I hate people who blame the Mercator projection without properly learning about what is wrong with it.
This is not a Mercator projection map. The northern side of the US is straight and horizontal on Mercartor maps.
“Straight lines” on a globe (great circles) on the Northern hemisphere bend in this ⏜ way, not this ⏝ on a Mercartor map.
Flattening a sphere without compromises is impossible. Most other projections are either unusable in many local contexts or don’t span the globe. Mercator (specifically the WGS-84 implementation) works very well unless your journey goes over ±84° latitude, which is OK for most cases. Every other projection will stretch, skew or cut local areas in major ways and EVERY ONE WILL SHOW (almost every instance of) THE SHORTEST (great circle) PATH AS NOT STRAIGHT.
I hate people who blame the Mercator projection without properly learning about what is wrong with it.
I’m rather impressed by your two unicode curve examples
I’ve scrolled through UnicodePad so many times I know what to expect where, so I usually only have to skim through one to three block.