Maps!

If I ever have the opportunity to really, truly warp the mind of a young person, my big plan is to do so by only ever showing him or her maps that look like this (or derivations thereof):


This map, originally produced by the SASI group, shows all the countries of the world in actual land-area proportion to eachother. As we map geeks know, most maps are some derivation or another of trying to project a spherical-ish surface (the globe) on to a flat page or screen. Which leads to lots of distortion, getting worse and worse as you move away from the equator. And, since most of the developed world lies signinficantly north (or south, hi New Zealand!) of the equator, these projections could give us developed-world-ers an inflated sense of our importance (at least geographically).*

I've flipped the map upside-down because, from the perspective of the universe, what is up? The only reason we draw north as "up" is because the first folks to figure out this whole map-drawing-printing-and-distributing thing drew themselves living on the top of the planet. Does it matter? Not really. Not climatologically. In fact, looking at the map this way reminds me of why it's so much colder in Siberia than it is in South Africa.

So, would a kid raised on this map freak out when he got to the first grade and saw his first north-up interrupted sinusoidal projection? Maybe. But that's what independent parent cooperative schools are for, right? So no kid ever gets called a freak because they know what Lambert conformal conic means.

* I should note here that maps like this are NOT good for navigation. That's a whole other thing. Really any projected map isn't very good for navigation over long distances.