There’s an interesting post on the nature of maps over at Strange Maps today.  I remember when some former colleagues and I decided to buy a map of the world to display on our office wall, back in the days where I worked somewhere where people had conversations, and outside interests, and we had a long discussion about what sort of a map we wanted, and someone (probably, I have to say, me) said that we should choose one which reflected a “real” view of the world, rather than one which was devised for the advancement of imperial interests (see the Peters Projection versus Mercator debate for more on this).  Now it seems that even that is an over-simplified view.