Riddle me this, flat Earth theorists: If the planet isn't a sphere, why is it so hard to put it on a flat map?

At first glance, it seems simple. Just take the globe, peel off the outer layer and lay it flat. Congratulations, you have a map. But not so fast: spheres do not unfold easily into rectangles. Or any two-dimensional shape, for that matter.

No two-dimensional representation of our planet can get it quite right. It's in the mathematics. But they can get awfully close, which is why one projection recently won Japan's Good Design Award because of how well it projected our sphere onto a flat surface. The AuthaGraph World Map "faithfully represents all oceans and continents including the neglected Antarctica," according to the award's website.

It's not a perfect map, but to even get as close as it did, architect Hajime Narukawa, the creator of the AuthaGraph map, had to cheat a little bit.