How Maps LIE To You
Summary
TLDRThis video script delves into the rich history of maps, highlighting their evolution from the ancient cattle halyuk cave painting to modern digital representations. It underscores the potential for maps to mislead, using examples like the 2019 Australian wildfires and historical inaccuracies like the Mountains of Kong. The script critiques common map distortions, such as the Mercator projection's size inaccuracies and the misleading U.S. election maps by land area. It also touches on the importance of accurate mapping for infrastructure and the persistent challenge of representing a spherical Earth on a flat surface, concluding with a call to invest in personal growth through healthy habits, supported by the Fabulous app.
Takeaways
- 🗺️ Maps have been a fundamental part of human culture for thousands of years, with the oldest known map dating back to 6200 BCE.
- 🔥 In June 2019, a misleading 3D map of Australia's wildfires went viral, illustrating how easily map misinformation can spread online.
- 🌐 Maps can be a source of both accurate information and disinformation, as seen with the Australian wildfire map and other examples.
- 📊 Maps can mislead through the use of statistics, such as a GIF map showing popular baby names in U.S. states that didn't account for changes in popularity over time.
- 📶 Cell phone coverage maps often overstate actual coverage, with the FCC finding significant discrepancies between claimed and actual coverage.
- 🏛️ Historically, governments have also released misleading maps, such as those used for U.S. presidential election results that don't accurately represent vote distributions.
- 🌍 The common Mercator projection map distorts the size of countries, particularly those far from the equator, leading to misconceptions about the Earth's geography.
- 🗾 Maps can be deliberately inaccurate to be more helpful, like the London Tube map, which prioritizes usability over geographical accuracy.
- 🌐 The orientation of maps with north at the top is a matter of perspective and not an absolute truth, as there is no 'top' or 'bottom' to the Earth in space.
- 🌏 Historical maps have included虚构地理特征,如'Mountains of Kong'和'Island of California',这些错误持续了数百年才被纠正。
Q & A
What is the oldest map on record, and when was it created?
-The oldest map on record is the Çatalhöyük cave painting in Konya, Turkey, believed to have been created around 6200 BCE, roughly a millennium before the advent of written language.
What happened with the map of Australian fires in 2019, and why was it controversial?
-In 2019, a 3D image created by artist Anthony Hearsay depicting areas affected by fires in Australia was mistakenly shared online as a NASA satellite photo. This misinformation spread quickly, including a viral tweet by Rihanna. Although the map accurately showed fire-affected regions, it was never intended to be a satellite photo.
Why can maps, even if technically correct, still be misleading?
-Maps can be misleading if the data is misinterpreted or lacks context. For example, a map showing the most popular baby names in the U.S. might lead to an incorrect understanding of trends by not accounting for how quickly other names dropped in popularity.
What did the 2019 FCC study reveal about cellular data coverage maps?
-The 2019 FCC study found that telecom companies significantly exaggerated their cellular coverage, with some companies only providing coverage in 45% of the areas they claimed, even though maps suggested much broader coverage.
How are voting maps of U.S. elections often misleading?
-Voting maps that show U.S. counties painted in solid red or blue are misleading because they don’t reflect the actual population distribution or close election margins. These maps often exaggerate the scale of wins or losses by using land area rather than representing the votes of people.
What are some examples of geographical features that appeared on maps but never existed?
-Examples include the Mountains of Kong, which appeared on maps of Africa for nearly 100 years, and the Mexican island of Bermeja, which was only confirmed not to exist in 2009, after appearing on maps since 1539.
What is the 'Island of California,' and why was it incorrectly represented on maps?
-The 'Island of California' is a famous historical error where the Baja Peninsula was mistakenly shown as an island. Despite being known as a peninsula by the 1530s, maps continued to depict it as an island until the mid-19th century.
Why is the map of the London Tube system geographically inaccurate?
-The London Tube map is inaccurate because it prioritizes simplicity and ease of use over geographical accuracy. Curves in the River Thames and distances between stops are misrepresented to make the map more readable and navigable for commuters.
What is the main issue with the Mercator projection map?
-The Mercator projection distorts land sizes, especially near the poles, making northern regions appear much larger than they are. While originally designed for navigation, it creates a misleading view of the world’s geography.
Why is it incorrect to assume that north is 'up' on world maps?
-Maps often show north as 'up,' but in reality, there is no top or bottom in space. This is just a perspective we’ve become used to, but an alternative orientation with south at the top is equally valid.
Outlines
🗺️ The Evolution and Misinterpretation of Maps
This paragraph delves into the historical significance of maps, highlighting the ancient origins exemplified by the Cattle Halyuk cave painting in Turkey, dating back to 6200 BCE. It underscores how maps have evolved to guide humanity but also discusses their potential to disseminate misinformation. A case study is presented on a 3D map of Australia's wildfires created by Anthony Hearsay, which, despite being relatively accurate, was widely misinterpreted when shared without context, leading to widespread misinformation. The paragraph emphasizes the need for due diligence in interpreting maps and the role of social media in amplifying misrepresentations.
👶 The Misleading Nature of Map Data
Paragraph 2 critiques the representation of data on maps, using the example of a GIF map showing popular baby names in U.S. states over time. It points out that while the map is technically correct, it can lead to misunderstandings due to the way data is visualized. The paragraph also discusses the inaccuracies in cellular coverage maps, as revealed by an FCC study that found significant discrepancies between what telecom companies claimed and actual coverage. The discussion extends to the political realm, examining how election maps can be deceptive, particularly in terms of vote distribution and population density, and concludes with a reflection on the historical persistence of fictional geographic features on maps, such as the Mountains of Kong and the Island of Bermeja.
🌐 The Bias and Inaccuracy of Common Map Projections
This section challenges the accuracy of commonly used map projections, particularly the Mercator projection, which was designed for navigation rather than geographic accuracy. It discusses the historical context and the distortions introduced by this projection, such as the exaggerated size of Greenland compared to Africa. The paragraph also addresses the cultural and political implications of these distortions, including their use in propaganda. Furthermore, it touches on the concept of map orientation, questioning the conventional 'north-up' approach and suggesting that it's more about perspective than objective truth, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of the geographical representations on maps.
📱 Promoting Healthy Habits with Technology
The final paragraph shifts focus to the application of technology in fostering healthy habits through an app called Fabulous. It describes how the app uses behavioral science to help users build and maintain habits, offering both customized habit tracking and curated journeys for specific goals. The summary emphasizes the app's user-friendly approach, which includes daily coaching content and the ability to add unlimited habits with a premium membership. The paragraph concludes with a promotional offer for the first 100 users, linking the app's benefits to both personal improvement and support for the content creator's work.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Maps
💡Misinformation
💡Cattle Halyuk Cave Painting
💡Anthony Hearsay
💡Baby Names Map
💡Cell Phone Coverage Maps
💡Mercator Projection
💡Political Maps
💡Fake Geographic Features
💡Orientation of Maps
Highlights
Maps have been a crucial part of human experience for thousands of years, with the oldest known map dating back to 6200 BCE.
Maps can be a source of misinformation, as they can be misinterpreted or misrepresented when shared without context.
In June 2019, a 3D image of Australia showing wildfire damage was shared widely but was miscaptioned as a NASA satellite photo, leading to misinformation.
A map showing popular baby names in U.S. states can lead to misunderstandings due to the way data is presented.
Cell phone coverage maps provided by telecom companies are often exaggerated and do not accurately represent actual coverage.
Voting maps after the 2016 U.S. presidential election were misleading as they showed a 'sea of red' but did not accurately represent the close vote counts.
Historically, maps have included虚构地理特征, such as the Mountains of Kong, which were believed to be real for over a century.
The island of California was a historical misconception that persisted on maps for centuries despite being geographically inaccurate.
The London Tube map is intentionally inaccurate to be more helpful for navigation, showing connections rather than geographical accuracy.
The Mercator projection map is widely used but distorts the size of countries, especially those far from the equator.
Maps inherently show a partial truth and can be misleading if not interpreted with the necessary context and understanding.
The orientation of maps with north at the top is a matter of perspective and not an absolute truth, as space has no top or bottom.
Transcripts
maps have always been a huge part of the
human experience now for thousands of
years the oldest map on record is the
cattle halyuk cave painting in kanye
turkey it's believed that this image was
created sometime around 6200 bce which
is roughly around an entire millennium
before the advent of written language
and ever since then maps have been
around to help guide us to wherever we
need to go and in many ways they
determine how we think about the world
around us but as it turns out maps can
also be a massive source of miss and
disinformation including my own that you
see on this channel from time to time so
as with everything in life you need to
do your own due diligence and here are a
bunch of examples why back in june of
2019 an unprecedentedly long fire season
began in australia lack of soil moisture
as well as an uncommonly long dry season
led to what became a long and terrible
10 months of fires during the height of
these flames an artist and designer
named anthony hearsay created a 3d image
of australia pulling data from nasa
satellites he showed all of the places
within the country that the fires had
hit up to that point and while the image
was quite compelling and relatively
accurate within its intended context the
map nevertheless became a cornerstone
for false information as the image was
spread across the internet as quickly as
the wildfires they depicted a facebook
page dedicated to the news of the
australian fires reposted the photo with
the new caption a 3d image of australia
shot from a nasa satellite this version
of the photo with that caption was then
subsequently shared around 10 000 times
then the apex of this mass spread of
misinformation came when rihanna tweeted
the photo to her at the time 96 million
followers not long after that the image
began being called out as false leading
to both facebook and instagram initially
flagging and taking down the original
post until it was all cleared up by
hearsay that he never actually at any
point claimed that it was a nasa
satellite photo so it's easy to see how
something like this all gets out of hand
the news coming out of australia at the
time seemed so dire while at the same
time the image appeared genuinely
compelling and while it was a somewhat
accurate 3d rendering of the culmination
of all the fires up to that point it was
absolutely not what it was being hailed
as something going viral is a great way
for information to be misinterpreted or
misrepresented back in a 2014 article
for slate bren blatt talked about a
popular gif map that showed which baby
names were most popular in every u.s
state depending on the year but he
points out that while the map is
technically correct the information
given isn't as straightforward as it
appears at first glance for instance the
name ashley is seemingly the most
popular name for girls across the u.s in
the years 1991 and 92. despite that fact
however a child born in 1984 was 8
percent more likely to have been named
ashley than a child born in 1992 in fact
1986 was the year when ashley peaked as
a name within the u.s but the reason why
the 91 and 92 years showed up on the map
is because as ashley dipped in
popularity as a name other names dipped
even quicker so while this map isn't
incorrect it can easily lead to an
incorrect understanding of what was
actually happening at the time now while
some of these maps we've been talking
about involve misleading statistics or
false information that were believed to
be true at the time
cell phone coverage maps are just
another thing entirely if you look at
one of the maps provided by any of the
big telecom companies you might feel
confident in that fee that you're paying
every month most of the companies show a
map largely covered in different shades
of the color of their choice 4g lte and
even 5g is boasted around the majority
of the us but in 2019 the fcc conducted
a study to see if cellular data was
actually available in all of the places
that the larger telecom companies were
claiming there was and as it turns out
it wasn't even close the company with
the highest amount of coverage was still
under 65
of what it claimed on their map with at
least one company having coverage closer
to around just 45
of the area that it claimed the fcc is
doing its best to get the telecom
companies to fall in line because
over-exaggerating about their coverage
actually affects an even larger issue as
technology and society advances it
becomes more and more important for
people to have internet access and
cellular coverage but if there's money
going to be put into infrastructure we
need to actually know where there is
coverage and where there isn't and while
a map that's all different shades of
purple might look nice and make it seem
like the company is ahead of the game
it's really just blocking access to
parts of the country that might actually
need it the most but that's just
business right governments have never
released any confusing or misleading
maps before right of course they have
after the 2016 u.s presidential election
the voting maps that were often shown on
tv and in articles were of the country
divided into red and blue sections based
on which counties voted for which
candidate if you've ever seen a version
of this map before you've seen that it's
essentially just a sea of red across the
country with some blue edges and a few
scattered blue dots floating throughout
the center and while within the lens of
which county voted for which candidate
this map is accurate it's nonetheless
pretty misleading for instance
regardless of which election it is
painting any county a single color is
often highly inaccurate in a pure win or
lose ratio yeah one side lost and one
side won however if a country is only
one by one percent as has been the case
with many counties across the u.s for
the past several presidential elections
than painting that entire county a
single color doesn't truly represent the
entire voter block if one is using the
map to imply a landslide it just isn't
accurate without the peripheral data
coloring in every county in darker or
lighter shades of red or blue would
dramatically help with this accuracy
problem but there's another inaccuracy
inherent within this map as well if one
looks at this map alone without any
outside knowledge at all it might seem
as if almost nobody in the country voted
for blue well almost everyone voted for
red instead in reality however the votes
were much closer than this map suggests
red received 62 million 984 828 votes
while blue received
fifty 65
thousand five hundred fourteen votes
which is well over two million more than
red and the reason why this map fails to
capture that closer spread is because
it's the wrong one to use this is a map
of land while an election map should
really be a map of people for example if
you look at the land map of the united
states you'd see that new york state and
arkansas are roughly the same size but
there's only three million people living
in arkansas while there's more than 19
and a half million people living in new
york that is well over six and a half
times the population of arkansas and
those are just states with similar sizes
it gets even more bonkers when you look
at a comparison of states like new
jersey and wyoming by land mass wyoming
is more than 11 times larger than new
jersey but by population new jersey has
more than 15 times the people of wyoming
in fact tiny but crowded new jersey has
nearly the same amount of people as
wyoming utah idaho montana north dakota
south dakota and nebraska do all
combined but you can reduce the size
comparison even further if you focus on
just nine counties around america's two
largest cities new york and los angeles
you'll find that the votes cast in just
these nine counties were only 260 000
short of those cast in all seven of
these entire states combined and thus if
you look at a map of the united states
based on where people actually live like
this one you can clearly see a
significantly more even and closer
distribution of votes than the one that
is based only on land and then there's
all the fake stuff that used to be
included on world maps that everybody
just thought was real for hundreds of
years like these strange mountains
you've probably never heard about or
ever seen before called the mountains of
kong they were first referenced in a map
of africa by a scottish explorer back in
1798 and over the next hundred years
until almost the beginning of the 20th
century different maps continued showing
this extensive mountain chain that
simply never existed at all and yet as
recently as
1995 a world atlas still referenced them
being there but the kong mountains
aren't the only mapped geographic
feature that never actually existed
there's also the mexican island of
bermeja which first showed up on a
spanish map back in 1539. the belief
that this imaginary island existed stuck
around for so long that it wasn't until
2009
that the country of mexico officially
announced to the world that it had
finally been determined that the island
of bermeja doesn't actually exist that
is 470 years that some of the world
believed a fake island existed all
because it showed up on one map back in
the 16th century and then of course
there is the island of california the
famous historical misconception that the
baja peninsula region of mexico wasn't
connected to the rest of the north
american mainland a spanish novel from
1510 referred to a magical island named
california and so when hernan cortez and
his men showed up in the 1530s they
decided to name what they believed was
an island california by the end of the
decade however it was actually
discovered that the land was in fact a
peninsula but then for reasons that
aren't really entirely clear nearly a
century later in 1622 maps began showing
the area as an island again and then it
stayed that way across many maps for
another century and a quarter until the
king of spain fernand vi made it clear
that california is not an island and
ordered all new maps to reflect this
however there are still maps all the way
up until 1865
the year when the u.s civil war ended
the continued showing the baja peninsula
as an island and then sometimes maps are
less accurate in order to be more
helpful for example the map for the
london tube is pretty far off from the
area's geographic reality the thames
curves in places on the map where it
doesn't in real life and vice versa
distances between certain stops seem
minuscule on the map but take longer
than the rides between stops that look
closer well-known stops and streets are
listed in geographically incorrect
places depending on if it's above ground
or below and all of this is because of
the simple fact that all of this complex
geographic information needs to all fit
on just a small and easy to read square
map and what's most important on this
kind of map is to show the lines in
places they connect to and end nobody
who needs to know how to get to a
geographic location should be using a
map that is specifically designed for
something else but that's actually what
most of us do with our world maps anyway
the most commonly used world map is
called the mercator projection map named
after the cartographer gerdes mercator
who created it centuries ago back in
1569. now obviously a lot has changed
since 1569 as have a lot of aspects to
the map but the core way that the map
looks at the world has stayed more or
less the same and that's the problem
because the mercator map was never
initially intended to be used as a map
for the common person it was made as a
map for navigators where one could
easily draw straight lines between the
known ports of the world in fact the map
was initially called a new and enlarged
description of the earth with
corrections for use in navigation it's
literally right there in the name but as
the number of people traveling across
the oceans increased over time this map
became more and more widely used it also
helps that the map-made countries in the
northern hemisphere seem much larger in
comparison to those that were in the
southern during the age of colonialism
it was a welcomed way of viewing the
world despite the original intentions of
just being an easy way to draw a line
between two points now in modern times
even if the mercator projection is the
map used in classrooms many of us have
been taught and are aware about the
map's glaringly obvious geographic
issues most infamous of all is the
absurdly large size of greenland which
appears to be roughly the size as the
entire continent of africa despite in
reality only actually being just a tad
smaller than the democratic republic of
the congo in the continent's center
antarctica covers almost the entire
bottom quarter of the map despite being
the third smallest of earth's continents
alaska appears larger than australia
despite being more than four times
smaller in real life and consequently
russia's inflated appearance has been
utilized several times in the u.s before
for propaganda purposes especially
during the cold war to create fear over
the supposed monstrous spread of
communism across the world all of this
distortion is due to the fact that the
projection is a cylindrical map based on
mercator's very specific needs when he
made it the further things are from the
equator the more their size inflates and
there's all sorts of math and science
regarding the hows and whys of the
mercator projection but the bottom line
is as with most world maps it's just
hard to show an accurate portrayal of
things that exist upon a
three-dimensional sphere in real life on
a flat rectangular two-dimensional
picture so while the mercator projection
succeeds at its original designed
intention it fails at mostly everything
else and then of course there is the one
thing that most global maps fail to show
north is not up and south is not down
the earth sits in space and in space
there is no top and there is no bottom
when looking at a map like the mercator
it presents the northern hemisphere
above the southern when the reality is
that that's all just a matter of
perspective north and south are only
directions but there is no top or bottom
to the earth a planet the southern
hemisphere isn't below the northern it's
simply on the other side of the equator
but because it's what most of us have
always known it's easy to understand why
one might consider north to be the top
of the map but as the south up
orientation map shows it's really just
as easy to see it all the other way
around even though to you this
perspective may feel strange it's just
as accurate of a view of earth's
geography as it is the other way around
a map with the north on top isn't lying
to us but it's also not telling us the
full truth because in the end maps are
only that a representation of a partial
truth
but you know what is a full truth the
best investment that you can make
probably isn't in designing a map but
investing in yourself as you probably
know we as people generally know what's
best for ourselves but we're pretty
often unable to transform healthy
behaviors into long-term habits
but that's exactly what fabulous is here
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help support real life lore at the same
time and as always thank you so much for
watching
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