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Distortion shares a root with torsion, twisting.

Scaling something evenly is not distortion, nor is placing it upside down, or otherwise changing its orientation.

There is no sense or perspective in which the orientation of a globe can be said to distort the shape of its features.

I honestly thought I must have missed something big until I got to your comment... It seemed painfully incongruous in my mind to equate the demonstrably geometric ‘distortion’ artifacts directly resulting from a lower dimensional representation of a sphere ... to the mathematically unrelated notion of orienting the observational frame of reference. 2D maps literally distort and misrepresent the spatial arrangement of our planet’s surface in a metaphysical sense. Globes do not suffer from this distortion of space in their spherical approximate representation of the planet. The latter seems to be the the most salient point of the thread given whether you use an actual globe or a virtual one such a Google Earth... both of which are ubiquitously common and available ... it seems practically irrelevant (if nevertheless interesting) to consider the distortion of a 2D map as an actual “problem”. And whether or not one agrees with that, it’s wholly unrelated to whether you choose to hold your 2D map or 3D globe upside and any other orientation relative to your observational frame of reference—the former remains geometrically distorted in an egregious manner and the latter not.

I believe the other commenter is referring to a distortion of mental perspective, not geometry, and honestly I’m buying it. It’s so strange to look at a globe upside down, even though there’s nothing unnatural about it.

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