Perhaps you are familiar with Simon Garfield; he has published a seminal book on maps. He wrote an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about some of the history of maps (and some of the great mistakes, like reporting that for more than two centuries California was an island) and then talking about how the future generation will be deprived of hovering over a map:

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Though those who gratefully downloaded Google Maps on their smartphones last week might disagree, there is something valuable about getting lost occasionally, even in our pixilated, endlessly interconnected world. Children of the current generation will be poorer for it if they never get to linger over a vast paper map and then try in vain to fold it back into its original shape. They will miss discovering that the world on a map is nothing if not an invitation to dream.

I agree, though it is nice when driving to pull out a cell phone to find out where you are...rather than to have to pull over and hope you have a map of that area in your car (usually that was either one map I was missing or that part of the map was torn off. ).

Better even than a map of the world is a globe. That really makes you realise just how different are countries' sizes from the sizes on the traditional Mercator projection.

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Better even than a map of the world is a globe.

When I use a globe, I can't close the glove compartment (box).

I agree with Richard about globes (and with proof about the impracticality of carrying one in the car - especially one big enough to use as a road map from, say, Wolverhampton to West Bromwich) AND with Simon Garfield about the joys of using a paper map - orienteering isn't nearly as much fun when you have a GPS in your pocket as it is when you are trying to orient a compass on a map held to the ground by four rocks.

It's only when you lokk at a good quality large globe of the world that you realise what a tiny part of it you live in.

(*Smaller globes often tend to make England too big because it would be very hard to find at the right scale.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

I've found that a Great Circle route from here to the local mall is highly inefficient.

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It's only when you lokk a t a good quality*
large globe of the world that you realise what a tiny part of it you live in.

Ah...but I bet China looks really big!

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Originally posted by Kalleh:

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It's only when you lokk a t a good quality*
large globe of the world that you realise what a tiny part of it you live in.

Ah...but I bet China looks really big!

Not as big as you might think. The Mercator projection makes China look rather larger than it really is - which is characteristic of cylindrical projections. The sizes of countries are only accurate near to the equator; the nearer to the poles you get the larger the countries appear to be. So, for example, Greenland looks nearly as big as Africa - although it is only around a fourteenth its size.

China is, in fact, about the size of the USA, both countries being around a third the size of Africa.

There is a fascinating article here - http://www.economist.com/blogs.../2010/11/cartography -

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Originally posted by Proofreader:
I've found that a Great Circle route from here to the local mall is highly inefficient.

I bet you'd use a Great Circle route if you could. A Great Circle route is simply the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere - and that rule applies even if the two points are close to one another. You probably can't use the shortest route from your house to the Mall as that is unlikely to be the way the road runs.

Again it is the Mercator Projection that deceives people; the shortest route (the Great Circle route) betwen London and New York goes through Newfoundland; measure the apparent shortest route on a Mercator projection and it seem to hit the American coast well south of that point.

I love finding finding quitky shortcuts around trafficky spots in the dense suburbs here, & ever-better routes on long trips, so I appreciate googlemaps & mapquest-- no, I don't miss the tiny print & tattered folds one bit. I like to study the area online at home first, then wing it. Much of my fun is in self-correcting via sense of direction & topography, so I dislike the idea of following voice commands, don't use gps.

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A Great Circle route is simply the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere - and that rule applies even if the two points are close to one another. You probably can't use the shortest route from your house to the Mall as that is unlikely to be the way the road runs.

Yes, and I want to apologize to the owners of the homes whose living rooms I disrupted on my way to Old Navy.

I am not the map person in our family; Shu is. I like driving, and he has always loved poring over maps (my brothers love doing that, too). When we drive somewhere fairly far, Shu will find the best routes!