NavList:

Mercator projection has exactly 3 drawbacks:

1. You cannot make a Mercator map of a neighborhood of a pole.

2. As a result, you cannot make a Mercator map of the whole globe. If you try to map most of it, most of the map will be occupied by Antarctic, Canada's nothern islands and Russia.

3. The straight line between two very remote points on Mercator map is not the shortest path.

There is no remedy for 1: if you plan to sail to the North pole, you have to use a map in some other projection.

For 2, who needs a map of the whole globe? Or a map of all Americas? Perhaps elementary school children, in some of their geography lessons. I agree that some other map should be shown to them when teaching world geography and sizes of various countries. (I was educated in Soviet Union. For world geography lessons we had  a map made in some other projection, which showed the areas more correctly. The map was haning on the wall of the classroom. As a child, I never thought that Greenland has the size of Africa). But I agree that sometimes (not frequently) a Merator map was abused to show exaggerrated size of Soviet union:-)

And finally to solve  propblem in 3 without a computer, you better use a globe and a rope instead of a  wall map: no wall map of the world will solve this problem for all destinations. Globes are also useful in elementary school education.

Alex.