Nice article, I, too, hadn't noticed the change in scale just by panning around.

The Google LatLong blog (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/) is packed with information related to Google Maps, and the maps API Google Group also is.

There's lots of talk about the Mercator projection on the list, tradeoffs, pros, cons, etc. So there really was no need to read the obfuscated code. Also, I'm not sure if "ease of implementation" was really what had them choose this projection, so it wouldn't hurt to dig around a little bit more before saying stuff like that, I think.

Still, pretty good stuff for people that want to know a bit more about how Google Maps work.