[Mtinie]

I'll be honest, I never really gave a lot of thought to whether or not I'm a "map lover" until this HN topic appeared in my feed, but your comment hooked me in...

...so much for this morning's priorities. /sigh

If you're familiar with the Natural Earth data set, do you know if it is possible to apply a transformation so a map could be printed of the World using the Cahill or Waterman projection?

I can envision a striking large-scale art piece that started from a "butterfly" representation of the World.

[maxerickson]

The data is stored as coordinates, so given software that supports a projection and understands the system used to store the data, it can be transformed.

(Much recently available data is stored using geographic coordinates - basically the latitude and longitude, and maybe the elevation, but a lot of older data, and especially government data, is stored in coordinate systems that are designed to limit the error in spatial analyses that are done on the data. This isn't really something that you would have to understand deeply to make a map in a given projection, but you might have to deal with it along the way.)

[albatross_down]

You can download QGIS and change the projection system pretty easily. It's also useful for doing other things like simplifying geometries, removing extra data columns, etc.

[jacobolus]

You should put your email address in your HN profile, so people can contact you. :-)