Okay, so once again, I get why people prefer this one. It’s got that fancy north is up south is down that people are going to need to think about on a regular basis to understand how literally anything in the world works.
You NEED to see this to understand where you are based on the cardinal directions. That is a basic skill everyone should have. Plus it fits very nicely in our dumb human japan= east america= west vernacular we have all decided to use for arbitrary reasons. But here’s the thing. Geography goes past just knowing how places line up with cardinal directions. A big part of geography is knowing how places are shaped and their size relations. So we absolutely should not just show kids the Mercator projection.
For reference , the above map is equally as warped and incorrect as the map below. (the significantly less popular transverse mercator. This warps the equator as much as the other one warps the poles and instead makes the poles the most accurate)
Look at South America! That’s not even a little bit close to how it’s actually shaped.We allow the mercator projection to be as wrong as it is and still be in popular use because it lines up with how human brains work, and nobody lives in the north and south poles anyway. None of the flat projections are great for true understanding of scale because the earth isn’t flat, but I think the orange peel model is a lot easier to explain to a child than the Dymaxion triangle nonsense
try explaining this to a toddler! My dumb monkey brain says map= rectangle. and north= up. Where do you even start with this? which direction does the sun travel on this? It’s informative but also kind of a mess.
octoberspirit 