THe whole argument about the negative affects of widespread use of Mercator projection for world maps has always struck me as way overblown. It's true, to be

THe whole argument about the negative affects of widespread use of Mercator projection for world maps has always struck me as way overblown. It's true, to be sure, that most Americans (which I use as an example. because I know them), have a distorted notion of the size of Africa, and to a lesser extent, South America, but in my experience, they equally underestimate the size of Russian and China. I think it has more to do with their certainty that the US is "really big and important" as countries go, than with mental burn-in of a warped geography from grade-school maps.