Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Masket Projection

I made this cake for my son's birthday yesterday:I've come to the conclusion that early mapmakers did their jobs roughly the same way I did it. Start with the continent you know best (North America, in my case), and then warp the other continents slightly as space demands. Is it my fault Eurasia is so darned big? I think I was totally justified in making Florida bigger than the Indian subcontinent. Honestly, is it any worse than the old Mercator projections that made Greenland the size of Mars and cut Russia in half?
Oh, for my previous cake works, see here, here and here. And for a wonderful discussion of maps and bias, see this West Wing scene.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could TOTALLY play Risk on that cake.

Seth Masket said...

Sounds like a good party game.

nimh said...

Is that the Chinese Wall there in white?

Seth Masket said...

Actually, I was going for the peaks of the Himalayas.