@XKCD XKCD #2911 Explained: When talking about maps of the world, it's common to discuss the ways that it distorts the land areas that are depicted (all flat maps suffer from some kind of distortion, because the surface of a sphere cannot be flattened without stretching parts and possibly cutting it into pieces). This normally refers to the way that the shapes change or the relative sizes of different land areas. For example, the ...