Mapheads
Nov 8, 2013
Your head and mine are three-dimensional objects, vaguely globular. This chart shows what we might look like if we tried to project our heads onto a flat piece of paper the way cartographers project the planet earth to make a world map.
The guy in the lower-right corner is Mercator Man, the visage we grew up with on schoolroom wallmaps. It's common knowledge that the earth on Mercator world maps was really, really distorted, but we might not have realized quite how ugly the distortion was. And the other three guys are also a mess, even though they are projected onto rounded shapes.
We know what you're thinking: if artists can draw a face on paper and have it look attractive and "realistic," why can't mapmakers give us a simple round world in its natural proportions?
We suspect this was one of the questions Picasso mulled over as he worked out his Cubist projection, a much more elegant solution to the problem of showing all the sides of things at once. A GPS optimized for driving all over Picasso Man, however, might be a hard sell.