When I was a kid in MA our public school teachers took us on more than one visit to the Christian Science mother church in Boston. I'm not sure of the justification for it, our good mostly Catholic and Protestant teachers weren't trying to convert us to the religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy. -Maybe we were subjects of a form of Massachusetts pride- They were fun trips and the highlight was a walk through the mapparium. The mapping in this case was a kind of direct scaled down negative (inverted?) mapping. It was a kind of 'freaking me out' experience, and a welcome one, because it was totally understandable, but different.

My mother subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor for many years. It seemed to hold an unprejudiced interest in the world and always had some kind of in-depth international article in its pages which was printed twice, once in English, and again in some other language.

According to this article, there are interesting acoustical effects in the Mapparium, which I'm sure we enjoyed when we were walking through, but I don't explicitly remember them.