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If you've spent time hanging around with students, it's quite likely that you have had someone explain to you why the Mercator projection, which is the one seen in most standard world maps, is horrendously distorted and inflates the importance of wealthy northern European countries, Russia, Canada etc. over their less influential equatorial counterparts in Africa and South/Central America. This is true, at least to the extent that one should never use a Mercator map to compare areas of countries, or relative importance (if that's what you like to do). The problems with the standard map projection arise from the issue of translating a spherical surface to a flat one - you simply can't preserve shape, size and direction when doing this. An example: it's possible to draw a triangle on a sphere in which every angle is 90 degrees, by drawing directly between the very top, left and front of the sphere. Try drawing that on a flat piece of paper. Obviously, the best rep