[thraxil]

Every time this discussion about different projections comes up, I just want to ask: has no one ever seen a globe? When I was a kid, we had them in classrooms and I had one in my bedroom. I never got the impression that that was unusual or unique. Have globes just gone wildly out of fashion in recent years?

[simonh]

You can't see both Mexico and Europe on a globe at the same time, but you can on a map. Globes are great, but the ones you see in most households are quite small with very little detail.

Atlases can help by showing geographical regions in appropriate projections on each page, but again you can't easily see full page appropriate projections of both Europe and Mexico at the same time because they'll be on far separated pages.

[okdood64]

What about 2 globes.

[simonh]

Sure it's possible to do that, but this discussion is about the experience people actually have with maps and how that affects their expectations. I don't think it's common for people to do that.

[skrause]

> You can't see both Mexico and Europe on a globe at the same time, but you can on a map.

Of course you can, try it in Google Map's globe view.

[simonh]

I actually did, but they both so distorted by perspective that I doubt many people have done that to build an understanding of their relative size in practice.

[yencabulator]

You can put your fingers on the extremes of Europe, and then move your hand over to Americas.

[simonh]

You can do, but how many people actually do that in practice when building an understanding of the relative size of regions, relative to looking at them on a flat map?

[agos]

yeah, computers and smartphones have made globes wildly out of fashion

[mjevans]

It's too bad Maps doesn't behave more like 'Earth' does / did (?). I haven't even installed Google Earth in years, but now that I zoom a maps window all the way out I'm sad it doesn't become a sphere projection in 3D.

[markdown]

You don't have to install it anymore.

https://earth.google.com/web/

[flohofwoe]

Weird, when I zoom out on https://www.google.com/maps/ it becomes a globe, I thought that's the default behaviour, but maybe I changed a setting at some point?

[kzrdude]

Google maps zooming out does become a globe for me (Firefox/Linux), why not for you? I see it has an on/off option for globe in the layers selection.. let's check in incognito.. aha, it's non-globe by default!

[mjevans]

Click Layers > Click More > Lower left, check the Globe View.

That's buried levels of undiscoverable.

[jollyllama]

They take up more space; a map can be folded/rolled up for storage or hung on a wall. Games like risk also much easier to do with a 2d map.