Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail
Template:Infobox The West Wing episode "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" is the 38th episode of The West Wing.
The title is a lyric from the Don Henley song "New York Minute", from the album "The End of the Innocence". The song is featured in the episode. Template:Spoiler
Plot
The staff again participates in "Big Block of Cheese Day". Toby is assigned to speak with a group of obnoxious young people protesting the WTO; a friend of Donna's asks Sam to consider a pardon request for an alleged Cold War spy. Sam, meanwhile, comes to grip with the revelation of his father's infidelity.
Toby Ziegler meets with the fictional group "World Policies Studies," which objects to the World Trade Organization, and C.J. Cregg meets with "The Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", which would like legislation to support a specific map projection, namely the "Peters projection" which corrects the exaggerated representation of North America and Western Europe found in the standard Mercator projection.
Opposing the WTO
While World Policies Studies does not exist, there are many individuals and organizations which object to the World Trade Organization (WTO), such as Pat Buchanan[1], Harry Browne[2], and the anti-globalization movement.
Map projections
While the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality does not exist, there is a great deal of controversy over the use of particular world maps. A map projection is any method used in cartography (mapmaking) to represent the three-dimensional curved surface of the earth on a flat plane (paper or digital map). This process involves selecting of a model for the shape of the earth and transform geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) to plane coordinates (eastings and northings or x,y).
Because it is not possible for a flat map to accurately represent the earth with the same scale throughout the entire map surface, the cartographer decides to make the scale depend on location but not direction, on latitude and direction, or on a combination of the two.
One of the more commonly used map projections, particularly in education, is the Mercator projection, which was developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, and is a conformal map. The Mercator projection exaggerates the size of areas far from the equator. Opponents often point out that Greenland is represented as being roughly as large as Africa, when in fact Africa's area is approximately 13 times that of Greenland.
The equal-area Peters World Map or Gall-Peters projection has been proposed as an alternative.
One obvious distortion of the Gall-Peters projection is that it stretches Africa, which in reality is about as wide east-west as it is long north-south, but in this projection appears to be almost twice as long as it is wide.
According to fansite The West Wing Episode Guide[3], an article published by Knight Ridder Newspapers quoted that sales for Peters maps from ODT Inc. had been about three per day before the show aired, but swelled to 120 orders in the five days following the episode.
References
- ^ The West Wing Episode Guide — Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail