Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth

[n2doc]

13:57 10 December 2009 by Jacob Aron


A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines.

"Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

"The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares.

Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes.

more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18264-clever-folds-in-a-globe-give-new-perspectives-on-earth.html

[fl_dem]

1. I like the way you think

I just got home from helping my daughter move all afternoon and logged onto DU to peruse the latest news, the first 3 items that caught my interest were posted by you....thanks for your inquiring mind and for sharing these tidbits of discovery.

[snagglepuss]

2. K&R Thanks for posting. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Sounds familiar ...

The Dymaxion map or Fuller map is a projection of a World map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map.

It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him during 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. The 1954 version published by Fuller with the title The AirOcean World Map used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.

Fuller claimed that his map had several advantages over other projections for world maps.

It has less distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas, notably when compared to the Gall–Peters projection. Other compromise projections attempt a similar trade-off.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map does not have any "right way up". Fuller argued frequently that in the universe there is no "up" and "down", or "north" and "south": only "in" and "out".<2> Gravitational forces of the stars and planets created "in", meaning 'towards the gravitational center', and "out", meaning "away from the gravitational center". He attributed the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of most other world maps to cultural bias.

There isn't any one "correct" view of the Dymaxion map. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth's continents – not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

Several configurations show in the Wiki.