Map Distances for Dummies

distance measurement with gmap-pedometer.com

If there's one thing our research team has learned over the past couple of years, it's that many of the self-appointed freelance writers in the Demand Media¹ family are quite willing to say truly stupid things to get their payout. One symptom is the amount of padding many contributors found necessary to meet the company's minimum word count for topics that could be addressed in a single sentence. Take Trails.com writer David Chandler and his opus "How to Calculate Travel Distances Between Cities."²

Chandler (yes, him again), who seems to consider himself quite the outdoorsman, apparently had to approach 500 words for his article (including headings, tips, and other bull, he hit 534). The yutz needed all that to describe a  method using string that is best-suited for third-graders, when the answer the OQ probably wanted was, "Read the little numbers beside the road on the map"! Then again, it's not unlikely that the question was actually about the great-circle distance between, say, Singapore and Buenos Aires (great circle distance, 9880 miles)

But no, Chandler waxed eloquent on mapping, in the process demonstrating his unfamiliarity with the art in his introduction "Maps are planar projections of the curved surface of the Earth. This distorts distance, direction, shape, area and scale represented on the map. Maps of relatively small areas of the Earth can preserve greater accuracy of these attributes than maps covering larger areas due to the reduced distortion caused by the curvature of the Earth. Another consideration is scale..." Dude, how many times are you gonna say "scale"? Besides which, the whole reason for map projections is to make the most accurate map of an area! And just where did you come up with the ridiculous notion that

"...maps of large areas will often include differing scales for different areas of the map..."?

Utter bull! But anyway... Chandler's method is to tell people to use a piece of string and

"Align the string along the route to be taken. Follow any bends and curves in the road or trail..."

Umm, yeah: string... that oughta do the trick. And, of course, Chandler explains how to convert your string length into real-world distances. Probably, what we found most hilarious is this "tip," which warns his readers to "Keep in mind significant figures" (we think he means "significant digits"). For some reason the idiot thinks people can only measure complete centimeters (what a cheap-o ruler!), so he "warns" of rounding errors by saying,

"[in my example] the 110 kilometers can have only two significant figures and therefore represents a distance between 105 kilometers and 114 kilometers"

...which, quite frankly, is a lot less important than how much that hunk of string stretches as you try to measure it. That's not to mention any distortion caused by the projection...

All that instead of telling his readers to "use google maps" or "use gmap-pedometer." But, as you can be certain, Chandler picked up his ten- or fifteen-dollar stipend for "all his work." Well, he's also getting something else – an award about eight years in the waiting (sort of like the Nobel Prize for freelance bullshit): a bright, shiny Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ now "Leaf Group"
² The new owner of Trails.com deleted this content, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   trails.com/how_5685_calculate-travel-distances-between-cities.html

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