on
what you want to do, different projections have. You know,
they're good points and they're bad points. Um. If you
want to have an equal area map, you would make
an equal area map. That means you preserve the correct
(21:31):
area and it's going to distort the shape of your
land masses. It might look weird if you're looking at
the entire world, but it's area wise, it's going to
be accurate. Um. If you have the pseudo conical Robinson projection,
it's gonna that's the map that you're probably most used
to seeing that actually looks quote unquote correct. But their
(21:54):
distances and direction aren't aren't accurate in that case, right,
So it's not good for navigating, it's good for being Oh,
so this is how the continents are situation. That's where
Russia is Asia or is it Europe? But depending on
where you begin, Um, the cartographer has a lot of
leeway and deciding, like what is going to be the
(22:16):
center of the world in this map. So Russia may
not actually be over there. Depending on the map, it
can be up into the left a little more in reality,
and it may be a little smaller. It just depends
on You remember where the balloon touched the inside of
the cylinder, and that was the tangent um. Wherever you
(22:37):
position the cylinder around the world, where it's going to touch,
that's your line of least distortion, And that can be
the center of your whole map, but it doesn't necessarily
mean that. In reality it's the center of the world.
So it's up to the cartographer what they're what choices
they're going to make to make what the center, what's where,
and then again what they're going to distort. If you
(23:00):
want to be accurate with your distances, you're gonna create
an equidistant map projection and uh, if you want your directions,
if you want like a navigational map, you can actually
use That's when you're gonna have to use those rum lines,
so you know it's your compass bearings will Actually you
can use this map to get around right, you can
you you can make a straight line in the map
(23:22):
and follow that same straight line, because if your rum
lines aren't straight, they're gonna be curved, But if your
rom lines are straight, then you're leading. Tude and longitude
are curved, so you're sacrificing one for the other. But um,
another thing you can do to get around this distortion
is to just tear out pieces of your map. Yeah. Um,
(23:44):
there's something called gores that they use this to make globes,
because the globe can start out as like a flat
piece of paper, but then they cut out angles so
that when you fold it, it doesn't crumple, it just
kind of lays in perfectly, right. Um. Gores usually go
on lines of longitude. That's where they separate, and it's
(24:05):
just kind of random, so like a part of a
land mass will be like completely separated by this another
region that doesn't really exist except in two dimensions, right right.
Um at the good projection, one of my favorites, and
it's also the logo for the U. N Um cuts
out these things called um tears, not gores. Oh is
(24:26):
that the very famous Um? Yeah, I know which one
you're talking about. And they just cut through the ocean
because it looks like like a bunch of footballs. Yes,
the Arctic, yeah, which itself is a little bit cut up,
but um, Yeah, that's the same one. That's that's my favorite.
(24:47):
Like it it's very land centric. Yeah, I like land
centric me with my tan oceans. Um. So, like we said,
maps are visual expressions of measurements. So if you go
to make a map, what you're probably gonna be working
on is a is all the maps that have come before. Like,
(25:07):
it's definitely like an aggregate thing, and you can make
your brand new map of course. But over in in
antiquity and history, maps were made by going out and
measuring things and writing that stuff down, and eventually the
more we discovered, the more accurate the maps were, and
they were just sort of it was a big group
effort basically to land on what eventually was an accurate
(25:29):
map took a long time. It did take a long time.
The oldest maps date back to I think the Babylonians
were making maps and they they're anthropologists and archaeologists disagree. Um,
but there may be even earlier maps. But among the drawings. Yeah,
but the anthropologists are like, well, is that a painting
(25:49):
of an area or is it a map? Yeah, you
can't really say what the intention of of I call
it a map. I mean it might just be here's
took Took's fortress, here is where the fire is, and
here's where the dinosaurs are. But that's still a very
crude map to me, So I vote for map okay. Um,
surveyors are going to come in handy obviously to um
(26:11):
take these precise measurements of both land and water. Um.
These days they have GPS is gonna make things a
lot easier and more accurate. Um. They have something called
remote sensing or aerial and satellite photography. They use that
a lot now and that actually actually was used back
in the eighteen hundreds. Um. Yeah, that was when they
(26:33):
first used aerial photography. But it really like came into
its own in World War Two when we had all
these reconnaissance photos to use that sort of to map
out your data. Yeah, cartographers were like, um, can we
have those when you're done? Yeah, exactly, and matt Making
kind of exploded after that. So chok. We talked about
thematic maps, right, Yeah, like where all the trout in
(26:54):
the United States. So it's basically like the basis is
of physical map. You've got mountains, rivers, all that stuff.
You can overlay political maps if you start to carve
that rain up by national or state or county or
city borders, um. And then on top of that you
can lay a thematic map, right like a census or whatever.
(27:15):
And that's when you become That's when the cartographer becomes
um researcher basically and uses a lot of the same
methods at a writer would. Uh. They need accurate information,
they need it as up to date as possible. Most
maps like that will actually have citations, just like a
research paper might like, hey, we got in touch with
the the World Bank for this map, or the World
(27:38):
Health Organization is who we're siting for these numbers, right,
I mean, if you're doing something like, um, smallpox outbreaks
from eighteen seventy two to nineteen fifteen, then you could
cite World Health Organization statistics and show that on a
map just by using some colors. Yeah, that's bam, that's
a thematic map right there. Yeah. And the two Frances Guthrie,
(28:02):
he was in England and he said, you know what
I have is this theorem that all you need is
four colors? And everyone said shut up and he said
no really, they said shut up. He said you need
to blue. Well, I actually don't know the four colors
I guess would be blue, brown, green, and apparently, apparently
you just need tan's brown. But that became known as
(28:23):
the four color theorem. And um, he proposed that you
could map out all the counties of England just with
those four colors. Why make it more complicated than that?
And people say, okay, maybe you're right, and he was, Um,
you need skill as an artist obviously if you want
to be a cartographer. Um. With computers these days, geographic
information systems g i s, they have automated a lot
(28:45):
of these tasks. But um, as Tracy points out, the
best maps still come from skilled artists. Yeah. Um, and
map making is I get the impression that, like it
really blew up after World War Two thanks to aerial photography. Yeah,
and we had some really great maps that were created
as a result. But I feel like the Internet has
(29:07):
really ushered in a new era for maps that has
not been seen since, like the age of exploration, where
it's like people are making maps for everything. They're a
lot easier to make. Um, although they still require a
great deal of skill. I think what I mean is
the tools are there to make a map easier to make.
(29:28):
They're more accurate, the more up to date, the time
between starting and releasing a map or publishing a map
is a lot shorter, and people just I think, tend
to use them a lot more and they're having a
lot more impact thanks to things like Google Maps. People
are discovering entire lost cities thanks to Google maps, like
Google Earth. Um. There was a war that broke out
(29:53):
over Google Maps, I believe between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Maybe. Yeah.
And two thousand eight, two dozen nine there was a skirmish, uh,
and I believe it was Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Um.
There was this little disputed bit of land, and some
rogue lieutenant said, you know what I found. I found
a Google map that sites this is ours, and I'm
(30:14):
gonna go colonize it. And it started an international incident
between the two countries. Yeah. Um, So I mean they
still have, like very maps have a huge impact on
you know, world and culture, and I think also a
lot of people assert that they have an impact on
the way people think of a nation or a continent
(30:36):
or a group of the people who inhabit that area.
Something that's big and in the center of a map
that must be an important place. Something that's small and
off to the side is marginal, and I think that
that has a an impact on the psychology behind maps,
and I think probably a good cartographer takes that into consideration.
(30:56):
Yeah sure, I think. Um well, something else that you
have to cider is like, what what is your purpose
of the map period? Like what information you're trying to
get across, because that will determine what kind of data
they're into. Uh. And then what's the audience, Just like
if you're writing a story or a paper, you want
to cater your map to who's going to be using it? Right,
you know this is for a children's website or is
(31:17):
it for getting around the big city? Um? But also
I mean, are you asserting the dominate, the domination of
Europe over the rest of the world. Then you're Gerardist
Mercat and it's the sixteenth century, so you put Europe
in the center of your world and make it way
bigger than South America, which is actually twice its size. Um.
(31:41):
I think these days cartographers fall into their different niches. Um,
Like you might be into political maps and so that's
what you do, or like, actually, we can just get
to this now. One of my best friends, one of
my oldest friends is a illustrator and cartographer and he
does well. Here, let me show you what he's done.
(32:02):
He does uh everything from like ski maps to like
like of ski slopes. Oh that's a nice map, isn't it,
to like the rivers of Utah or the rivers of
this certain part of Africa. It's like really cool maps
like that, and yeah, it's very pretty. His name is
Rad Smith and we're looking at Raddington rad Key Radford.
(32:27):
I told you mentioned him before. Um So I sent
Rad a few questions actually, just to spice this thing up,
because when you have a cartographer at you're, you know,
Beck and call, might as well use them, right, Ben Franklin,
I think said that. I think so. So I just
threw a few quick questions out him earlier in the
day and he was kind enough to respond. And you
can see Rad's work by the way. It red Smith
(32:48):
Illustrations dot com. If you're so inclined or illustration no
as um So I asked him what kind of personality traits,
because like what what kind of person becomes a cartographer?
And he said, um, patients is obviously a big, big
thing because you can't just like whittle off a map
in a few minutes or a few days. UM. He says,
(33:11):
especially in relation to having the ability to source and
seek out existing data, because every county, state, university, federal agency, etcetera.
Has our own data clearinghouse and g i S library,
so finding the right data for your needs can really
be a challenge. UM. It also has become a crowdsourced
resource as data libraries are growing every day. I think
having a strong mathematical background and understanding of scale and
(33:34):
perspective is important too, and enjoying looking at the world
from a map perspective as a plus. Um. He said
he never gets tired of looking at maps, old and new.
And this was a dude that we used to sit
around watch the Weather Channel together in high school just
for fun. That really panned off for him. Yeah, and
he would be doodling and I would be like writing
stories and like look at us now, you know, Um,
that's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. He uses the g I
(33:57):
S systems and GPS. UM has asked him if, like,
how much is actually field work and I think generally
he works in in conjunction with people out in the field. Uh,
and then asked him how he got started, and he
said he always loved maps, but he started painting watercolor
maps for magazine. He would paint background textures to suggest terrain, water,
(34:19):
and other geographic features. Bet he didn't paint it brown.
I bet rat he's all about the blue water. He's
a surfer. That may have been when we talked about it.
Um oh, and finally asked him, like how long? And
that's the worst question ever, like, hey, how long does
it take to do a map? But that moonlight base
and scheme map I did, he said, took a hundred
(34:39):
and seventy hours to create. It looks like Yeah, he said.
He worked from dozens of aerial photos, topographic maps, satellite images,
building plans to piece it all together. So it's very cool.
It's like kind of figuring out a puzzle, I think,
and then relaying it in a way that is both
accurate and interesting to the user. Yeah, and I like
(35:00):
connect maps to um. There's a bunch of cool ones
all over the internet. I think if you just search
like strange maps, yeah, it'll bring up some pretty cool sites. Yeah,
and it's fun to look at too. The old I'm
into the what people used to think the world look
like and the land masses were shaped like you know, well,
if you look at certain projections now that are supposedly
(35:21):
very accurate, it looks really weird and nothing like what
we think of as well. Maps is done. Uh, you
got any more way to add? Uh the cartographer then
it's nice. Yeah, thanks d Thanks buddy, thanks a lot. RD.
He's pretty excited about this. I think. Oh yeah, well,
(35:42):
anytime someone's highlighting your field. He does other illustrations too.
He's not just a cartographer. Oh yeah, yeah, exact, that's
just what he does on the side. Uh. If you
want to know more about maps and cartography, you can
type maps into the search bar how stuff works dot com,
which means since I said search bar, it's time for
listener message, Rick, and how about some listener mail? All right,
(36:11):
I'm gonna call this uh fraternity and drag. Okay, all right,
this is from Cameron. Hey, guys and Jerry. First off,
I'm a big fan of the show, recently listened to
the episode on Drag Queens and I thought i'd share
a little bit about my organization. I'm the president of
the ZI chapter. I think that's right. I think if
it's to ZI of Delta Lambda Phi International social fraternity
(36:33):
at u C. Davis in California. We're a special interest
fraternity for gay, bisexual, and progressive men. For the past
almost twenty five years, we put on Northern California's largest
drag show called Davis Is Burning. The name inspired obviously
by the documentary Harris Is Burning, which you guys mentioned.
The show is a night of gender bending fund as
(36:53):
many of our brothers dress up and perform and drag
for an audience of almost one thousand students, staff and
community members. So that's awesome, Like everyone's getting involved in Additionally,
we have local celebrity drag performers from Sacramento. Their Sacramento
celebrities uh in San Francisco. Okay, there you go. The
(37:14):
audience gets involved too in our famous drag king and
queen competitions. While the show serves mainly as a fundraiser
for the chapter, we donate a large amount of money
from the show to the Trevor Project, an anti suicide
hotline for at risk l g ptuth Um. I think
it's great and you guys that you guys featured this
piece on the show about drag queens and had some
(37:36):
fun with the lingo. Did a great job. Feel free
to check out our website for the show at Davis
is Burning dot com. That is from Cameron. Thanks Cameron.
We got some good replies. Did you see the guy
who Um he and his partner met one of the
veterans of the Stone Wall, right, Yeah, done in Puerto Rico. Yeah,
he's still in drag and uh just like living history
(37:57):
right there. So very cool. So thanks to them. I'm
sure she would not like you to refer to her
as living history. Hopefully she doesn't listen to this. What
living history? What's wrong with that? It just makes her
sound old? She is whold, but she's part of history
and she's alive. Anyway. I hope she's not listening. He
also hit him at the end of the email and
(38:18):
the PS oh yeah what he's saying. He's like, y, Chuck,
if you ever decided to swing over our way, give me.
He's like, Josh is too skinny for me, But that's hilarious. Yeah,
I guess he's into the Bears. Yeah, the chubby bearded
ones Bears. Yeah. Um, I didn't even notice that. Yeah.
To scroll down further AMO emails from now on you
should The PS is always riveting. Um, If you've got
(38:40):
a ps that you want us to hear, you can
tweet to us yeah s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at Discovery dot com and uh as always, you
can join us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should dot com for more on this and thousands
(39:07):
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Hi, everybody, This is Chuck again with another edition of
Stuff you Should Know. Selects are Saturday Classic Edition episodes
and uh, as you know, we're curating these one at
a time, and this week I got to pick, and
I picked How Maps Work? And uh I picked this
one because everyone knows I love maps, and so I
thought it was a good one to rerun. Plus I
(00:21):
get to talk a little bit about my old high
school best friend Rad, who was a cartographer and I'm
always happy to get the word out about his work.
So listen and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
(00:42):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clarkin, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and I just had a bunch of peanuts. So it's
Stuff you Know Time Circus Edition. Yep. I wonder if
we could get R. E. M. S. Maps and Legends
to play just subtly behind this entire podcast. I can
answer that for you. Nope, No, okay, what album is
(01:05):
that one? Where is that an album? Boy? That was
the early one? I think maybe like reckoning even No again,
people are at home screaming at me because I can't
call that to mind. Was that their first one reckoning
Let's just move on. I'm afraid to get anything wrong. Yeah,
it's cool. People who are in are um are really
(01:27):
in ari em maps and legends. Good song um chuck. Yeah.
Have you ever used a map? Um? I have? I
am a notoriously terrible with my sense of direction, like
literally almost all the time. If I say it's left,
isn't it? They say, no, it's right. We just talked
(01:48):
about this. And because if I try to trick myself
and go I think it's left, I'm gonna say right,
then it's left. Like it's terrible. I've talked about it before.
It's it's really yeah, we we did recently. I can't
place why or where. It's just my brain. Man, it
doesn't work that way. So yeah, I use maps, and
I'm one of those people as to turn the map
in the direction I'm facing, and I just it's tough
for me. So when you were using a map, you
(02:12):
could have also said or that you're terrible using maps.
You can say I'm terrible at using two dimensional um contorted,
grossly misrepresentative images that supposedly are um. They stand for
different data points of Earth. That's right, that's another way
(02:36):
you could put maps, because it turns out that they're
actually not so great, even though they are extraordinarily useful.
They're portable now that you can get them online, they're
more portable than ever, and we would be pretty much
nowhere without them as far as the imperial colonization of
the world went. But um, we still have not licked
(02:58):
some very fundamental sick problems with maps. Maps and legends
was on fables By the way, So did you didn't
even hear what I just said? I heard it all
and I agree. Well, the problem is, dude, is the
Earth is is not a flat piece of paper or
a computer screen. The Earth is uh sort of shape
(03:20):
like a pumpkin. Yeah, I didn't realize that. I didn't either.
Apparently the middle is getting bigger too. You know what,
I just realized what what Tracy who wrote this meant
by pumpkin? Like, she didn't mean the tall pumpkin. Well, yeah,
pumpkins come in all shapes, right, So which pumpkin was
she referring to? I think like the shorter, rounder, round pumpkin. Yeah,
(03:44):
but apparently I think the Earth is supposedly getting bigger,
expanding at its at its center, not in the center,
but it's getting more pumpkiny, I think more pumpkin like. Okay,
so maps are getting less and less accurate then maybe
because here here's the problem. Map, Like we said, it's
a two dimensional representation of something that's three dimensional. It's
(04:04):
hard to do. A map is flat and it's representing
something that's round, spherical. Um. And if you take like,
take a pumpkin, go to your pantry right now and
get one of the pumpkins that you have there, and
take a piece of paper off of a roll saying
newsprint and um, tear enough off to go all the
way around the pumpkin, and you will see that if
(04:27):
you if you take a pumpkin and mash the paper
around it so that the pumpkins completely covered, you're gonna
have something that's that's just grossly distorted. That's a map.
It's a gross distortion of what's real. So much so
that if you see a map that accurately represents what
the continents look like and how close they are and
(04:49):
the amount of size they each have, you'd probably be
pretty startled because it doesn't look like what we're used to,
which is called the ma cat projection. Yeah. Um, And
it's funny. When I was reading this, I remember thinking
to myself, like, you know, if you're gonna make cheats,
like make them in the ocean, and I think that's
a lot of times what they do. Yeah, these no
(05:09):
one would notice, you know, the good hommal homal design.
The good homal design good as in somebody's last name
with an e. It basically distorts or chops up the
world in the oceans, so it's real good for land mass.
It would be terrible if you're driving like a an
(05:31):
oil tanker across the sea. Yeah. You don't want to
navigate by these things. No. And so since there's different
ways to distort a map, there's different uses for different
types of maps or distortions, which we call projections. We'll
get into that a little more later on. Let's talk
about the basics of all maps, right. A map is
(05:51):
essentially a representation of, like we said, data points on Earth. Yeah,
and it can be it can represent whatever. There's different
attributes you can if you wanted to show a map
um distribution of UM Golden Retriever ownership, you could do
that on a map. You totally could. Or the GDP
(06:13):
of different countries or land use you know, like it's
basically an easy way. It's an easy language to show
someone in picture form, various attributes, you know, and uh,
maps are created by people called cartographers, which is great
and um, like we said there's some there's some basic
(06:35):
commonalities to all maps, right, yeah. I kind of collect
maps by the way. I know you told me, not
like a bunch, but I've got I've got like six
right maps, any pirate maps, no pirate maps, but my
my entire desk. I made my desk and it is, Uh,
I've got a map of the world on it. It's like,
you know, four ft by three feet and then I
shall act over that and that's like my you know,
(06:56):
the base of my desk. Yeah, it's really cool because
you know, i'd reference it a lot. Actually, I like
the uh yeah, you know I could stand to do
that a lot more New England no idea. Well, it's
like looking up a word in the dictionary when you
don't know it referring to an atlas. If you're like, hey,
where's Kuala Lampoor but I don't have a map, and suddenly,
(07:17):
oh my god, Miss teen South Carolina's answer has come
to pass like I don't have a map, and I'm
not I'm not bad with maps, and I think if
you gave me like a little time, I would be
able to find anything. Sure, but um, because I don't
have a map for easy reference, like I use online
maps now, but like if I had one for easy reference,
(07:40):
I think I would be a lot better at geography.
I think everybody forget your computer. That's very handy, but
I think everyone should own a globe and or a
map of the world just to have it right. It's
nice to have frame it, put it on your wall.
They're very attractive. It's art, all right. I like the
fifties sixties maps, like a kind you'd find at school. Yeah,
(08:02):
from that era. I just like the design of them
to look Yeah, Kevin Canaine that one of the comedians
I saw, Max fun was talking about his pillows and
how you unsheathed his pillow, how nasty it is and
it looks like an ancient map of the world. You know,
it's like brown with those like lines. Yeah, what is
that stuff? It's he basically is like you know, this
stuff is like leaks from your head like sleep. Uh,
(08:25):
it's funny. It's a funny bit. Okay, so the basic
commonalities of maps are number one, usually land masses or
bodies of water. So you're gonna have an outline of
what you're talking about or what you're trying to show. Yeah, um,
are you talking about like a physical map? Yeah, well,
I mean any map is going to have that, but
the physical map is physical maps are more like like
(08:47):
the terrain of an area, right, that's what a physical
maps concerned with. Yeah, and they use something called hipsometric
tents um variations of color to obviously, you know, usually
your water is blue and then the land can be
green to brown or white if it's like the Swiss Alps,
you know. Yeah, have you ever seen a map where
(09:07):
the water isn't blue? The one on my desk is
it's tan. What Yeah, it's the whole thing is reading
in background. Now there's no blue, it's all tan. Um, Yeah,
it's tan. I've never seen that, you know, like the
Tan globe. No, you've seen like the Tan globe where
the globe isn't like blue and green. That's basically what
(09:28):
this is. It's like, I'm still having trouble wrapping my
head around it. Next time you're in my home office,
I'll show it to you. Uh. You can have political
maps that display like different cultural information about countries. Um.
Thematic maps obviously have a theme like climate or g
DP like I said, or you can get really specialized
(09:50):
like hey, where's the internet available in the world. Let's
draw a map instead of listing a bunch of countries.
Got you know? Yeah? Um yeah, thematic maps those are
probably the ones you see the most, aside from using
a map for street directions. Yeah, thematic maps are the
ones you went across. Like it'll be all sorts of
(10:10):
things like you just mentioned population density or oil exports,
all that. All right, Josh, Let's talk about what they
call cartography conventions. And this is not when a bunch
of cartographers get together at you know, the the downtown
Hilton in Atlanta and talk about maps, although I'm sure
they do that. I'm sure there are real cartography conventions.
(10:33):
We're talking about conventions in the sense of often used
uh techniques, right. Um. One of them, which I have
already broken with my map, is that, like we said,
water is blue. That's so weird. I don't understand land
is screen vegetation screen or brown or tan land masses
that's just one of the comic conventions. So what color
(10:55):
is the land mask? Then if the water on your
map is tan, they're also uh tan and green and
and brown and yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
It's really not that big of a deal, you know.
I'll go look it up. I will post a photo
of this of my map um online on Facebook when
we do this, and everyone will go, oh, that doesn't
(11:17):
look so weird. All right. I feel like a jerk
now because my water is not blue. No, No, it's fine, Okay,
I'm just I'm just having trouble understand you. It's all yeah, um,
all maps to pick their subject matter from above. Yeah,
that's something that you just don't even really think of.
It's such a common convention. North is usually at the top, yeah, um, generally,
(11:40):
or if it's not, for some reason, they'll point you
in the right direction, say this is north, this is
southeast and west. They have legends a lot of times. Yeah,
maps and legends. Like we talked about with r a
M and UM scale is usually indicated, so like it
will be like one inch equals a hundred miles, or
there's like one to like there's a ratio or something
like that. Yeah, and this is all the the gobbity
(12:01):
book you find on the outskirts of the map. There's
usually lots of stuff written down that you may not
look at. That's where you'll find this information. And this
should include in the legend that like Hawaii and Alaska
are not actually right next to one another in the
South Pacific Ocean. Yeah, as it seems it's true. That's
just odd. Well, like we said, it's tough, you know,
(12:23):
when you got around or a pumpkin like world. Um,
coordinate system A lot of times they're not a lot
of times. Every time you'll see a map, there's gonna
be some kind of a coordinate system. If it's a
Thomas Guide, Like before the advent of online smartphone maps,
when I lived in l A, the Thomas Guide was
your best friend. Um. And that's just a simple grid system.
(12:45):
Like you look up, hey, I want to go to
to Panga Canyon, Go to page four hundred and look
up F six and then you'll just map your way
from there. Yeah. The alphabets across the top numbers run
down the side and you find F six and sink
someone's battleship. Um. If it's like a map of the
world they're probably gonna show you, um launch student latitude,
(13:09):
but not necessarily something you can navigate with, you know, no,
but it should it should be accurate as the point,
well accurate, but not like you don't want to take
a map of the world into the woods if you're orienteering,
you know, you want a topographical map. Tricky to read,
by the way, they ever looked at a topo map
like been camping and stuff, because you were talking about
hip symmetric tents to indicate different changes in altitude right
(13:33):
or elevation. Topographical maps use contour lines and yeah, you
better know what you're doing because it's not necessarily intuitive.
It's not intuitive at all. You just have to learn
it and then once you learn it, you can wrap
your head around it. Usually the closer the lines are
or every time, the closer the lines are together, the
more steep the change in elevation is right, and lines
(13:54):
that are kind of spread out indicate like a very
slow Yeah, I think that slope. Been a while since
I'm taking basic orienteering. Is that a word orienteering? Yeah?
I've not heard it really, Yeah, are you messing with
me on this episode? Now? Orienteering is when, like you,
they'd give you a map and a compass and send
you out in the woods. Yeah. I thought that was
(14:15):
called trailblazing. Sure you can. You're also trailblazing. Okay, well
hold on before we go any further. Um, it's time
for a message break. Okay. So we're back and we're
talking about map drawing conventions, believe it or not. And
there's a cool here's a cool experiment you can do
(14:37):
if you want to know how difficult it is to
draw a map and have it look accurate. Get a balloon,
blow it up, Um, draw whatever you want, but draw,
you know, the United States in Mexico and South America
in Canada, Canada in there, and then deflate that balloon
and see what it looks like. And that will give
(14:59):
you a little bit of insight into how tough it
is to be a cartographer. Right. I mean you mentioned
um lines of longitude and latitude. Right, those are coordinates
on any map, and since their coordinates on a map,
um people use them to navigate by. Right. But since
we're going from a sphere to a flat plane, you
(15:22):
have to figure out how to adjust for that, and
you're basically making a decision. You're gonna say, Okay, am
I going to make it so that the angles if
somebody draws a straight line, the angles are all going
to be the same along that line, Meaning you can
follow that line on a compass in the real world
and get there. It's called a rum line. Or are
the lines of latitude which are called parallels, Yeah, and
(15:47):
lines of longitude are meridians. They're going to be equidistant accurately. Like,
that's the conundrum. That's the big conundrum with maps typically, Yeah,
like where do you want your curiousy two be right?
Which is pretty weird. I never really thought about it though,
like that, you know, like you have to it's an
interesting job, and that you have to know that I
(16:08):
cannot you cannot draw a perfect map on a piece
of paper. So where am I gonna um fludge? Essentially?
And you do this. You figure this out with what
they call map projections, and that is basically the method
that you choose to project that severe onto a flat surface. Right, So, Josh,
you've cracked the code. I have not. This is a
This is a very kind of it's tough to to
(16:31):
think of because we're talking about now how distortions occur,
and um, so there's different ways to manipulate how something's distorted.
First of all, let's say you are making a new projection. Okay, right,
that's that's a different manipulation of distortion, right as a projection, um,
(16:51):
and you're making a brand new one. One of the things,
one of the tools you can use is called um
tisso's indoka tricks T I S S O, t apostrophe
s too. So those are the circles. Yeah, and what
you do is you just overlay the equal distant uh
(17:11):
exactly the same aka identical circles. It like a grid
of circles right over a globe. And then when you
make your projection, the circles will distort and you will
be able to see where your distortions are on different areas, um,
how they distort, like what direction they're going to distort it,
and get an exist an idea of how your your
(17:32):
projection is distorted. Right. Um. And the reason that maps
distort again is because you're taking a three dimensional spherical
representation and putting it on a two dimensional flat surface.
And the projection that we're all very familiar with the
one that we use almost across the board is the
Mercat projection. And there is a guy named gerardist Picator
(17:56):
who in fifteen sixty nine created a map of the world.
And Mark Hater decided that I'm gonna make my maps
for sailors, and he made a very important decision. He
made it so that rum lines where you measure between
two points on this map, and you can follow that
angle with your compass in real life and you will
(18:17):
get there. He made it so that those were precise,
but he gave up lines of longitude and latitude being precise.
And he figured out how to represent this very cleverly,
where on lines of I'm sorry, not lines of longitude
and lolatitude, just latitude since since the Earth gets narrower
(18:39):
at the top because it's a ball, and it's widest
at the middle, the anything above or below the equator,
as you get further away, the lines get the lines
between the latitudinal lines get bigger and bigger the spaces
between them, so like you would see on the globe. Maybe, yeah,
it's a it's a really clever representation of of what
(19:01):
happens when you take a piece of paper and put
it around a globe. A ball that's the Mercater projection.
And the way to figure out how he did this,
or to imagine how he did is to take a
cylinder like a piece of paper and roll it up
into the shape of the cylinder. This is a magic
piece of paper cylinder, and you have a balloon, and
(19:21):
it's a magic balloon. That's it's the same balloon we've
drawn our world on. It can be, but it's a
magic version of it because we needed to have our
world on it, drawing on it perfectly. And you blow
up this balloon until it hits um an edge of
the cylinder, right, so it's just touching the inside of
the cylinder on two points one on either side. What
(19:43):
that balloon has just become is tangent to the cylinder.
The sekin is where the cylinder would like intersect the balloon,
but right now it's just touching. And you take a
Mercader projection, and you've got a perfectly blown up balloon
inside a cylinder. And that's what you imagine is the projection.
You have to take it a little further. You blow
up the balloon until it completely fills up the cylinder.
(20:04):
So now all of the information on this balloon is
pressed up against the inside of the cylinder, the place
where it was tangent, where it touched naturally when the
blue was just filled up and it was just a sphere.
That's going to be undistorted. Okay, that makes sense. The
stuff that you're blowing up until the balloon is no
longer a spear but is filling up the cylinder, that
stuff becomes distorted. And the further toward the edges you go,
(20:27):
the more distorted. Is now we can pop our magic
balloon because all that information has been transferred on the
inside of this cylindrical paper. And you unroll it and
there's your Mercator projection. Pretty good? Yeah, I think I
get it? Do you really? I got it more than
I did than when I read this like eight times. Yeah,
you know, yeah, Uncle Josh coming through for me. But
(20:49):
in the center of a Mercator projection, the distortions are
going to be the least because it's tangent to the cylinder.
That's where it's just naturally touching the edges. It's not
distort it's not being forced into the cylindrical shape. Yeah,
that makes sense. We should call this one What maps
the Sun? Part two? Write. It is really hard to
(21:09):
wrap your head around. It is, especially when you're like
me and you're bad with maps. To begin with. Um,
so we talked about projections. Um. You know, depending on
what you want to do, different projections have. You know,
they're good points and they're bad points. Um. If you
want to have an equal area map, you would make
an equal area map. That means you preserve the correct
(21:31):
area and it's going to distort the shape of your
land masses. It might look weird if you're looking at
the entire world, but it's area wise, it's going to
be accurate. Um. If you have the pseudo conical Robinson projection,
it's gonna that's the map that you're probably most used
to seeing that actually looks quote unquote correct. But their
(21:54):
distances and direction aren't aren't accurate in that case, right,
So it's not good for navigating, it's good for being Oh,
so this is how the continents are situation. That's where
Russia is Asia or is it Europe? But depending on
where you begin, Um, the cartographer has a lot of
leeway and deciding, like what is going to be the
(22:16):
center of the world in this map. So Russia may
not actually be over there. Depending on the map, it
can be up into the left a little more in reality,
and it may be a little smaller. It just depends
on You remember where the balloon touched the inside of
the cylinder, and that was the tangent um. Wherever you
(22:37):
position the cylinder around the world, where it's going to touch,
that's your line of least distortion, And that can be
the center of your whole map, but it doesn't necessarily
mean that. In reality it's the center of the world.
So it's up to the cartographer what they're what choices
they're going to make to make what the center, what's where,
and then again what they're going to distort. If you
(23:00):
want to be accurate with your distances, you're gonna create
an equidistant map projection and uh, if you want your directions,
if you want like a navigational map, you can actually
use That's when you're gonna have to use those rum lines,
so you know it's your compass bearings will Actually you
can use this map to get around right, you can
you you can make a straight line in the map
(23:22):
and follow that same straight line, because if your rum
lines aren't straight, they're gonna be curved, But if your
rom lines are straight, then you're leading. Tude and longitude
are curved, so you're sacrificing one for the other. But um,
another thing you can do to get around this distortion
is to just tear out pieces of your map. Yeah. Um,
(23:44):
there's something called gores that they use this to make globes,
because the globe can start out as like a flat
piece of paper, but then they cut out angles so
that when you fold it, it doesn't crumple, it just
kind of lays in perfectly, right. Um. Gores usually go
on lines of longitude. That's where they separate, and it's
(24:05):
just kind of random, so like a part of a
land mass will be like completely separated by this another
region that doesn't really exist except in two dimensions, right right.
Um at the good projection, one of my favorites, and
it's also the logo for the U. N Um cuts
out these things called um tears, not gores. Oh is
(24:26):
that the very famous Um? Yeah, I know which one
you're talking about. And they just cut through the ocean
because it looks like like a bunch of footballs. Yes,
the Arctic, yeah, which itself is a little bit cut up,
but um, Yeah, that's the same one. That's that's my favorite.
(24:47):
Like it it's very land centric. Yeah, I like land
centric me with my tan oceans. Um. So, like we said,
maps are visual expressions of measurements. So if you go
to make a map, what you're probably gonna be working
on is a is all the maps that have come before. Like,
(25:07):
it's definitely like an aggregate thing, and you can make
your brand new map of course. But over in in
antiquity and history, maps were made by going out and
measuring things and writing that stuff down, and eventually the
more we discovered, the more accurate the maps were, and
they were just sort of it was a big group
effort basically to land on what eventually was an accurate
(25:29):
map took a long time. It did take a long time.
The oldest maps date back to I think the Babylonians
were making maps and they they're anthropologists and archaeologists disagree. Um,
but there may be even earlier maps. But among the drawings. Yeah,
but the anthropologists are like, well, is that a painting
(25:49):
of an area or is it a map? Yeah, you
can't really say what the intention of of I call
it a map. I mean it might just be here's
took Took's fortress, here is where the fire is, and
here's where the dinosaurs are. But that's still a very
crude map to me, So I vote for map okay. Um,
surveyors are going to come in handy obviously to um
(26:11):
take these precise measurements of both land and water. Um.
These days they have GPS is gonna make things a
lot easier and more accurate. Um. They have something called
remote sensing or aerial and satellite photography. They use that
a lot now and that actually actually was used back
in the eighteen hundreds. Um. Yeah, that was when they
(26:33):
first used aerial photography. But it really like came into
its own in World War Two when we had all
these reconnaissance photos to use that sort of to map
out your data. Yeah, cartographers were like, um, can we
have those when you're done? Yeah, exactly, and matt Making
kind of exploded after that. So chok. We talked about
thematic maps, right, Yeah, like where all the trout in
(26:54):
the United States. So it's basically like the basis is
of physical map. You've got mountains, rivers, all that stuff.
You can overlay political maps if you start to carve
that rain up by national or state or county or
city borders, um. And then on top of that you
can lay a thematic map, right like a census or whatever.
(27:15):
And that's when you become That's when the cartographer becomes
um researcher basically and uses a lot of the same
methods at a writer would. Uh. They need accurate information,
they need it as up to date as possible. Most
maps like that will actually have citations, just like a
research paper might like, hey, we got in touch with
the the World Bank for this map, or the World
(27:38):
Health Organization is who we're siting for these numbers, right,
I mean, if you're doing something like, um, smallpox outbreaks
from eighteen seventy two to nineteen fifteen, then you could
cite World Health Organization statistics and show that on a
map just by using some colors. Yeah, that's bam, that's
a thematic map right there. Yeah. And the two Frances Guthrie,
(28:02):
he was in England and he said, you know what
I have is this theorem that all you need is
four colors? And everyone said shut up and he said
no really, they said shut up. He said you need
to blue. Well, I actually don't know the four colors
I guess would be blue, brown, green, and apparently, apparently
you just need tan's brown. But that became known as
(28:23):
the four color theorem. And um, he proposed that you
could map out all the counties of England just with
those four colors. Why make it more complicated than that?
And people say, okay, maybe you're right, and he was, Um,
you need skill as an artist obviously if you want
to be a cartographer. Um. With computers these days, geographic
information systems g i s, they have automated a lot
(28:45):
of these tasks. But um, as Tracy points out, the
best maps still come from skilled artists. Yeah. Um, and
map making is I get the impression that, like it
really blew up after World War Two thanks to aerial photography. Yeah,
and we had some really great maps that were created
as a result. But I feel like the Internet has
(29:07):
really ushered in a new era for maps that has
not been seen since, like the age of exploration, where
it's like people are making maps for everything. They're a
lot easier to make. Um, although they still require a
great deal of skill. I think what I mean is
the tools are there to make a map easier to make.
(29:28):
They're more accurate, the more up to date, the time
between starting and releasing a map or publishing a map
is a lot shorter, and people just I think, tend
to use them a lot more and they're having a
lot more impact thanks to things like Google Maps. People
are discovering entire lost cities thanks to Google maps, like
Google Earth. Um. There was a war that broke out
(29:53):
over Google Maps, I believe between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Maybe. Yeah.
And two thousand eight, two dozen nine there was a skirmish, uh,
and I believe it was Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Um.
There was this little disputed bit of land, and some
rogue lieutenant said, you know what I found. I found
a Google map that sites this is ours, and I'm
(30:14):
gonna go colonize it. And it started an international incident
between the two countries. Yeah. Um, So I mean they
still have, like very maps have a huge impact on
you know, world and culture, and I think also a
lot of people assert that they have an impact on
the way people think of a nation or a continent
(30:36):
or a group of the people who inhabit that area.
Something that's big and in the center of a map
that must be an important place. Something that's small and
off to the side is marginal, and I think that
that has a an impact on the psychology behind maps,
and I think probably a good cartographer takes that into consideration.
(30:56):
Yeah sure, I think. Um well, something else that you
have to cider is like, what what is your purpose
of the map period? Like what information you're trying to
get across, because that will determine what kind of data
they're into. Uh. And then what's the audience, Just like
if you're writing a story or a paper, you want
to cater your map to who's going to be using it? Right,
you know this is for a children's website or is
(31:17):
it for getting around the big city? Um? But also
I mean, are you asserting the dominate, the domination of
Europe over the rest of the world. Then you're Gerardist
Mercat and it's the sixteenth century, so you put Europe
in the center of your world and make it way
bigger than South America, which is actually twice its size. Um.
(31:41):
I think these days cartographers fall into their different niches. Um,
Like you might be into political maps and so that's
what you do, or like, actually, we can just get
to this now. One of my best friends, one of
my oldest friends is a illustrator and cartographer and he
does well. Here, let me show you what he's done.
(32:02):
He does uh everything from like ski maps to like
like of ski slopes. Oh that's a nice map, isn't it,
to like the rivers of Utah or the rivers of
this certain part of Africa. It's like really cool maps
like that, and yeah, it's very pretty. His name is
Rad Smith and we're looking at Raddington rad Key Radford.
(32:27):
I told you mentioned him before. Um So I sent
Rad a few questions actually, just to spice this thing up,
because when you have a cartographer at you're, you know,
Beck and call, might as well use them, right, Ben Franklin,
I think said that. I think so. So I just
threw a few quick questions out him earlier in the
day and he was kind enough to respond. And you
can see Rad's work by the way. It red Smith
(32:48):
Illustrations dot com. If you're so inclined or illustration no
as um So I asked him what kind of personality traits,
because like what what kind of person becomes a cartographer?
And he said, um, patients is obviously a big, big
thing because you can't just like whittle off a map
in a few minutes or a few days. UM. He says,
(33:11):
especially in relation to having the ability to source and
seek out existing data, because every county, state, university, federal agency, etcetera.
Has our own data clearinghouse and g i S library,
so finding the right data for your needs can really
be a challenge. UM. It also has become a crowdsourced
resource as data libraries are growing every day. I think
having a strong mathematical background and understanding of scale and
(33:34):
perspective is important too, and enjoying looking at the world
from a map perspective as a plus. Um. He said
he never gets tired of looking at maps, old and new.
And this was a dude that we used to sit
around watch the Weather Channel together in high school just
for fun. That really panned off for him. Yeah, and
he would be doodling and I would be like writing
stories and like look at us now, you know, Um,
that's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. He uses the g I
(33:57):
S systems and GPS. UM has asked him if, like,
how much is actually field work and I think generally
he works in in conjunction with people out in the field. Uh,
and then asked him how he got started, and he
said he always loved maps, but he started painting watercolor
maps for magazine. He would paint background textures to suggest terrain, water,
(34:19):
and other geographic features. Bet he didn't paint it brown.
I bet rat he's all about the blue water. He's
a surfer. That may have been when we talked about it.
Um oh, and finally asked him, like how long? And
that's the worst question ever, like, hey, how long does
it take to do a map? But that moonlight base
and scheme map I did, he said, took a hundred
(34:39):
and seventy hours to create. It looks like Yeah, he said.
He worked from dozens of aerial photos, topographic maps, satellite images,
building plans to piece it all together. So it's very cool.
It's like kind of figuring out a puzzle, I think,
and then relaying it in a way that is both
accurate and interesting to the user. Yeah, and I like
(35:00):
connect maps to um. There's a bunch of cool ones
all over the internet. I think if you just search
like strange maps, yeah, it'll bring up some pretty cool sites. Yeah,
and it's fun to look at too. The old I'm
into the what people used to think the world look
like and the land masses were shaped like you know, well,
if you look at certain projections now that are supposedly
(35:21):
very accurate, it looks really weird and nothing like what
we think of as well. Maps is done. Uh, you
got any more way to add? Uh the cartographer then
it's nice. Yeah, thanks d Thanks buddy, thanks a lot. RD.
He's pretty excited about this. I think. Oh yeah, well,
(35:42):
anytime someone's highlighting your field. He does other illustrations too.
He's not just a cartographer. Oh yeah, yeah, exact, that's
just what he does on the side. Uh. If you
want to know more about maps and cartography, you can
type maps into the search bar how stuff works dot com,
which means since I said search bar, it's time for
listener message, Rick, and how about some listener mail? All right,
(36:11):
I'm gonna call this uh fraternity and drag. Okay, all right,
this is from Cameron. Hey, guys and Jerry. First off,
I'm a big fan of the show, recently listened to
the episode on Drag Queens and I thought i'd share
a little bit about my organization. I'm the president of
the ZI chapter. I think that's right. I think if
it's to ZI of Delta Lambda Phi International social fraternity
(36:33):
at u C. Davis in California. We're a special interest
fraternity for gay, bisexual, and progressive men. For the past
almost twenty five years, we put on Northern California's largest
drag show called Davis Is Burning. The name inspired obviously
by the documentary Harris Is Burning, which you guys mentioned.
The show is a night of gender bending fund as
(36:53):
many of our brothers dress up and perform and drag
for an audience of almost one thousand students, staff and
community members. So that's awesome, Like everyone's getting involved in Additionally,
we have local celebrity drag performers from Sacramento. Their Sacramento
celebrities uh in San Francisco. Okay, there you go. The
(37:14):
audience gets involved too in our famous drag king and
queen competitions. While the show serves mainly as a fundraiser
for the chapter, we donate a large amount of money
from the show to the Trevor Project, an anti suicide
hotline for at risk l g ptuth Um. I think
it's great and you guys that you guys featured this
piece on the show about drag queens and had some
(37:36):
fun with the lingo. Did a great job. Feel free
to check out our website for the show at Davis
is Burning dot com. That is from Cameron. Thanks Cameron.
We got some good replies. Did you see the guy
who Um he and his partner met one of the
veterans of the Stone Wall, right, Yeah, done in Puerto Rico. Yeah,
he's still in drag and uh just like living history
(37:57):
right there. So very cool. So thanks to them. I'm
sure she would not like you to refer to her
as living history. Hopefully she doesn't listen to this. What
living history? What's wrong with that? It just makes her
sound old? She is whold, but she's part of history
and she's alive. Anyway. I hope she's not listening. He
also hit him at the end of the email and
(38:18):
the PS oh yeah what he's saying. He's like, y, Chuck,
if you ever decided to swing over our way, give me.
He's like, Josh is too skinny for me, But that's hilarious. Yeah,
I guess he's into the Bears. Yeah, the chubby bearded
ones Bears. Yeah. Um, I didn't even notice that. Yeah.
To scroll down further AMO emails from now on you
should The PS is always riveting. Um, If you've got
(38:40):
a ps that you want us to hear, you can
tweet to us yeah s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at Discovery dot com and uh as always, you
can join us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should dot com for more on this and thousands
(39:07):
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
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