Good morning John! Today I'm going to introduce you to some maps.
Maps are an amazing kind of art. They tend to represent reality but they don't have to.
They can put lots of information into perspective.They can be extremely information dense
and I love information density, which is why I cut all the breaths out of my videos.
Historical maps don't just tell you about the world,
they tell you about the world
that they were created during, which is really amazing.
And not just what the world looked like back then but also how little we knew about the world back then.
When I'm reading Game of Thrones 
I'm always super frustrated because
they haven't mapped the whole world yet
And I'm like 
"If you go west from Westeros, what's over there?!"
It's just amazing to realise that the majority of people who lived in the world so far
didn't know what the whole world looked like.
That, just, it seems terrifying to me!
But once we had the global maps we started using them for more than just representing the world
so you could navigate it or divide it up into things that were owned by different people and countries.
It became an interesting and useful way to display and understand data about the world.
Population probably being the most obvious example.
Here's the world split up into seven different regions,
each with about one billion people
and yes, that is North and South America and Australia just making up one of them.
Australia is mostly empty.
Only 2% of people live in the highlighted area.
Inside this circle, there are more people living 
than outside of that circle.
Actually it's this circle because things get distorted
when you take a globe 
and unwrap it into a flat rectangular map
Which is why this weird curvy line is actually
the longest straight line you can sail 
without running into land
Here it is actually projected onto a globe. 
See? Straight line.
This sailing route is only possible, of course, 
because the earth is mostly water
which becomes more evident 
when you look at the places
that you could actually make an Earth sandwich.
By which I mean that there is actually land 
on both sides of the planet in those places.
Maps can also show preferences of course.
From alcoholic drinks to sides of the road or how to pronounce car-a-mel or carmel or what to call cola soda pop cokes or systems of measurement.
And yes, the U.S. is lagging a little bit behind on the metric system there.
Also, in maternity leave. Also, in executing juveniles, which is a little embarrassing.
World mapper is an amazing website and software tool that distorts the world based on data.
Because, really is the amount of land a country has the most important thing about that country?
Of course it's not! Here the world is morphing from a map that shows the amount of land that each country has to the amount of people each country has.
While, in this world mapper map, we see the number of internet users swelling from 2000 to 2007.
These moving maps that stretch to the dimension of time are some of my favorites.
For example, this one that shows internet usage over a 24 hour period
And this one, that shows global flights over a 24 hour period. Woah!
Now as much as maps can help us understand the world,
They can also distort our perceptions of the world.
For example,  the Mercator map projection which we often use
stretches out the world at the poles.
In this map,  Africa looks like it's about the size of Greenland.
But infact, Africa is BIG.
VERY BIG.
The continent of Africa is bigger than:
The United States,  France, Germany, Spain, the UK, all of Eastern Europe, China, and India.
WHAT
Also 'North being up' is completely arbitrary.
And it's kinda convenient it turns out
because most people actually do live in the Northern Hemisphere.
In the Western world we started out with 'North being up' with Ptolemy,
But then we swtiched so that East was up.
So that when you said 'to orient', to orient your map, you were pointing toward the Orient.
We switched back to the North being on top because we got obsessed with the Greeks during the Rennaisance.
If you're wondering.
We live in a big, complicated world,
Sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible;
always impossible to understand completely.
The people who use these data and these tools make these constructions of reality
so that we can better understand our world are some of the heroes of the Modern Age.
Hats off to them, and our everchanging, wonderful world.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
