I had to check today's date when I read this article. I had no idea that the map image of the world and the relative sizes of its continents, that I have been carrying in my head my entire life, was so inaccurate!
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/19/boston-public-schools-world-map-mercator-peters-projection 
Comments
Serious geographers in the west use it. The rest of us seem to prefer Mercator's projection. Can't think why!
You can drag and drop countries around the map to compare their true relative sizes.
2 maps of Antarctica supposedly drawn (quite accurately), prior to Antarctica being discovered
Look them up. Really interesting
Surely all you need to do is look at a globe.
On the album cover, the map is projected on to a naked female, which works for me.
https://goo.gl/images/DX7Txi
There are dozens of projections and it is lazy to consider one as more accurate than other because strictly speaking all of the accepted projections are accurate but in a different way. The Mercator is more useful than the Peters for navigation, for example. Peters is the gateway map to understanding why projections differ but is by no means the best projection we have. Classrooms ought to have a globe, not a flat map. Mercator is a decent map for representing where countries are in relation to each other and smaller countries are less likely to be squished together. Perhaps teachers should be encouraged to teach students about projections and show them side by side and discuss the pros and cons of each one, or even extrapolate it into a discussion on whether you can believe everything you see, or whether two different things can both be accurate. There is a lot of opportunity for lateral thinking or critical thought and it would be a shame if schools switched from just using one map to another without a discussion on why.
I still use a pre 1920 atlas at work, it has all the important bits including the steamer routes.
Classic last line!
Let me just say, on behalf of America, if you want to be at the center of the map, then bloody well go out and get YOUR fast food restaurants, banks, and oil companies to conquer most of the known world!
And then to think that the entire population of some of these vast countries would fit into London, or Tokyo, or Mexico City, and you start to realise just how fucking mental we as a species are
I'd always heard it said Africa in reality was far bigger than shown on the maps but i'd never seen it until now either, amazing really.
My mistake - Oronteus Finaeus & Piri Reis maps were polar ice cap free maps of Antarctica