Mercator Tiles
To help myself understand how the area of Web Mercator tiles varies across the globe, I extended my map visualization. I find it a helpful reminder of how, despite having equivalent sizes on the mercator map, the tiles are actually far from equally sized.
This has several implications in the realm of analytics. Web Mercator’s tiling scheme covers the majority of the globe in regular, power of 2 square tiles. It’s fantastically practical. It’s very tempting simply tile a bunch of data into WebMercator and then do analytics on it. If you do this, important not to forget that you’re failing to preserve area.