He had the backing of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who said his ministry was going to stop using the Mercator map.

Hmm, use it for what, exactly? In the present, nobody is using these maps for navigation, and hopefully not for any serious geography study beyond say the history of cartography... so I guess mostly lower-level education purposes? That's important, the way we teach children to think about the world certainly matters.

"Changing the map obviously doesn't change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth," he said.

The pedantic part of me wants to point out that every projection of a 3D object onto a 2D surface requires distortion, especially in a case like this where the entire surface area of the object is shown on a single unbroken plane. At some level, describing one projection as better than another is akin to saying that one way of drawing a cube on a sheet of paper is better than another. More important than picking a winner is having the discussion about the limitations of all forms of projection and how they affect our perceptions, in all subject areas.

If there is a real benefit to making a change like this, it's in provoking those discussions.

Besides, we all know the Waterman Butterfly is superior: