👀 The world is just a cat playing with Australia

#127 | Size does matter

Hello hello,

You probably know that all maps are kinda incorrect. Representing a mostly spherical planet as a two-dimensional map is impossible without distorting something – shape, direction, size. If you’re a flat-earther, naturally, you won’t have this problem, so you can just skip this Thing altogether.

The Mercator projection we study in school preserves the shapes of countries and their direction, but it doesn’t do such a good job with size. Africa is about 14 times as large as Greenland and can fit the US, China, India and a bunch of other countries.

But you wouldn’t think it looking at a Mercator map. Go here to see how the size of your country actually compares to others.

There are other projections, of course, which do a better job of maintaining the integrity of country sizes but at the cost of shape or direction. Not that it matters, because all said and done, these are the only maps you really need.

Ria