Somehow birthdays get forgotten and Tory Historian feels very bad about it. There were several important ones this year (and it ain't over yet). Given TH's love of maps, it is a crime and a shame not to remember that March 5 (the anniversary of Stalin's death, as it happens, which also makes it a good day) was the 500th birthday of Gerard Mercatus, the great cartographer who
created (in 1569) a world map upon which navigators, for the first time, could draw a straight line and actually travel along it without the curvature of the earth messing up their co-ordinates.
A man whose influence on our lives is, quite literally, incalculable. 
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