[ProtectOurFreedom]

People don’t know about the difficulty of projecting spherical surfaces onto 2D planes? Not surprising. I guess classrooms don’t have globes in them anymore.

[Unassuaged]

Sure they do, it is all a matter of what portion is distorted and the incorrect impressions left by flat maps commonly in use today and during our schooling.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

People don’t know about the difficulty of projecting spherical surfaces onto 2D planes?

My 3rd grade teacher back in the day told us to imagine that the globe in the classroom was a basketball, then to imagine slicing the basketball on one side, and stretching the top and bottom of the resulting skin to make a rectangle. Easy enough to see how the sections at the top and bottom would become distorted and appear far larger than they were.

But I guess most kids are too busy with video games to know what basketballs are.

[pingman]

Mercator projection.

[Bubba_Leroy]

I have a 20-inch standing floor globe in my office that I bought when my oldest child was 5. We kept it in our living room until they all went off to college.

It shows the Soviet Union, so it probably is not up to date. Hopefully, it is no like my old silk ties that come back into fashion after several years.

[glennaro]

Excellent point to the (deliberate) misuse of the term “misrepresentation” (of scale) in the “news” report.