Beserker
Grey Hound
Because there is so much of it:
Immappancy—the fact that most people do not realise how much the ubiquitous Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of countries.
A sphere cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another.
Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas. You can read all the gory details on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection
Gerardus Mercator's projection, published in 1569, was immediately useful because it depicts a line of constant bearing as a straight line, which is handy for marine navigation. The drawback is that it distorts the shapes and areas of large land masses, and the distortion gets progressively worse as you get closer to the poles. (Africa looks about the same size as Greenland under the Mercator projection, for example, even though it is in fact 14 times bigger.) This was not a big problem from 16th-century sailors, of course, and the Mercator projection remains popular to this day.
What it really looks like:
Immappancy—the fact that most people do not realise how much the ubiquitous Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of countries.
A sphere cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another.
Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas. You can read all the gory details on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection
Gerardus Mercator's projection, published in 1569, was immediately useful because it depicts a line of constant bearing as a straight line, which is handy for marine navigation. The drawback is that it distorts the shapes and areas of large land masses, and the distortion gets progressively worse as you get closer to the poles. (Africa looks about the same size as Greenland under the Mercator projection, for example, even though it is in fact 14 times bigger.) This was not a big problem from 16th-century sailors, of course, and the Mercator projection remains popular to this day.
What it really looks like:
