On the Superiority of Cylindrical Equal-Area Projections

An ignorant American cartography professor and Apple-Maps developer was teaching a class on Gerardus Mercator, known DST advocate. “Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Mercator and accept that he was the most highly-evolved cartographer the world has ever known, even greater than James Gall and Arno Peters!” At this moment, a brave, logical European Redditor who was a long-time contributor to sporcle.com and understood the superiority of cylindrical equal-area projections stood up and held up a globe. “What is the largest continent, pinhead?” The arrogant professor smirked quite Euro-centrically and smugly replied “Greenland, you stupid pleb! Can’t you see how much larger it is than Africa?” “Wrong,” said the student, and drew a perfect circle encompassing Greenland (which isn’t even green smh), “if Greenland is so big, how come there are more people outside this circle than inside?” The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata. He stormed out of the room crying those distorted conformal Mercator tears, his world collapsing around him. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Alphons J. Van der Grinten, wished he had received a European education and become more than yet another distributor of lies in our flawed education system, and was kicking himself for never noticing that India has a greater north-south extent than Finland. The students applauded and all subscribed to /r/mapporn that day and accepted the Peirce Quincuncial projection as the coolest projection ever. There was a school-wide renouncement of outdated colonialist maps, and south-up maps (like the ones they definitely 100% use in Australia) were hung up across the northern hemisphere. God himself showed up and enforced geography as a mandatory subject in schools nationwide. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He committed suicide and his body was tossed into the Mariana trench. And that student’s name? Harry Beck, creator of the London Tube map.

(Not mine, but so good I had to share!)

SciFiGamers, My Part in Their Downfall

You know, it’s great when you see your kids grow up and achieve something in the outside world.

About a year ago someone decided that the way to get ahead in life would be to set up a Tumblr blog that harvested images and posts from the Warhammer Subreddit and presented them as their own with no credit or attribution. This was eventually noticed by the admins, and said blog was deluged with DMCA takedown requests until Tumblr had no choice but to shut it down with extreme prejudice. Hooray!

Before this happened however, I made a suggestion in the thread discussing the issue, that we should all add “SciFiGamers Sucks Ass” to our posts, in the hope that the bot behind the theft would slavishly copy such comments across. A few people attempted this, posting messages much more explicit, but the blog was shut down shortly afterwards and nothing much came of it.

A few months later the same blog popped up again under a slightly different URL. I made my suggestion again, this time providing “SCIFIGAMERS GARGLES DONKEY KNOB” as a sample message. The idea took off like wildfire and before very long the thread and the parasite blog were decorated with messages such as “Here are my Imperial Knights. By the way, SciFiGamers ingests it’s own feces!”. Once again the blog was taken down shortly afterwards. Victory!

Earlier today it was discovered that another site was parasiting off the Subreddit. The Mods made my humble idea official policy, and before long the infringing site was bulging at the seams with absolutely awful – and often hilarious – messages condoning all manner of perversions and extreme political views. Before long the actual owner of the site showed up in the Subreddit and apologised, having taken down all of the pirated content. However it was then discovered that the original offenders were at it again, so the bile cannon was redirected their way. As I type this, SciFiGamers are overwhelmed with crude and offensive messages, and the campaign has made it to the front page of Reddit.

I’m so proud! ;D

Updates

I haven’t been making any posts this week as I thought it’d be better to wait until I got everything transferred to the new server, but as is usually the case this is taking longer than anticipated. I now hope to get it sorted early to mid next week.

In the meantime, the video card on my home PC has given up the ghost, which means I’ll have to put it into the shop all weekend. No internet access for an entire weekend – especially one with temperatures tipped to get close to 40° – may well drive me mad, so when the Wyrmlog comes back up please don’t be surprised if it resembles Sixth World Problems.

On the subject of numerical world problems, please take a look at how much fun I had this week pretending to be a 14th century peasant who stumbled over an iMac and mistook everyone on Reddit for spirits and demons.

OK, that’s it. See you in the funny pages.

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami