Since maps aren’t reality, but merely imitate reality, they are prone to all the slings and arrows of human error, ambition, greed and folly.

Recently, Donald Trump not only posted a map that showed the U.S. flag covering large parts of Canada, Greenland and Mexico, he renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Apple was the first to tug its forelock, saying “only Americans” would see Lake America; all others would see Lake Ontario.

You can call this craven, bullying and even unhinged. I prefer to call it “high school.” But the real Pinocchio Award for map-making goes to Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish cosmographer and cartographer who created the world map in 1569 based on a new projection that made it more useful to sailors. But any three-dimensional object portrayed in two dimensions is bound to contain some biases and distortions. For example, Mercator’s exaggerates the size of countries near the poles and downplays those near the equator.

Read on…