mercator

"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it." -Steven Wright So just because the Ask Ethan series is becoming way more popular than I can handle -- I've got more than 200 questions that I'm sitting on by now -- doesn't mean you should stop sending your questions! There are some really good ones, and today's comes from Robert Plotner, who asks: When maps of the CMB are depicted, they are shown as a flattened ovoid. How does this correlate to our view of the sky which is a sphere? For example, a global map of the Earth is either distorted to show it in two dimensions…