and here's a map in addition to showing the globe has plotted circles on the map to show the relative distortion at different latitudes. as you can see here, as you go south and north, the distortion increases. and it's a bit subtle, but the distortion going from circle one to two is much less than going from two to three.
car hire dublin, so there's not equal distortion going from the equator, north. but it does it's best as close to the equator as it can, to preserve area. and once you get far, far north. the mercator projection is much more lenient in its distortions.
one thing of note is that the mercator projection actually preserves area across a latitude line. so even if you are very north, going across the same latitude line, all the circles are equally as distorted. if you've ever wondered why alaska looks about as big as the entire united states, and greenland looks bigger than africa, it's simply because the mercator projection vastly distorts countries or area so far north and south of the equator, and is often one of the most ubiquitous map projections you see out there, regardless of this distortion effect.
but for our purposes, we're interested in countries in the middle region.
one, because they're the participating countries in the world cup and most frequently participating and two, the locations near the center of the map are the ones where the world cup's actually been held. so let's return to our code and start drawing.
