map wars

This is one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing.  CJ has a meeting with cartographers who want to change the map we use to be a map that more accurately shows the size of land masses. It will BLOW.YOUR.MIND!

By all accounts, the Gall-Peterson map projection and the traditional Mercator both distort parts of the globe (Gall-Peters distorts angles, but preserves land mass size; Mercator distorts land mass size, but preserves angles). What's their problem? Why distort anything at all? Well, of course it is difficult to make something round flat with out any negative affects.  Read more about it (and other mind blowing map projections) here.

Gall-Peters Map