Common errors contain information by their being common, and in this case I think it's pretty cool information. Africa is rendered grossly smaller than life in

Common errors contain information by their being common, and in this case I think it's pretty cool information. Africa is rendered grossly smaller than life in our minds due to a confluence of two bugs: 1) the usual 2D mapping techniques distort scale (e.g., see google maps), and 2) our internal representation of geo-size seems to implement a spatial compression on places we have less information about.