Oh cartographic bliss! Mikel Maron has added an alternate world-view to his suite of blog-mapping visualizations with the World as a Blog - dymaxion edition to show the latest pings across our one-world island.

For those unfamiliar with the Dymaxion Projection, this was the invention of R. Buckminster Fuller, a follow-up to the 19th-century one world-ocean map that had been popular with the sea-ruling empires because it avoided the psychological bias of the Mercator -- when JOHO speaks of word piracy, he's not speaking any ultra modern concepts -- Bucky reasoned that an air travel culture would need to see the planet as a land-mass surrounded by that ocean, and with the least distortion (notice how Canada isn't so large anymore? Greenland too).

The Dymaxion more clearly shows why an ICBM takes time against the currents to get to Moscow while a Soviet missle would ride the spin over the pole to get to Washington DC (among other things) ... it also explains why our modern Europe/America clippers take near-polar routes.

Traditional world maps reinforce the elements that separate humanity and fail to highlight the patterns and relationships emerging from the ever evolving and accelerating process of globalization. Instead of serving as "a precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic and comprehensive viewpoint," the maps we use still cause humanity to "appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of its got to be you or me; there is not enough for both." - BFI

Seeing the world as it is, without distortions or cuts into any landmass, has other residual benefits as well. We see clearly how important it was in 1961 when airliners exceeded ships in moving people, we see why GENI wants to bridge the electrical grid across the Bering Straights, and if you add in one dot to represent ever 1% of humanity, you see how almost all of us live and work in the Northern Hemisphere.

You also see how we're not all that far from each other, you and I.