A moment to discuss GIS and how it is used...
How does this map distort the data?

“Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential.” Mark Monmonier, 1991

All maps distort the world in some ways: they make it look flat and tiny, and they take away almost all of the stuff that you see when you look at the real world. Similarly, all representations of data (graphs, tables, charts) distort the things they represent, in order to make it easy to see some mathematical relationship. This page describes some of the decisions we made for displaying data in the maps, to help you understand the distortions we chose, and use the data appropriately.