Also, there’s the actual Chad, which is bigger than Texas.

What happened in Iceland? I really thought they would have inherited this kind of stuff from Norway.

When in doubt, always guess it’s a Swedish loanword. You’ll be right surprisingly often.

Maybe one day I’ll get a Cahill-Keyes projection on the wall. I think it’s useful to see how surface areas compare.

It’s great for navigating at sea, but bad for looking at the world as a whole. Nowadays most people use maps for the latter; hence the complaints.

My guess is, the map of North Africa is really rough, because nobody actually put in the years of research time to produce a detailed map. Haven’t really tried looking for a better version, so if you find one, that bit of evidence can prove me wrong instantly. If that’s the case, the map we see here is a simplified version meant for internet audiences.

Norwegians seem lo love linguistic about as much as Finns do. Because of this enthusiasm, people have been making extremely detailed dialect maps for decades. My guess is that these two countries are the exception and the rest of the world focuses on funding other types of research.

If you want to assassinate a graphic designer by giving them a heart attack, aneurysm and an anaphylactic shock all at once.

If I even happen to visit Boston, that museum will be one of the locations I absolutely have to visit. Now I just need to come up with a reason to fly over the ocean.

Wait, are you saying that the historical site of the Boston Tea Party is now a highway? What’s wrong with you Americans? The peer where that ship was docked could have been such an epic tourist attraction, but I guess you need roads too. Cars go brrr…

Looks like there’s also plenty of calligraphy involved.

You’re right that there are many big differences. Launching a rocket into space could be compared with building a major cathedral back in the day. People did both, but not very often, because those projects are very demanding. Ships were also super expensive, but we built those all the time, so obviously the requirements weren’t quite as high.

Also attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the recent centuries, so losing a few sailors isn’t quite the same as losing an astronaut. Nowadays, safety is taken a lot more seriously which makes the project even more expensive.

Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.

Normally we’re projecting a sphere on to a cylinder, cone or some fancy polyhedron. Now what if we picked a more interesting shape such as a disc, cube, saddle, donut or a banana and project on to that instead. Is there a shape that maximizes distortions in all latitude and longitudes…

So you can use any function in that map. How about log, cos, sqrt or something else. Should be fun.

It’s true that most buyers probably know what they’re getting into, but back in the good old days of Reddit I saw there quite a few dissatisfied comments too. Those customers obviously didn’t realize the product was far from finished.

You’re absolutely right that lurking just a little while will give a better idea of the current state of development, but some people decided to skip stage entirely. They just went with the marketing, imagined they would get a finished product, and ended up with something more geared toward developers and tinkerers rather than normal consumers. That is very unfortunate for Purism, because these comments aren’t doing them any favors.

Many people expect it to be a privacy oriented daily driver phone, and consequently end up getting very disappointed. The marketing doesn’t help either, because Purism is not pitching it as a tinker phone.

Pretty cool. It seems that there has been plenty if progress, but there is still a long way to go.

“It hates me, and I hate it, and we understand each other that way.”

• James Hoffmann, talking about an Ikea funnel intended to work like a V60.