What was wrong with the OLD Zealand?
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Pᴇʀʜᴀᴘs. Iᴛ ɪs ʜᴀʀᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴋᴇᴇᴘ ᴛʀᴀᴄᴋ. Hᴏɴᴇsᴛʟʏ, I ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ sᴇᴇ ᴡʜᴀᴛ’s ᴛʜᴇ ғᴜss ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ Nᴇᴀʀ-Mᴇ ᴇxᴘᴇʀɪᴇɴᴄᴇs. Tʜᴇʏ ᴀʀᴇ ᴘʀᴇᴛᴛʏ ᴅᴜʟʟ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴍʏ ᴘᴇʀsᴘᴇᴄᴛɪᴠᴇ.
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Also, the idea that this map is distortion-free is inaccurate. Africa is nearly as wide as it is high, but not on the Peters projection.
The innovation and advantage of Mercator charts are rhumb-line travel, which is a very useful feature for medium distance navigation. There are great circle charts, but they really are useful only for navigation. I get what they are maybe trying to say about colonialism, but I think it is only accurate in the sense that Mercator charts were a critical development in worldwide navigation. They still are. There is a real advantage to being able to draw a line on a map between two places, measuring the angle, then head off in the measured direction with a reasonable expectation of arriving at the chosen destination.
I’d hope that people aren’t using a poster map of the world for navigation purposes, whatever the projection.
There is that guy in the UK who keeps trying to use road maps and needs rescuing by the RNLI, though.
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Use the last one in an SF movie and lots of people won’t recognize it as Earth. 
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Only the Australians would recognize it
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There is no way to make a distortion-free map of a three-dimensional sphere on a two-dimensional surface. You can only choose the manner of the distortion.
That’s why the best solution is usually to just pound the planet flat.
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I trust you are familiar with
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@M_M inquiring minds want to know if Australia puts their maps “upside down”? (I’ve been meaning to ask anyway. )
I think if Australia doesn’t but would still get it, maybe South America would too. This could cause a problem for wide release of our movie idea about stumbling upon a lost Earth and not recognizing it because it’s “upside down.”
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You would be shocked at what some people navigate by. In the Gulf of Mexico, there are quite a few people with no navigation skills whatever. They have a copy of the oil lease chart under plexiglass, and navigate by just approaching the nearest rig, and matching the posted numbers with the lease chart. Then, they just vaguely steer in the direction of the destination lease number. Eventually, they get to the right place, but never consider wind or current, or even magnetic compass correction.
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Only if we want to scribble on the back of them. 
Nah, the ones I’ve seen are all “North to the top of the page”.
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I think you’re on to something. We should pitch this to Hollywood. Astronauts spend years in radio silence, think they’ve gone through a wormhole, and arrive at this strange bizarro Earth planet where Donald Trump is president and the How Bow Dah girl has a T.V. show. At the end of the movie one of them realizes they just have the map upside down and it was their Earth all along.
Then this happens:
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You’ve turned my over-serious summer SF blockbuster into a comedy roast of SF movies. 
I tentatively love it. 
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When did I say that any of that was funny? 
Donald Trump IS the president and the How Bow Dah girl IS getting a TV show.
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The timing plus the classic “damn you all to hell”? 
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The Mercator Projection was not “designed to emphasize colonial trade routes.” It was designed to make it possible to navigate using a map when the only tools you have available are a compass, protractor, and straight edge. The projection conserves angles, making lines of constant course into straight lines that intersect with lines of longitude at constant angles. Let’s see you do that with this projection.
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Yes of course, this one comes close
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Oh dear.
Unfortunately, we are getting the usual level of scientific literacy from the Grauniad here.
And as happens too often, the article has been eviscerated in the comments, both here and on the original.
To me, the really surprising thing is that the original article unironically cited that clip from The West Wing. In context, the show wasn’t promoting the message of “Cartographers for social equality” at all. They were depicted as an eccentric fringe group with bad arguments, who only got an audience in the white house due to Leo’s “Big block of cheese day” policy.
FWIW I recently saw a presentation about the Authagraph map projection by its inventor. He showed animations of how it is really a cool tool for showing continental drift, explorer’s routes around the world, and other things. He (Prof. Narukawa) also had provided printed maps you can pop out and fit together with tabs, so that you get a tetrahedron. It’s not perfect since there are some points where I was not sure which direction to draw to get the shortest route e.g. from eastern tip of South America to Africa, and if you flatten it out it looks weird, but it is interesting and tries to maintain shape and area. Also you can make triangular maps centered anywhere on the globe, which is cool.
http://www.authagraph.com/top/?lang=en
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