I find it very difficult to believe that majority of people haven't seen other than mercator projected maps. NatGeo notoriously has used a variety of projections over time. Another fairly notable non-mercator map appears in the UN logo. New York Times seems to use non-mercator maps.

Also imho saying that mercator projection is radically inaccurate is misleading, as it is actually very accurate for some things, which is the reason it's afaik used in navigation.

The Wikipedia article linked is actually very complete on the properties of each projection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

See the "Properties" column and description of each at the end. Mercator is marked as "Conformal", which means local angles are preserved. I believe that basically means if you are going 45°, and you draw a 45° line from your current location on a Mercator map, you will end up where that line goes. Which explains why it's so good for navigation.

Hah! This post immediately made me think of West Wing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM

I think the editor must have removed the prefix "Preschoolers" from the title.

I can't believe that most people here haven't see the Dymaxion Map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map