The Software Architect Elevator

Chapter 16. The IT World Is Flat

Without a Map, Any Road Looks Promising

Living in the Middle Kingdom—by Kwong Hing Yen (江慶人)

Maps have been valuable tools for millennia, despite most of them, especially world maps, being quite badly distorted. The fundamental challenge of plotting the surface of a sphere onto a flat sheet of paper forces maps to make compromises when depicting angles, sizes, and distances—if the earth were flat, things would be much easier. For example, the historically popular Mercator projection provides true angles for seafarers, meaning you can read an angle off the map and use the same angle on the ship’s compass (compensating for the discrepancy between geographic and magnetic north). The price to pay for this convenient property, which avoids distorting angles, is area distortion: the further away countries are from the equator, the larger they appear on the map. That’s why Africa looks disproportionately small on such maps,¹ a trade-off that might be acceptable when navigating by boat: misestimating the distance is likely a lesser problem than heading into the wrong direction.

Plotting the surface of a sphere also presents the challenge of deciding where the “middle” is. Most world maps conveniently position Europe in the center, supported by 0 degree longitude (the prime meridian) going through Greenwich, England. This depiction results in Asia being ...