Show this map to Trump. He will not want Greenland anymore.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Acquiring Greenland would move the USA up 2 places in the list of largest countries (past Canada and China). That's probably why he wants it.
He just wants it ti deflect from the Epstein Files.
He wants to embed himself in the history as some kind of victor. It's his sick phantasy to be presented in history books as a hero. That's why he is doing everything he can to irreversibly leave his legacy wherever he can. That's why he's building the Epstein ballroom. That's why he renames buildings and places after himself. That's why he wants to create new colonies. He's a narcissist.
It is quick becoming a very important strategic hub in the Arctic due to shipping lanes opening up due to global heating. Greenland is also continuously opening up to natural resource extraction as ice disappears, and they have vast quantities of a lot of very valuable shit under the ground that keeps getting easier to access for the same reason, like rare earth elements, oil, natural gas, copper, gold, zinc, uranium, lithium, tungsten, the list goes on...
Controlling and exploiting that land is a major strategic interest for all the big (and small) powers. That's why he wants it, and everyone else too. Fuck his fat fucking ass though.
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Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men!
Men map men map men map!
I'll add that we use the mercator projection because it preserves shapes but not scale. There's other projections that preserve scale but not shapes.
None of those preserve the shape of Antarctica!
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This post didn't need to include an ad for x-dot-com.
I don't think that's the true size. You'll find all those countries are actually a lot bigger than presented on that map and scaled down to fit on a screen
You don't know how big my screen is.
This is why Trump wants Greenland so bad. He sees it, and says "It's big, I want it. Get it for me!" and gets all Veruca Salt about it.
All because he doesn't understand what a Mercator Projection is, on account of he beat up some nerd to do his homework that day, like every day.
A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.
Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump's legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that's all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that's his entire ethical framework.
What does Miller want from it? No idea, he's utterly, inhumanly insane. He's just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.
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Hmm, so the Mercator projection makes things look larger than they are? I think I've got an idea for another use for it... 😏
Is that it?
Slightly enlarging something that is microscopic doesn't change much.
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Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.
And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.
The reason it's Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn't stray too far East or West will be very accurate.
Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.
There also an interactive version of this, also a bunch of copies (not sure if this is the original, but i believe so): https://thetruesize.com/
How much do you wanna bet Trump wouldn't be so gung ho on Greenland if he saw this map? He probably thinks he is going to double the size of America.
Can they spot grrenland on the map tho?
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Did it cut out the European portion of Russia?
No, it just can't be scaled down and somehow kept in place at the tame time
Its distorted on the Mercator projection quite a bit because of its width. So the true shape looks very different presented like this.
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Why is the difference only extremely pronounced in the northern hemisphere? If I understand the math behind the projection correctly, the equator should be true scale, and things should vary more the further north AND south you go.
This image shows the extreme southern latitudes to be almost equal to their true area. Is the image wrong, or am I misunderstanding something about the projection?
This map is clipping a good chunk of the Southern Hemisphere. When you include it, you also notice the same distortion:
Note how it looks like Antarctica (14*10⁶km²) is 1/4~1/5 of the globe, even if it's actually smaller than South America (18*10⁶km²).
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Antarctica is missing, which skews it heavily towards north
It doesn't show Antarctica, but also there's just more stuff in the far north than the far south (if we aren't counting Antarctica)
Interesting how much closer kazakhstan (and by extension, china) is to europe when you see it like this. Like if the red outlines were all smooshed back closely together.
Crossing the globe north to south is the same distance as east to west, but since it is folded open on 2d maps it looks as if the earth is wider then it is higher. In this projection that means the map is stretched more horizontally than vertically, if i understand correctly.
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How can it be the true size if it’s still a projection on a 2d surface? I thought could only see the true size on a 3d globe.
True size is possible just fine on a 2D surface. For both too large and too small to be even possible there must exist some transitional point where the size is correct.
You cannot have both the size and shape correct at the same time. Having the correct size means distorting the shape, and vise versa. One or the other can be correct, but never both.
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If I have to shower in gym class I want the mercator-projection showers.
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