Culture

摘要

There's a certain comfort in the way maps neatly package the world. But we all know the world isn't flat, separated into crayon-colored puzzle shapes, or centered around the USA. Cartographers have been waging a quiet war amongst themselves for decades, if not centuries, trying to determine the best way to represent our round, messy globe in two dimensions. Until the 1970s, the unquestioned practice was to map the world cylindrically-that is, with parallel lines of longitude but latitudes stretched in proportion to distance from the equator.