"How do maps lie to their viewers?

"

Maps are created from data, and data is collected by humans. If we get the data wrong,
for example, the elevation of a mountain or the precise bend of a river—then our map will be
inaccurate. Maps lie in many other ways, too: with symbols, through generalizations, because of
scale, by exclusion.

Firstly, say If you want to turn this globe into a flat map, You are going to have to cut it
open. To get this to look anything like a rectangle. You would have to cut it in places. You
would have to stretch it so that the countries look all wonky and even still, it's almost impossible
to get it to lie flat and that right there is the eternal dilemma of map makers: The surface of a
sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion. This guy proved that
with math a long time ago. Since around the 1500s, mathematicians have set about creating
algorithms that would translate the globe into something flat. To do this, they use a process
called projection. Popular rectangular maps use cylindrical projections. Every one of these
projections comes with trade-offs in shape, distance, direction and land area. The Earth is not
flat, no matter what you might see people saying on Twitter. It turns out that it’s pretty tricky to
make the world flat. For example, If you draw a map of Earth on a flat sheet of paper, you’re
going to end up making some parts bigger, or smaller, or shaped wrong. It’s like trying to flatten
an orange peel. You just can’t do it. So when you create a map, or even when you decide which
map you want to use, you have to make a choice: which aspects of the world do you want to
distort? We have lots of different options, depending on what you want to do with your map. The
type of map called the Mercator projection, for example, is famous because all its shapes are
accurate. It’s made by cutting the globe into wedges along the meridians, the lines that run
between the North and South Poles. Then you flatten out those wedges. But once they’re
flattened, the tips of the wedges are no longer touching, and you’re left with gaps in your map.
So to fix this problem, so you have to stretch the tips of the wedges horizontally. But if you’ve
ever tried to stretch a photo in only one direction, you know that that seriously messes with the
way things are shaped. To compensate, you have to stretch the tips of the wedges vertically, too.
If you do it just right, then the map will have something called Constant True Direction. That
means that if you draw a straight line between any two points on a Mercator map, it’ll give the
same direction as a compass would in real life — a feature that’s super useful for navigators.
This is why the Mercator projection’s original purpose was to help navigators figure out where
they were going.

Secondly, certain map projections can be either misleading or very helpful depending on
what you are using them for. Here’s an example. This map is called the Mercator projection. It’s
the projection Google Maps uses. Mercator projection is popular for a couple of reasons. It
generally preserves the shape of the countries. Brazil on the globe has the same shape as Brazil
on the Mercator projection. But the real purpose of the Mercator projection was navigation it
preserves direction, which is a big deal if you are trying to navigate the ocean with only a
compass. It was designed so that a line drawn between two points on the map would provide the
exact angle to follow on a compass to travel between those points. We go back into a globe, we
can see that this line is not the shortest route. It provides a simple, reliable way to navigate across
oceans.

Thirdly, Mercator fails in its representation of the size. The size of Africa as compared to
Greenland. On the Mercator map, they look about the same size. But look at a globe for
Greenland’s true size, and you’ll see it’s way smaller than Africa. By a factor of 1/4. If we put
some dot that is all the same size on a globe, then we projected as a Mercator map. Most web
mapping tools like Google maps still use the Mercator. According to Google, this is because the
Mercator’s ability to preserve shape and angles makes close-up views of cities more accurate a
90 degree left turn on the map is a 90 degree left turn on the street you’re driving down. But
when trying to display something on a world map, cartographers rarely use the Mercator.

In conclusion, the best way to see what the earth looks like is to look at a globe. But as
long we use flat maps, we will deal with the tradeoffs of predictions, there is no perfect world
map.