I know right??
It goes with the old joke about why girls aren’t so good with math? Because men have been telling them all their lives that this [hold up thumb and forefinger about four inches apart] is six inches . . .

And, I love the conceding head nod at “we unconsciously equate size with importance and power” (begininning at 3:00). :)

I think I remember the Mercator map from school. It’s considered “euro-centric” because the countries in the northern hemisphere appear bigger, right? As I recall, there are lots of ways to map the globe and they all have distortions of some kind… but, I’m a lousy 3-dimensional thinker, so I didn’t retain much of what I learned. :)

In 1974, a historian and cartographer named Dr. Arno Peters introduced a map which projected the world onto an equal and consistent grid, which made it possible to accurately compare the sizes of countries and visualize the true distance between any two points on the earth. For those who grew up with the Mercator map, the Peters projection map appears to be stretched vertically, and Africa suddenly looks huge.

A variety of social and religious groups fervently argue that since the Mercator map makes many countries appear smaller than they really are, people (especially children) reading them may infer that certain countries are innately more important than others. This rhetoric has often escalated to the point where the Mercator map is openly described as being “racist”. Many of these groups are working to address this perceived problem by lobbying schools around the world to adopt the Peters projection map in classrooms. This seemingly noble movement is not without controversy, however, since educators, well-aware of the Mercator map’s deficiencies, were already adopting maps based on other projections, some of which are even more accurate than Peters’s. Others argue that Arno Peters wasn’t even the first person to devise such a projection, since James Gall had come up with the same idea in 1855 (which is why some refer to it as the Gall-Peters projection).

http://everything2.com/title/Peters+Projection

My daughter asked me about why some people believe the world will come to an end in 2012. She had a bit of a hard time understanding how people can fall for these myths.