this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Dymaxion map (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 5 months ago by Plum to c/wikipedia
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The Dymaxion is great, but personally I'm partial to the Waterman Butterfly.

A pretty butterfly.

Also, obligatory XKCD:

What's that? You think I don't like the Peters map because I'm uncomfortable with having my cultural assumptions challenged? Are you sure you're not ... ::puts on sunglasses:: ... projecting?

[–] Plum 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yours is beautiful and eyecatching, but I love an intact and correctly scaled Antarctica. It's hard to find.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Yeah, the version in the comic has it as a separate piece under the butterfly instead of the tips of the wings, but it's not the same.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that's way less confusing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

To be fair the Dymaxion is less confusing if you add “fold here” lines... but then you end up with (an approximation of) a globe.

The same criticism is applicable to the Waterman, though; both are more unfolded globes than proper maps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah I know, it's just really confusing to look at.

But that's probably just due to the fact that the north pole is at the top and America is in the centre and not GMT/Europe

[–] ripcord 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why doesn't Antarctica get any respect on your map

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Because not enough people live there, I suppose.

(If you look at the version in the comic, though, it's got Antarctica as a separate piece under the butterfly instead of split on the wingtips, so that's something, I suppose, even if it's not the same as a continuous map...)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Buckminster Fuller was obsessed with the word "dymaxion". It's like "X" with Musk.

[–] MCHEVA4EVA 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah well you can have a nice little dymaxion nap in your dymaxion house after driving home from your dymaxion job in your dymaxion car.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

For reference:

Dymaxion house:

Shiny.

Cozy.

Dymaxion car:

Not quite Gernsback Continuum material, but close enough.

Volkswagen's van was more iconic, I'm afraid.

[–] MCHEVA4EVA 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The car - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car

The dymaxion nap is a reference to polyphasic sleep which Fuller did for a while. To the best of my knowledge there is no dymaxion job.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's a portmanteau of DYnamic MAXimum tensION. All the things he labeled with the term were supposed to follow a unifying design principle of maximum performance for minimal energy input, based on carefully optimized interplay of internal forces. In the case of the map, this manifested in the minimizing geographic distortion.

There is actually a second Dymaxion projection which preserves contiguity of water rather than land

[–] GraniteM 6 points 5 months ago

I love the Dymaxion map and I was also the kid in high school chemistry class who, when we covered the allotropic forms of carbon, insisted that we also had to talk about buckminsterfullerene.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

TIHI

also see xkcd