I totally get the mixed feelings about Facebook, but it's cool you found a space for learning! I also like Facebook for the opportunity to gain Facebook followers cheaply with this service. I had a similar revelation about maps – they can be deceiving! It's wild how our perspectives shift, right? Kudos to your unique Facebook journey!

Eschew FB.

It is of course mainly a problem with Mercator's projection, which is not the only map projection available, but is so useful that it becomes almost the standard. Any map is bound to cause some sort of distortion since it is not possible to unwrap a spherical surface and flatten it out without stretching it in some way.

It only needs a seconds thought to see that, since Mercator keeps the lines of latitude parallel, it is bound to distort the width of things towards the poles, since the poles are only single points, yet in Mercator they stretch all the way along both the top and bottom of the map, making a single point as wide as the planet.

While on curious things, did you also know that there are several north and south poles, not just one at each end ? At least two magnetic poles at each end, a geographic, which is the end of the earths axis, a traditional geographic, where the lines of longitude meet, an astronomic, which is where the geographic points at the sky, and which moves as the earths tilt changes, and a pole of inaccessibility which at the South is the furthest point from the coast, at least.