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Cahill-Keyes Megamap prototypes
Fig 7. Another view of the Megamap’s 16-panel assembly prototype, toward a template for the graticule, with a closer view of the Maritime provinces outtake. A single octant would be 62 square meters. The 20 x 40 meter Megamap comprises 800 square meters, but the graticule and geographic contents only occupy 496 of those square-meter panels; the rest are backdrop. The square accent lines now enclose a grid of 200 x 200 mm, where each millimeter represents a kilometer: i.e., a 1/1,000,000 map. These panels were hand-drafted in pencil, using x-y coordinates manually compiled from a Sharp EL-515 calculator, and others output with a BASIC program.
© 1978, 1980, 2009 by Gene Keyes
Photo by Peter Weeks, 1983-10-21
This is an animation illustrating Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map Projection of Earth. While this animation is not mathematically accurate, I think it’s a good illustration of the concept.
Basically, Fuller started with the data for the spherical Earth surface. He projected the data from the sphere onto an icosahedron — the twenty- sided Platonic solid — and then unfolded that icosahedron out flat.
The advantages of this method are many: for one thing, it’s possible to align the surface data with the icosahedron in such a way that, when unfolded, no landmass is cut into, which allows us to see the Earth’s landmasses as one continent (this is where my illustration falls short; note that the landmass is cut into in a couple of spots); also, this method results in nearly no distortion of either size or shape of the landmasses, unlike most other projections (the familiar classroom Mercator map or the Peters projection, for example).
