Cartographic Projection
every map is wrong, and by exactly how much
Concept

Selection — where it appears

Deciding which features a map keeps and which it drops, as against how the ones it keeps are drawn. On a legibility limit it is a threshold on size, so the surviving population is the upper tail of the original rather than a sample of it.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Töpfer's square root is one line of a family. The fraction of features surviving to a smaller scale, for four stated populations whose size distributions differ only in their exponent. Every one is a straight line on these axes, and the slope of each is its own exponent: 0.3, 0.5, 0.8, 1.2. Töpfer's radical law is the line at 0.5 — the square root — and it is exact for that population and for no other. The law is not a rule of thumb with exceptions; it is a theorem with a hypothesis nobody states.

How many features a scale can carry

Töpfer's radical law is quoted everywhere as a rule of thumb. It is not one: it is a theorem about a size distribution with a Pareto exponent of exactly one half, exact to 1.8 per cent for that population and out by 99.4 per cent for a lognormal one.

applied · Generalise Three selection rules, and what each one keeps. Keeping one feature in ten from a stated population whose size distribution has a Pareto exponent of a half — the exponent Töpfer's law is a theorem about. Keeping the largest carries 99.99 per cent of the total size and inflates the median feature by a factor of 95. A random sample keeps the median to 1.068 and carries 5.0 per cent of the total. The two rules are right about different things and there is no rule that is right about both, because the total lives in the tail and the median does not.

Which features survive is not a sample

The rung below answers how many features a scale can carry and treats the population as a number. Which ones survive is a different question: keeping one feature in ten carries 99.99 per cent of the total length and inflates the median feature by a factor of 95, and the shape of the size distribution survives both exactly.

applied · Generalise

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

GeneralisationLegibilitySimplificationBiasClosed formExponentFeature populationLognormalPareto exponentPower lawQuadratic lawRadical law

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