Why You Should Never Trust a Map

In middle and high school, we learn that flat maps are distorted projections of a nearly spherical planet. They're always wrong. The popular Mercator map gets especially bad in the polar regions. Still, even with this knowledge, bad impressions form in our minds about the relative size of countries and continents. For example, though Greenland appears to be huge in a Mercator map, it's very small compared to the equatorial-centered continent of Africa.

(Video Link)

This BuzzFeed video illustrates some of the common misconceptions and shows how big parts of the world really are.

-via The Presurfer

Was the video part good? I missed it. I was up dancing! That's my jam!

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The video is should't say the map is a lie or wrong, that's not true, it should explain how a projection works, so people can really know what are they looking at instead of go around saying maps are not accurate... Mercator projection was originally made for sailing so it preserves angles, you can and should trust it if you know how to read it... if you want the map for something else i.e. comparing sizes, you should simple use other projection...

Schools should really take a look into this matter, at least show graphically how a projection is done, it's no so hard and it should avoid things like that video that will make a lot of people go trough life saying maps are not useful...

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