Week 3

Assignment #6

I choose to use Hawaii, Japan, and the United States for my map which represents all three places I live in. I've moved both Japan and Hawaii towards Norway, since I have a little bit of Norwegian blood in me. Surprisingly, Hawaii, including its oceans in between each island, seems to be almost similar in size to Norway. Japan is much larger than I expected to be, and I was shocked to see this as well in the lecture.

Assignment #7

1. The Web Mercator distorts the area because on the map the areas closer to both the north and south poles. The map exaggerates the size of the land masses closer to the poles to fit to scale. This distortion is shown to be expressed by the graticule lines as you go further towards each pole, the lines and subsequent areas become increasingly larger.

2. I didn’t receive an error message when doing this. I’m following all the instructions as best as I can and have redone it multiple times but, i’ve never seen an error message occur. Although maybe since slide 7 deals with map fake towns, it could be that there is false information present on the map.

3. The projection distorts the size and shapes of the land mass to fit in the curvature of the graticule lines according to the earths spherical shape. However, it is still a distorted representation of the land masses since we are also in a two dimensional plane trying to illustrate a three dimensional world.

4. An equal area projection does a better job at representing size and scale than a mercator map does. The equal area projection keeps sizes, shapes and areas closer to their real scale making it easier to understand these key features detailed in maps.