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Let me start off by saying, the following maps are just JOKES. I'm a very proud American. But I will be the first to admit that my views of the rest of the world are a bit, well to be honest I have never been to any other country before (well Canada once, but that doesn't count.) Haha, C'mon, i'm kidding!! Anyway, don't take the following to seriously.

"Video: A new way to unfold the Earth's surface produces a new kind of map A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines. See a gallery of the new maps "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. "The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes. Warping reality The mathematical impossibility of flattening the surface of a sphere has long troubled mapmakers. "Consider peeling an orange and trying to flatten it out," says van Wijk. "The surface has to distort or crack." Some solutions distort the size of the continents while roughly preserving their shape - the familiar Mercator projection, for instance, makes Europe and North America disproportionately large compared with Africa. Others, like the Peters projection, keep landmasses at the correct relative sizes, at the expense of warping their shapes. An ideal map would combine the best properties of both, but that is only possible by inserting gaps into the Earth's surface, resulting in a map with confusing interruptions. Van Wijk's method makes it possible to direct those cuts in a way that minimises such confusion. Maps of significance When generating a map he assigns a "weighting" to each edge on the polyhedron to signal its importance, influencing the pl

"Let's Go Grocery Shopping at a Chinese Wal-Mart! 1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Loading ... 欢迎光临沃尔码! With the rising popularity of Coffee, Western music, Buicks, and dozens of Wal-Marts opening around China, America just might be catching up in the culture war. Now the land of the Dragon can enjoy marginal quality products at awesome prices too! Fortunately, the products they sell are just slightly different than the ones we get over here. Like tasty, tasty alligator: tn3"

Movies in 3-D are becoming such big moneymakers that Hollywood studios are cramming them into the nation's theaters, even though there aren't enough screens available to give each film its fullest possible run. That will mean an unprecedented number of 3-D movies for film fans to choose from this spring, and smaller profits for Hollywood studios than they might otherwise get with fewer 3-D competitors.