I remember being told this in high school and being totally confused. My teacher told us that a standard map, or even a globe, is inaccurate. She explained why but I didn’t understand. Why is this?
In: Technology
The globe is *technically* inaccurate, because the earth is a slight ellipsoid rather than a sphere, and chances are the globe doesn’t take that into account, but the error is trivial for anything a regular globe is used for – also far far less than the inaccuracies of that result from measuring tolerances.
The flat maps are inaccurate as you cannot project a curved surface onto a flat one without losing integrity in some combination of size, shape, direction or distance, with the errors becoming more significant the bigger the area shown on the map. For anything in the range <50 miles square the errors are trivial outside of extremely high precision applications, and if you’re doing those you know all about this issue. There are a lot of different projection methods that each preserve some of these qualities better than others, basically you have to trade off the properties you don’t care about as much for those that you do.
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