As promised last week: “No more politics!” This week’s story is about a conversation between a former Geography teacher, now a real estate agent, who I’ll call ‘Mister NJW’ and an infamous would-be expansionist land-owner, known as ‘Mister DJT’. The latter is quite interested in acquiring his 51st and 52nd pieces of property.
NJW notices that DJT is clutching his pristine grade three World Atlas, c. 1940 edition. The lettering is in Cyrillic, but shape of the countries is shown inMercator projection. “DJT, that book you’re using really distorts the size of those two northern properties you’re interested in. They are much smaller than depicted.” However, since you insist, we’ll refer to your atlas”
The size of land masses is significantly distorted, especially as they move further from the equator. Areas near the poles appear much larger than they are inreality. Distorted representation of area can lead to inaccurate perceptions of geographic proportions. To put it simply, just as it says in your car’s right-hand mirror: “Objects may appear smaller than they really are.” Greenland isn’t nearly as big as it’s represented by Mercator, It’s accurately represented on a globe.
I then tried to explain to DJT about kinds of boundaries, starting with those’imaginary lines’ that he likes so much. I started with, “Take Saskatchewan. It isn’t really a rectangle, but it does have four sides, longitude lines on the east and west sides, latitude lines on the north and south.” I gave upon that, as he was never able to comprehend the concept of square vs. rectangle. Longitude and latitude were even more over his head.
Ah! Water as boundaries. He could certainly grasp that, since he knows he can’t walk on water – yet. Then I said: “In much of Ontario, rivers (St. Mary’s, Detroit, Niagara and St. Lawrence) act as boundaries between Ontario and the states of Minnesota, Michigan, and New York. Understand?” The word ‘Ontario’ may as well have been the make of a car. He asked, “Should I impose a 50 or 75% tariff on it?” However, he did recognize those states names, and even knew whether they voted blue or red.
At that, I realized he did know his colours, but doing wise any ethical real estate transactions were far beyond him. At that I gave up on being a real estate agent and decided to go back to being a Geography teacher.
