Did you know? Dymaxion Map (#3)

Say hello to the Dymaxion Map (also known as the Fuller Map).

Have you ever looked at a map and thought Greenland was huge?  Possibly even bigger than the entire United States?

If you grew up with a map like this, then you probably did.  And yet, in reality, the contiguous 48 states are about 3.7 times the size of Greenland.  So why is it shown so large here?

The answer to that is because the globe isn’t flat, and in order to make the map square, quite a bit of stretching was done to the top and bottom of the map.

That’s where the Dymaxion Map is particularly useful.  Unlike a globe, where you can’t see everything at once, the Dymaxion Map is a flat, two-dimensional map with effectively zero stretching anywhere.  All landmasses are exactly to scale, and every landmass is whole; the edges only cut through water.

Sure, it appears difficult to tell how far apart certain places are just by looking at the map, but that’s where it gets really interesting: The map folds into an icosahedron:

In fiction, the word “factoid” is often used by someone who is written to be smart and willing to flaunt it, and is often preceded by some sort of little-known bit of trivia.  “That’s an interesting factoid, isn’t it?”  When used in fiction, the term “factoid” refers to an obscure piece of knowledge.

However, in reality, factoids are things that resemble facts, without actually being facts — yes, that’s right.  Factoids are false.  “Factoid” is a composition of the root word “fact”, combined with the suffix “-oid”, which is of Greek origin, effectively translating as “-like”, so a factoid is fact-like.

Ever wondered why robots are called “androids”?  For the same reason!  The Greek root word is “andros”, meaning “man”, so “android” is something that is “man-like”, but is not actually a man.  In the same fashion, “aster” is the Greek word for “star”, so an “asteroid” is something that is star-like — asteroids are often visible at night, but do not produce light, they only reflect it.

In a standard year, there are exactly seven days that can be your birthday such that you do not have a half birthday: March 31st, May 31st, August 29th through 31st, October 31st, and December 31st.  August is the only one with more than one of these days, and actually has three.

During Leap Years, people born on August 29th will be able to celebrate their elusive true half-birthday.

For the record, I was born on August 30th, the only 30th in the above list.