As I gazed at the map of America hanging in my office I wondered what went into the making of a map. Cartography is a science. Remember you have to take into account that the world is curved and then put it down on a flat surface. In my mind there should be some distortion involved. I took out my atlas and looked at a map of Europe. When you look at the landmass ranging from France all the way across Europe, across Russia to the furthest Siberian coast…well thats a long piece of land. There must be some distortion involved in putting this down in two dimensions. I then tried to compare how France, Greece and Germany compared with an individual map of France, a map of Greece, and a map of Germany. To my eyes there appeared to be little difference! I know that map making in the old days use to be done by hand. If you compare some old maps with modern ones you can see quite a difference. I find the science and skill of cartography quite remarkable.
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