The world is not flat, it's a tetrahedron!

Various map projections try to approximate a sphere into a flat plane - Mercator etc, with varying amounts of distortion.  But ultimately, the flat plane is a poor substitute for the real thing.

Mollweide Projection from Wikipedia by Strebe

The AuthaGraph projection, invented by Hajime Narukawa in 1999 gets around this by essentially approximating a sphere to a regular tetrahedron and then unfolding it into a rectangular plane.

AuthaGraph map from Alexcious

Other similar projections such as by Buckminster Fuller and B.J.S. Cahill have done this before but they do not produce a nice rectangular map, without holes or 'Here there be dragons' areas of imaginary sea.

Cahill butterfly projection by Strebe

My lovely wife bought me an AuthaGraph map for the wall from Geo-grafia a while back.  The temptation was too great though, and I had to turn it into a tetrahedron, so now it has to hang from the ceiling.