The Mercator projection relates the aspects of a spherical Earth onto the surface of a cylinder. It’s the projection that shows Alaska as half the size of the continental US and Greenland the size of a continent.
I found this cool software that allows a mapmaker to move the distorted north pole around a bit. Alternate World Map Creator let us have a little fun. The above map puts the poles in the middle of the oceans, and we get just a minimum of distortion in southern Africa and the Aleutian Islands. Below is what we get if we put Rome on top.
16 November 2007 at 2:20 am
Now, when you put Rome at the top, you get MY place, New Zealand, stretched out right at the bottom. Kind of cool from my perspective ;-)