>From your link the contiguous US would appear to be represented at ~ 1.7 times larger scale than the continent of Africa, on average. Look at this chart in pa

>From your link the contiguous US would appear to be represented at ~ 1.7 times larger scale than the continent of Africa, on average. Look at this chart in particular: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ilC.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ilC.png 1.7 larger is nowhere to be found. The very north of continental US compared to equator is below 1.5. If you consider that Africa extends north and south of equator and US south of 45th, the magnification is much smaller. Moreover consider that we're comparing areas instead of lengths, so visually the extent of magnification is even less apparent. You keep repeating the word "massive distortion", but it simply doesn't apply to the latitudes of continental US. This is very easy to check if you have a globe and a Mercator map. And yet the myth persists... >People are trying to discourage it because it is a distortion that is only really of use to people navigating the sea in boats using paper charts. That is patently false. Mercator has many very useful properties, such as local conformality which is why Google Maps and other maps providers use it. It is, in fact, the only cylindrical map projection with local conformality. Which is very useful for generating map tiles.