WEBVTT

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thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button then enable

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notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so the

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answer to today's question is actually pretty simple Google is yet another

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greedy corporation trying to pull the wool over our eyes and hide the truth

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that the earth is actually a flat surface surrounded on all sides by walls

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of ice Oh gotcha just kidding we aren't flat

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earthers here at Tech wiki but other than making Google Maps look a little

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cooler when you zoom all the way out what exactly was the point of switching

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away from the flat map that we're all familiar with from grade school well as

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it turns out making any kind of map look

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flat is a relatively in exact science for example imagine if you painted the

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outside of a grapefruit to look like a globe then you let the paint dry peeled

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it and laid the peel flat to make a 2 dimensional map well you'd quickly

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realize that not only do the shapes of landforms and bodies of water get a

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little distorted when you flatten them but you can forget about trying to make

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the map a perfectly neat rectangle in fact part of the reason that this map

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projection that you've probably seen in old school world atlases look so funny

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is because it's attempting to show shapes and sizes more accurately than

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would be possible if you were trying to stretch the map to fit it inside a

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rectangular space and this was especially noticeable on the projection

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used for a long time by Google called the Mercator even though this map

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projection actually goes back over 400

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years Google favored it for their Maps application over others because it's

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quite good at preserving angles which is important because so many people use

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Google Maps for navigation in fact the Mercator became popular long ago

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precisely because it's accurate angles help sailors navigate the high seas with

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confidence but Mercator also has a very

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obvious flaw you see the projection works by showing you what you'd get if

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you have stuck the earth inside a cylinder that was just big enough to

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hold it kind of like putting a tennis ball in a can so the middle of the earth

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the equator will touch the sides of the can but areas closer to the North and

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South Poles have to be stretched out in order to touch the cylinder which you

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would then unroll to get a Mercator map in the world this stretching means that

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the sizes of land masses are inaccurate and this is especially true the further

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you get from the equator for example Greenland looks much bigger than

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Australia on a Mercator map even though it's actually the other way around in

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real life which was mostly fine since

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odds are that you aren't doing much traveling Antarctica or the very

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northern reaches of Canada but Google made the change anyway since even though

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a globe is three dimensional which means your computer's graphics processor has

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to do extra work in order to render it smoothly on your monitor the processing

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power available in the typical desktop or laptop has come a long way since the

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service was first launched in 2005 with

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that said if you go to Google Maps right now you may actually hear your laptop

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get a little louder as the fan speed increases that's your GPU firing up or

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at least it should as long as you have hardware acceleration enabled in your

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browser interestingly the answer to this question also probably addresses why

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this feature isn't available on the maps app for smartphones just yet it would

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really suck to see your phone battery drained just because you lost your

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fidget spinner and decided to keep flicking that virtual globe around to

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satisfy your social media addled attentions bad

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speaking of you know making your

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whatever juggling multiple computers is difficult you end up with various sets

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of mice and keyboards on your desk which not only looks messy but it can get

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super confusing which one goes for which KVM switches can partially solved this

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problem but we found that they aren't very seamless and can be cumbersome well

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with synergy you can move a single mouse and keyboard between your computers

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seamlessly to make them feel like just one system you can check out the full

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details at the link below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our

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other videos don't forget to subscribe for future fast as possible and leave a comment if you have suggestions for

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other videos that we could do on this channel like I don't know the the birds

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and the bees as fast as possible it's like well you got this one you got this

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one they go