Originally Posted by
Taunton Blue Genie
All map projections (and there are many) are distortions. Try and imagine representing a football as a flat two-dimensional object.
Not easy, is it? The Mercator projection, named after a Flemish cartographer, effectively shows the globe as a flattened out cylinder with the most northern and southern regions cropped because the further away from the equator the more stretching is involved - and the north and south poles, mere points on the globe, would be shown as wide as the equator. The projection is useful in several ways, including the north/up v south/down concepts but, in reality, there is no up and down apart from in our imagination. And as for north being at the top of maps, it's merely convention and not universal - and the word 'orientation' came from the days when The Holy Land/The East was at the top of maps and when North was effectively shown on the left-hand side. Many things in mapping are human constructs and but it's the maths that count.