The thing I resent most is the terms Global North and Global South. It seems like an offensive classification no matter which side you are placed.
China is an incredibly rich, highly developed industrial economy with a history that goes back thousands of years with massive cultural influence. They are firmly in the northern hemisphere. They have high speed electric trains and their cities look like something out of Blade Runner. I live in a comparatively underdeveloped, de-industrialised Australia, way to the South where we get classified as part of the North because white people invaded 200 years ago? If we are ex-colonial doesn't that put us in the South?
As much as I love New Zealand its very clear visiting that they suffer massive under investment compared even to Australia though at least they have an orbital launch capacity but then so does India which is in the South. Is it because we speak a European language. Why is Argentina, the country with nuclear technology that build our research/medical reactor in the South when we don't have that technology?
It is completely arbitrary, political and divisive. It portrays countries like Australia and NZ as being in conflict with our neighbor when we have had really good relations with our neighbors. It puts China in with countries they have territorial disputes with. It puts Russia in with Ukraine. I don't get it.
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
This, of course, is the point of the article. It was so predictable that it made me wonder: who is telling me that top is good and lower is bad? The articles themselves.
At one point a character in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum says "archetypes don't exist, the body exists" and then gives some sexual and reproductive examples, followed by
> And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
You could also argue that because of gravity and potential energy, up is usually the result of purposive action and effort, while down is often the result of accident or neglect ("you often hurt yourself falling"). That potential energy (and wide-open space) can also be used for maneuvering, so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground. The lower party has less energy available to direct toward the opponent, and usually less room to move, being more constrained by the presence of the ground.
I highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", which discusses how metaphors are not arbitrary, but are part of schemas. For instance, there are whole classes of orientational metaphors that fall into the schemas: "more is up, less is down", "good is up, bad is down", "virtue is up, depravity is down", "rational is up, emotional is down", "having control is up, being subject to control is down", and so on. (Yes, I'm sure you're clever enough to find counterexamples.) This is a thought-provoking book that changed how I view the world, so check it out.
There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.
But... it's a title, not a sentence. Many book titles are even a single word, which is even less a sentence. Why would a grammatical convention for sentences apply to book titles?
First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory.
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
Right, in my experience it's a distinction that's offensive to the "Northern" camp that thinks about the disparity in terms of each country's independent "growth"/"progress"/development". It also offends "would-be Northerners", i.e. comprador/petty bourgeois individuals located geographically in the "South", for similar reasons. To complicate matters, dependency theorists were themselves petty bourgeois apologists of the Non-Aligned Movement. It's just that times have changed, just like how "American Indian" is preferred by the older generation because "Native" and "Indigenous" are impositions of liberalism, even though the newer generation may prefer the latter labels.
Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
> What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north? Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
The way to think about it is along economic, social, and infra/tech dimensions, and are not coupled to culture or ethnicity (your "white western").
Specifically, developing countries:
- Economic: low income, underdeveloped industry
- Social: lower quality of life, limited access to basic services (jobs, food, clean water, education, healthcare, housing)
- Infra/tech: poor infrastructure, limited access to technology
Furthermore, the following countries in Europe ("white") can be considered developing: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. while Japan is not developing (and not "white western").
Some countries have a high HDI (e.g. in Africa you can think of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, etc.) but can still be considered developing on other dimensions.
In the Middle East, counties like Qatar, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, and Bahrain can be considered developed (and not "white western").
I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.
I also love that Singapore is both 'developing' on this list and int the Small Island Developing States list, despite it easily being in the top 10 of most developed countries in the world.
Such grouping is based on dubious theories. For example, China is classified as a "developing economy" (red), even though it is one of only three countries with the independent capability to send humans into Earth's orbit using its own launch systems and spacecraft.
Only because their population is so huge. Their Dollar GDP is about 2/3 that of the USA and is 4.5x that of Japan. In a sense it’s set of highly developed urban industrial zones that also has a massive underdeveloped rural area.
GDP PPP is being used to compare countries productivity more often now. Australia has high GDP but low productivity as most is sunk into expensive, unproductive real estate. Every country has their rust belts and undeveloped rural areas.
I'd bet a lot of this behavior is heavily correlated with how we generally read top to bottom, which is in itself, probably an arbitrary decision made by ancient text writers.
Writing top to bottom, and even left to right has/had advantages for mostly right-handed writers to avoid moving your hand over and smudging previously written text.
Writing top-to-bottom has advantages for all writers whose eyes are above their hands. The bit of the writing surface that's blocked by your hand hasn't been written on yet.
Top to bottom advantages everyone. Left to right advantages the right-handed. Right handed being the majority, top to bottom and left to right wins in almost every writing system.
For one, starting at the top and ending at the bottom is natural progress of things because of gravity.
I’m not sure if that means anything, but down-to-up seems very unnatural (of coure I can’t ignore my cultural biases). Is there any writing systems like that?
Gravity is just a random natural process to pick for your point. You could just as easily say “bottom to top is natural because that’s the direction trees grow”.
I don't think "natural" is used metaphorically. If you had an accurate simulation of the human hand you could show that one of the directions minimizes energy usage and damage to your hand, and I think it's the one we use. Starting high means gravity is helping you move down the page, and it's also easier to move your hand towards you than away from you, and the many small movements (rather than the one big one to the top of the next page) are where more energy is spent because of friction.
Writing is done by people and people are almost always subject to gravity. It's one of the 4 fundamental forces. Energy minimization is not an arbitrary selection criteria, it's central to the fitness/design of all living things.
I don't think it takes knowledge of gravity/energy/entropy to generalize that things more naturally "fall down" rather things naturally "rise up". But, it's probably a stretch to say that influenced writing direction.
Others have made a possibly more relevant point - in one direction, your arm/hand will block what you have already written.
Out of curiosity, why do you think humanity tends to read from top down? We do have inherent bias living in a world with gravity. Though such bias may be subtle, and any attempts to evince deep meaning futile, it is nevertheless present.
I mean, and.. with the map South-up, all the stuff is crammed down at the bottom now, no?
Aren’t most of the people and land and things in the North part? A casual Google [0] suggests 88% of the humans, for example?
I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing, but it does make sense to me that you scan something “earlier” or “later” in casting your eye across a mass of stuff.
If we read from top to bottom… doesn't it make sense to put the part where the stuff is earlier in order than the part with mainly oceans?
It makes slightly more sense to me to argue about which continental masses should go on the left or the right of the map, e.g. [1]. Although compositionally, if you put the Eurasian continent on the left side (“first” for left-to-right readers), doesn’t the massive Pacific exaggerate the impression of a discontinuity or a vast gap between geographical clusters of humans?
Probably as kid, but at some point in maturing you learn that what you consider good/bad is your own prejudice and working off that is going to cause social troubles.
I read it and their methodology is embarassingly bad, especially for the kind of study that can be done en masse so easily (heck, a Twitter poll would be more useful). N=28, where all were undergraduates, and 24 were women. Could easily be influenced by the college campus, location, student housing, etc. It's literally the kind of project you'd do in middle school for a science fair.
The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different arbitrary orientation.
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east.
Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
North being up doesn't make left west because left is relative to front, not up, and front can easily change directions whereas up cannot (at least not relative to the direction of gravity). It happens that when you're looking at a map mounted on a wall with north up, west is left, but if you were to turn 90° left yourself, then west would be straight (front). This is all consistent with north being up.
I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.
As someone from the southern hemisphere, the only thing more patronizing and infuriating than this is the insistence from the same moralizing group that my country isn’t part of “The West”, despite it being physically and culturally there.
The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m in Peru right now, and people talk about the local cultures in comparison to Western culture and I find it kind of confusing. They’re certainly not Eastern here.
It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.
Good point. If south-up were the default, we would probably be manufacturing globes without any mounting system, and just leave them lying around with the Eurasian landmass facing down due to gravity.
It’s because to make it work you split just half the equator. Think of the prime meridian and the antimeridian (by the date line). They make a circle that goes all the way around like the equator, but you only split on half.
People read things top to bottom. If you have half a page worth of content will you put it at the top and leave the bottom half of the page empty or the opposite? If you are writing a TL;DR will you put it at the top or bottom of the page?
I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
I think the convention was born by magnetic north. I suppose it might also point to non magnetic south. Maybe a combination of the explorers and compass convention.
> I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
No, the preference is conventional.
I should note, though, that Chinese maps were traditionally south-up. There's no reason to expect what hemisphere people are from to control that decision.
(Not only did the Chinese come from the northern hemisphere - they had an official orthodoxy holding that the north of China, where they originated, was morally superior to the south!
Nevertheless, they drew their maps with south at the top and referred to compasses as "south-pointing needles".)
In Japan, physical maps like in parks and city information booths are oriented to be aligned with the actual geography. Meaning, north on the map points to actual north.
Made me think of how much more accurate the end to end process of putting up that map has to be vs. maps oriented by "north is up".
Just imagine the map needs to be moved by 10m and rotated around for some last minute restructuring of the park before finalizing the project.
Anyway, it was fun to read these maps and think about how many assumptions we carry around that are shaped by objects around us we use daily.
This is similar to the modern car GPS question → do you always have the little arrow pointing up in the middle and the map rotates, or is the map still and the car rotates?
True! When I started driving, I was using the "north is always up" setting as it helped me get a better understanding of where I was in the city. Somehow this was more fun.
At some point I switched to the more common setting (I assume) of having the map rotate.
I still have my map as going in the direction I'm going. Being from Europe wind directions don't matter. The roads don't care.
Then the 3d view came out, and that got my preference, and I'm always hoping one day the clouds will represent actual weather.
Anyway, the first car I got when moving to the USA got one of those direction things in the mirror, and I actually started to force myself to think in those terms. It removes a lot of ambiguity when explaining things, for example: you then turn left is more ambiguous than you then turn West.
Arrow points up, map is displayed with a slight perspective.
If there is no perspective, then at the very least, the car is about halfway between the middle of the screen and the bottom of it. I care far more about what's in front of me than what's behind me.
What I really hate is that the nav in my Tesla will typically show a perspective view while navigating, but as I approach a turn, it changes to a top-down view and zooms in, often to the point where the actual turn is no longer even on the screen, so I don't know where I'm actually supposed to go anymore.
It just needs to me moved not rotated if it's horizontal though, those are not so uncommon either as physical/tactile minature models or maps on podestals, tables or on the floor even in europe.
Einnorden used to be quite a thing with paper maps in the field.
The term Orientation even goes back further referencing to the era of T and O maps in occidental Europe where east was up and where the sun rises and also of significance to Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
Then again nobody seems to notice the Manhattan grid is actually not north up.
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block.
And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
I haven't seen the increase by five, but by twos when the odds/evens are separated across the street from each other. 101's next door neighbor is 103 while 102 is across the street next door to 104.
Putting the north at the top was an artifact of the need to select a standard orientation when the printing press enabled mass production of maps.
It was going to be north or south, thanks to the widespread existence of the magnetic compass at the time, and the printing press was invented by people in the north.
North was established earlier by European sailors as the north star is visible in the sky and is hugely useful for navigation, divining latitude etc. in the northern hemisphere. The coincidence of the north star and magnetic north as major navigational tools was really too hard to ignore.
Printing press and maps really started following the sailors and navigators knowledge and needs, where previously it was often religious or political (east at top facing jerusalem or 'oriented')
Not just land area; ~90% of the world population lives on the northern hemisphere, so it's more important in that sense, political and historical considerations aside.
Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise". So to "orient" would specifically mean looking East.
Before compasses all indicated North, "the North" was associated with cold and evil, the south was associated with warmth and prosperity, and the East was considered neutral when establishing bearings.
> Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise".
Even more literally "of the rising" ("occidental" meaning "of the falling"). The sun is of course implied here, but the Latin verbs orior and occido more generally indicate rising and falling motions of anyone and anything.
So again, even more literally, it's "of the midday, of the noon", so "toward the noon, noonwards". And in the northern hemisphere, the noon happens in the direction of the equator, so southward.
The main concern when making maps is not philosophical but practical. The usual orientation responds to the simple fact that two thirds of Earth’s land is in the Northern hemisphere.
European and American maps place the Atlantic in the middle, because it minimises the distortions to those regions and makes them more visible. Asian maps put the Pacific in the middle for the same reason.
Reading the article, I am reminded of the medieval maps that put Jerusalem in the center, with Asia at the top and the Mediterranean flowing down from it. A spiritual map.
Perhaps what the article is describing is also a spiritual map in its own way.
Yeah, sure, I've heard that before... master/slave, black/white lists... and now, north/south.
I wonder what they'll come up with now to explain reading from left to right (don't even think about the majority of right-handed writers, that would ruin the fun).
".snoitnevnoc fo yticilpmis eht dnihneb noitnetni neddih a eb ot dnuob si erehT"
You're not interested to see if they don't care about majority, are you? But let's be honest: it's just other cultures to me. I don't even think WE often care about majority either.
I'm wondering if they have the same handedness for writing and for other tasks or not, if practice writing rtl makes them on average more ambidextrous on average etc. Does it have any cultural impacts like how we had the "sinister" thing in English?
There is nothing cultural about an individual's ability to write with their right hand. Studies have been conducted on this subject: it is a physiological/neurological factor (which also applies to other parts of the human body).
I know this because, well... I'm a left-handed writer and it interested me at one point (strangely enough, I find it very difficult to throw something with my left hand; and I'm right-handed at tennis, and I kick with my left foot in soccer).
Culturally, there has been pressure in the past to use the right hand for writing. But this has been considered harsh for decades and is now seen as an archaic practice.
In the past, left handed people were sometimes punished and forced to write with the other hand. Their right handed writing was an artifact of that culture.
If you can't write with your left hand, because you never learned to do so, and you can with your right hand, you're a right handed writer. That's the only form of writing you can do.
Yes, the underlying handedness is independent of culture, but the actual ability is cultural.
Relatedly there's a Map Men video on why north is up. [0] I don't buy the whole top is 'good' and lower is 'bad'. I think the bias is just a lot of the groups that made maps were located north(ish) and traveling roughly southward which made it a convenient orientation, especially during the age of sail.
And looking at the map, it would be hard for those map makers not to be north(ish) since the South is mostly ocean. Not too many civilizations that have sprung up in the ocean.
A south-up map article that doesn't mention the classic (pre-internet even) Theory of Continental Drip? (basically that you can overlay "teardrop" shapes on south america, africa, mexico, and a bunch of other places depending on how artistic you get about it; though there were apparently later attempts to tie it to actual plate tectonics, it was originally a simple visual pun...)
My favorite is the Dymaxion projection created by Bucky Fuller. It shows all seven continents as one roughly contiguous chain of islands from Australia to Antarctica, surrounded by a giant ocean. It's no more or less correct than "north up" projections.
In college I wanted to buy a large printed Dymaxion map of the world to put in my dorm, as opposed to the usual movie posters. I could not find any place selling such a print.
Eyeballing distances is probably my biggest problem with dymaxion map, it is pretty difficult to do. Admittedly it is problem on many projections to some degree, but dymaxion is especially tricky
Huh. I wonder if part of this is that, when you make a globe, you’ll pretty much always look “down” on it. And as another poster said, most of the land (and thus peoples and nations) are in the north. So it makes sense it’d end up on top?
This map feels confusing because Canada, Russia, Greenland and antarctica are the same color, I feel like they should not be the same and antarctica should not be a country color
"North" is better correlated with the direction of travel that our planet/solar system is moving within[0]
Given the context in our movement compared to the milky way, maybe it's better to have East/West for top/bottom, with the poles on each edge of the map ;) [1]
Or better yet, let's make the top of the map Galactic North, instead of Celestial North :P
I was taught in high school that during the Cold War, there were maps with the US centered and USSR divided on either side to imply American unity in the face of opposition.
The maps were common, but there was nothing anti-USSR about them, and they go way back before the Cold War.
It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.
These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.
> The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD). "Perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient for study if they were in the upper right-hand corner," historian Daniel Boorstin opines. Mapmakers haven't always followed Ptolemy; during the Middle Ages, Boorstin notes, maps often had east on top--whence the expression "to orient."
Strange. “Upper Egypt” is the southern part of Egypt and “Lower Egypt” is the northern part. The source of the Nile (to the south of Egypt) was the key reference point to ancient Egyptians.
I searched, and Ptolemy was a Greek who lived in Egypt, not an ethnic Egyptian.
The first time I realized the Nile flowed from South to North, I thought someone was pranking me. It just felt fundamentally wrong. That’s probably because when you look at a globe, the Nile seems like it should be dripping downward…
The article doesn't even mention stars and here I only see a few comments mentioning "Polaris", "pole star" or "North star" but I think Polaris is the main reason.
Furthermore, because it was seen up and not down, the cartographers instinctively placed north at the top.
I bought a similar map from a shop in Australia and thought it was a really cool way to look at things from a different perspective. Perhaps un-surprisingly, it has Australa front and centre.
I think rather than berating people for allegedly stodgy thinking that a better approach is just that everyone has an equal moral right to produce a map in which they are in the position of prominence, and since everyone can do that equally, nobody should be running around complaining about any particular orientation.
Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.
Tbh east on top would in some ways be more interesting because map projections usually are symmetrical across the equator but are not rotationally symmetrical. So east up map would have potentially different shapes of land masses, while south up map has exact same shapes as north up.
Intriguing. I wonder if an Arabic reader looks more prominently at the right side (Europe), the way an English speaker looks more prominently at the left side (Africa).
Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.
I love maps that are in non standard orientations.
South up as a default I think is a little boring once you’ve seen it but thinking wider orienting a map to how it would best display whay you’re mapping (rather than defaulting North/South) is a must in my mind.
My Australian Geography teacher (in the UK) had an upside-down map and anti-clockwise clock on the wall and told us that was how all maps and clocks were in Australia. We might not have been convinced, but it certainly gave a different perspective on the way things are.
Totally mind blowing. I would not have known that one could have oriented a map with a different direction at the top had a blog post not been written about it.
My sixth grade teacher had this map pinned to the wall. I’ll never know if it really had a meaningful influence on my outlook, but I think it probably did. Then again my opinions evolved to be opposite many of hers, so maybe it had some unintentional side effects.
I definitely recommend you to read A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Broton. It's very interesting and you learn a lot about our world and its history.
This is a great map, they should show it alongside the typical one when teaching geography. I'll show this to my kids later, see what they think and ask them to find some countries on it.
A similar change of perspective "trick" is knowing that when we look up at the stars, it's not really "up", it can be "down", too. Imagine being suspended head down, feet stuck to the ground looking at the space below, with billions of light years worth of almost nothing out there. A bit terrifying, I suppose, so maybe don't think too much about it :-)
In practical terms, though, 90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere contains ~65% of the earth's land mass, so it's not entirely without merit that we orient the map that way.
I think in this case the concept of North came first and which end of a magnet points that way came second. Compasses are old, but not as old as the sunrise/set, which are (presumably) the original vaguely universal directions and define all four cardinal directions.
I have been rewatching Stargate SG-1 recently and noticed in S07E08 "Space Race" the surface of the planet (Hebridan) clearly had India and the Arabian Peninsula in it https://i.imgur.com/ocNHrpi.png but nearly upside down.
I wonder how many times I missed similar things just because the perspective was different than I'm used to.
The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.
Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.
So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).
I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.
As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.
Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.
Panel 1: But Libertad¹, you’re hanging it upside down.
Panel 2: Upside down in relation to what? Earth is in space, and space has neither up nor down.
Panel 3: Saying the northern hemisphere is up is a psychological trick from those at the top, so that those who believe we are below continue to believe we are at the bottom. And the worst part is that if we keep believing we’re below, we’ll continue to be. But starting today, that’s over!
Panel 4, top: Where were you, Mafalda?
Panel 4, bottom: I don’t know, but something just came to an end.
I get the philosophical idea of challenging our default assumptions and remember people who are’t right in the middle of our conventional map. Good thing to do, sure.
But, the fact that Africa and South America are pointy on their southern sides makes these kind of maps look awkward and bad IMO. It is like adjusting a paragraph so that the extra white space is in the first, instead of the last, line. Or putting the shortest line of a multi line function definition at the top, instead of the bottom.
We’ve all seen ragged-right and ragged-left typesetting, but never ragged-top.
Yeah I'm not sure why taking the same projection and mirroring it does anything. Surely you'd want a different style of map entirely for this kind of project? Africa could be much larger in it for instance
Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:
1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.
2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.
3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.
4. Orienting a map with such an impactful direction at the top creates a strong literal connection to the territory it represents, rather than to a part-abstracted direction that must be identified and agreed.
The sun doesn’t rise directly in the east though unless you live exactly on the equator, and it rises a different amount off of east every day. However, at noon, the sun is always either due north or due south depending on what hemisphere you’re in, so number 3 is quite arguable.
Also the North Star being a thing is quite influential.
Print regular map in a design you like and hang it upside down. It's literally that. Or if you want to be strict you can use "flip" function in image editing tool. You can compensate me for saving your money
Recently I had been looking for a specific map of a local trail system and found a map store near me that might have it, and had seen this exact map in the store. Crazy to see it here a couple days later!
It is almost the same area if you exclude Alaska but considerably closer to the equator. Cat-dog disappears when shown the right way up so I think the Europeans were right to draw their maps upside down.
Weirdness isn't the issue. It would be literally much harder to see the bottom side (which is where most cities and humans are located, as you mention) unless you make the globes easy enough to lift, or tall enough to go above most people's heads. I fail to see how that would be better UI.
another reason why w -> e makes sense to me is that most cultures see progression as from left to right. in terms of timekeeping, west is in the "past" and east is in the "future", so it makes sense west would be on the left, and east would be on the right, and n up, s down as the result.
Arguments about map projections are tiring. If you want to understand the whole planet, use a globe. Most people use maps via screens these days and there is no problem with projection or orientation. Most apps will let you orient the map how you like or according to your current bearing etc. and use a local projection. Can't we just stop using these whole world projections completely?
Another fun arbitrary thing is which meridian you decide to cut, because the earth is round.
If you do an image search for, say, "world atlas," you'll see all the maps have cut the Pacific in half, so the West Pacific is at the right edge and the East Pacific is at the left edge of the map.
Now, if you search for, say, "세계전도", then you'll see that most maps have cut the Atlantic in half, because otherwise kids (for whom those atlases are intended) would see their own hometown shoved all the way to the end of the map.
While technically choice of prime meridian is arbitrary, there is a particular cartographic reason to prefer so called Florence meridian, as it minimizes interruption of land masses.
Whilst this map may be not upside down, it is just wrong - it has Crimean peninsula marked as russian, disregarding all existing border treaties and being valid in only one fascist kingdom.
Though some view me as a stodgy, patriotic American "right-winger" I feel this country needs to make actual north orientation great again and also adopt the goddamn metric system. FLIP THE MAP
North is not up. That would make left west.
When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left, which is east.
In school, everyone learns that north is not up, and south is not down. Only us dumb grown-ups use that. ALL. THE. TIME. ALL. OF. THEM.
For navigation, having the poles at top and bottom is really the only way to do it. Lining up positions of constant noon sun angle along a horizontal line (i.e. latitude line) makes the paper map correspond nicely to the navigational information available.
Is this map projection making Russia look small an artifact of the projection (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south in this projection in general) or an optical illusion?
Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.
> (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south
Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).
The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.
It does seem to look visually less squished if I flip the image over, so beyond the projection, I would also say yes to optical illusion to some extent: https://i.imgur.com/JPIuvYl.jpeg
I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps. When I was growing up in Russia, the map I had in my room was a similar projection -- except with the North up, of course -- and Russia was about the same size on it.
The thing I resent most is the terms Global North and Global South. It seems like an offensive classification no matter which side you are placed.
China is an incredibly rich, highly developed industrial economy with a history that goes back thousands of years with massive cultural influence. They are firmly in the northern hemisphere. They have high speed electric trains and their cities look like something out of Blade Runner. I live in a comparatively underdeveloped, de-industrialised Australia, way to the South where we get classified as part of the North because white people invaded 200 years ago? If we are ex-colonial doesn't that put us in the South?
As much as I love New Zealand its very clear visiting that they suffer massive under investment compared even to Australia though at least they have an orbital launch capacity but then so does India which is in the South. Is it because we speak a European language. Why is Argentina, the country with nuclear technology that build our research/medical reactor in the South when we don't have that technology?
It is completely arbitrary, political and divisive. It portrays countries like Australia and NZ as being in conflict with our neighbor when we have had really good relations with our neighbors. It puts China in with countries they have territorial disputes with. It puts Russia in with Ukraine. I don't get it.
Honorary mention to one of the officials maps of Argentina https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/me...
Casually claiming a bunch of British territories
Easy come easy go
Islas Malvinas are Argentinian.
[says who?]
Wow this is so cool! Thanks for sharing.
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
This, of course, is the point of the article. It was so predictable that it made me wonder: who is telling me that top is good and lower is bad? The articles themselves.
At one point a character in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum says "archetypes don't exist, the body exists" and then gives some sexual and reproductive examples, followed by
> And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
You could also argue that because of gravity and potential energy, up is usually the result of purposive action and effort, while down is often the result of accident or neglect ("you often hurt yourself falling"). That potential energy (and wide-open space) can also be used for maneuvering, so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground. The lower party has less energy available to direct toward the opponent, and usually less room to move, being more constrained by the presence of the ground.
We print black on white. Does that mean that words are bad and only defile the blank sheet?
Sounds like a new religion in the making!
What does the transition from white chalk on blackboard to black markers on whiteboard mean?
That people will have fewer cases of lung cancer.
Plain chalk is carcinogenic??
But more cases of liver cancer.
It's probably even dumber than this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10676768/
> so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground
Tell that to a BJJ fighter.
BJJ fighters still think higher up is an advantage. Body weight to press down on opponent, greater freedom of movement.
There are a lot of people who prefer to fight from guard.
Yes, I did a horrible thing and made a joke.
Only an Anakin Skywalker vs Royce Gracey fight can settle this question once and for all.
I'll send the message via DJI drone.
I highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", which discusses how metaphors are not arbitrary, but are part of schemas. For instance, there are whole classes of orientational metaphors that fall into the schemas: "more is up, less is down", "good is up, bad is down", "virtue is up, depravity is down", "rational is up, emotional is down", "having control is up, being subject to control is down", and so on. (Yes, I'm sure you're clever enough to find counterexamples.) This is a thought-provoking book that changed how I view the world, so check it out.
The book: https://archive.org/details/lakoff-george-metaphors-we-live-...
Norvig's review discussing the book in the context of AI: https://norvig.com/mwlb.html
> Metaphors We Live By
Unfortunately the editor didn't seem to read "Grammar By Which We Live" before entitling that book.
This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put
I spent a solid ten minutes researching this and couldn't find any suggestion that there's any problem with the title.
Could you explain how it's ungrammatical?
There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.
But... it's a title, not a sentence. Many book titles are even a single word, which is even less a sentence. Why would a grammatical convention for sentences apply to book titles?
They did, they just understood they were editing English not Latin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
What do you mean by discriminatory?
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
Right, in my experience it's a distinction that's offensive to the "Northern" camp that thinks about the disparity in terms of each country's independent "growth"/"progress"/development". It also offends "would-be Northerners", i.e. comprador/petty bourgeois individuals located geographically in the "South", for similar reasons. To complicate matters, dependency theorists were themselves petty bourgeois apologists of the Non-Aligned Movement. It's just that times have changed, just like how "American Indian" is preferred by the older generation because "Native" and "Indigenous" are impositions of liberalism, even though the newer generation may prefer the latter labels.
Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north?
Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
> What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north? Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
The way to think about it is along economic, social, and infra/tech dimensions, and are not coupled to culture or ethnicity (your "white western").
Specifically, developing countries:
- Economic: low income, underdeveloped industry
- Social: lower quality of life, limited access to basic services (jobs, food, clean water, education, healthcare, housing)
- Infra/tech: poor infrastructure, limited access to technology
Furthermore, the following countries in Europe ("white") can be considered developing: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. while Japan is not developing (and not "white western").
Some countries have a high HDI (e.g. in Africa you can think of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, etc.) but can still be considered developing on other dimensions.
In the Middle East, counties like Qatar, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, and Bahrain can be considered developed (and not "white western").
I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.
They’re becoming developed like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
They are "developing" into industrialized countries.
Do you live in a white western country?
If so, do you have a plan for emigrating?
If you've no plan, why not?
it is discriminatory, though that wasn't the original intention
That is such an odd list.
I also love that Singapore is both 'developing' on this list and int the Small Island Developing States list, despite it easily being in the top 10 of most developed countries in the world.
Such grouping is based on dubious theories. For example, China is classified as a "developing economy" (red), even though it is one of only three countries with the independent capability to send humans into Earth's orbit using its own launch systems and spacecraft.
China has had massive economic growth in recent years, but were undisputedly a developing country prior to that growth.
They may deserve to be reclassified now, although their GDP per capita is still much lower than the US.
Only because their population is so huge. Their Dollar GDP is about 2/3 that of the USA and is 4.5x that of Japan. In a sense it’s set of highly developed urban industrial zones that also has a massive underdeveloped rural area.
GDP PPP is being used to compare countries productivity more often now. Australia has high GDP but low productivity as most is sunk into expensive, unproductive real estate. Every country has their rust belts and undeveloped rural areas.
China (and India) are near the border, which is creeping downward as nations develop economically.
Australia is the funny one.
How is Australia part of Global North? :)
North is 0-127, South is 128-255. When you go south enough, the 8-bit counter overflows and that's how Australia becomes North.
Alternatively, "Global North" is just code for "white", with a few apartheid-style token "honorary whites" like Japan added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_whites
Are you feeling down, or are things looking up for you?
Do you have people to look up to, or do you spend more time looking down on others?
Are you on top of the world, or working your way up from the bottom?
Etc, etc. It's suffused throughout our language, and not just this one language, either.
It's wrong in any case. The center is the most important part.
I'd bet a lot of this behavior is heavily correlated with how we generally read top to bottom, which is in itself, probably an arbitrary decision made by ancient text writers.
Writing top to bottom, and even left to right has/had advantages for mostly right-handed writers to avoid moving your hand over and smudging previously written text.
Writing top-to-bottom has advantages for all writers whose eyes are above their hands. The bit of the writing surface that's blocked by your hand hasn't been written on yet.
How would top-to-bottom benefit right-handed writers any more than left-handed ones?
Top to bottom advantages everyone. Left to right advantages the right-handed. Right handed being the majority, top to bottom and left to right wins in almost every writing system.
And why would that make the top better than the bottom anyway? That's like saying the meal is worse after you finish it.
Because your arm doesn't cover the text as you are writing.
Because of Primacy Bias.
I’m not sure it’s arbitrary.
For one, starting at the top and ending at the bottom is natural progress of things because of gravity.
I’m not sure if that means anything, but down-to-up seems very unnatural (of coure I can’t ignore my cultural biases). Is there any writing systems like that?
It is indeed rare, I could find only a single example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanunoo_script
Just look at how all of the continents tend to be shaped like they are dripping down. That just proves TFA map is upside down.
Any one can make arbitrary reasons to support a decision.
Gravity is just a random natural process to pick for your point. You could just as easily say “bottom to top is natural because that’s the direction trees grow”.
It’s all arbitrary.
I don't think "natural" is used metaphorically. If you had an accurate simulation of the human hand you could show that one of the directions minimizes energy usage and damage to your hand, and I think it's the one we use. Starting high means gravity is helping you move down the page, and it's also easier to move your hand towards you than away from you, and the many small movements (rather than the one big one to the top of the next page) are where more energy is spent because of friction.
Writing is done by people and people are almost always subject to gravity. It's one of the 4 fundamental forces. Energy minimization is not an arbitrary selection criteria, it's central to the fitness/design of all living things.
I don't think it takes knowledge of gravity/energy/entropy to generalize that things more naturally "fall down" rather things naturally "rise up". But, it's probably a stretch to say that influenced writing direction.
Others have made a possibly more relevant point - in one direction, your arm/hand will block what you have already written.
yeah it's remarkable how many comments in this thread seem to be grasping onto random facts as if they represent a non-arbitrary justification.
is this a contrarian impulse or an anti-contrarian impulse?
And the follow up question: why the author want to flip the map to see the countries at the top as bad and the lower ones as good?
Started at the bottom, now we're here.
Up-and-coming.
Top-of-the-line.
I could go on, but I don't want to get you down.
Those who claim the top is viewed as good by most people would also have to defend the claim that most people are Alaskan supremacists.
They're subservient to Santa, who is the uppermost
Out of curiosity, why do you think humanity tends to read from top down? We do have inherent bias living in a world with gravity. Though such bias may be subtle, and any attempts to evince deep meaning futile, it is nevertheless present.
I mean, and.. with the map South-up, all the stuff is crammed down at the bottom now, no?
Aren’t most of the people and land and things in the North part? A casual Google [0] suggests 88% of the humans, for example?
I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing, but it does make sense to me that you scan something “earlier” or “later” in casting your eye across a mass of stuff.
If we read from top to bottom… doesn't it make sense to put the part where the stuff is earlier in order than the part with mainly oceans?
It makes slightly more sense to me to argue about which continental masses should go on the left or the right of the map, e.g. [1]. Although compositionally, if you put the Eurasian continent on the left side (“first” for left-to-right readers), doesn’t the massive Pacific exaggerate the impression of a discontinuity or a vast gap between geographical clusters of humans?
[0] https://brilliantmaps.com/human-hemisphere/#:~:text=88%25%20...
[1] https://www.mapresources.com/products/world-digital-vector-r...
>I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing
The author has an inferiority complex.
Heaven and hell, not hell and heaven. The stock market goes up as spirits rise.
Really? Before you read this article you never associated being on top = good and being at the bottom = bad?
Probably as kid, but at some point in maturing you learn that what you consider good/bad is your own prejudice and working off that is going to cause social troubles.
They link this[1] article, which I don't plan to read. I, too, rolled my eyes.
1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061140104...
I read it and their methodology is embarassingly bad, especially for the kind of study that can be done en masse so easily (heck, a Twitter poll would be more useful). N=28, where all were undergraduates, and 24 were women. Could easily be influenced by the college campus, location, student housing, etc. It's literally the kind of project you'd do in middle school for a science fair.
Absolutely terrible study. Full paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189192_Spatial_M...
This is always done.
Studies of American college students to prove some sort of universal rule about human psychology.
There’s embarrassing papers that get published in every field but social sciences is where they always try and put a moralistic element in as well.
Sigh.
The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different arbitrary orientation.
For clarity, you cannot call north up:
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east.
Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
North being up doesn't make left west because left is relative to front, not up, and front can easily change directions whereas up cannot (at least not relative to the direction of gravity). It happens that when you're looking at a map mounted on a wall with north up, west is left, but if you were to turn 90° left yourself, then west would be straight (front). This is all consistent with north being up.
I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.
[0] page 907: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...
As someone from the southern hemisphere, the only thing more patronizing and infuriating than this is the insistence from the same moralizing group that my country isn’t part of “The West”, despite it being physically and culturally there.
The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m in Peru right now, and people talk about the local cultures in comparison to Western culture and I find it kind of confusing. They’re certainly not Eastern here.
It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.
90% of the world's population and 68% of the land mass being in the northen hemisphere is probably a good enough reason to put north up top on a map.
Disagree completely.
Your map should be bottom-heavy for stability.
It's true, that's how Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.
Good point. If south-up were the default, we would probably be manufacturing globes without any mounting system, and just leave them lying around with the Eurasian landmass facing down due to gravity.
Also if the map is flat on a table, more stuff is closer to you.
No no no.
We should put Asia at the top, Europe bottom left, Africa bottom right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
-Dwight Schrute
Split it at the equator, make them north south edges and make everyone angry.
You forgot to tilt it and to push the Greenwich meridian out of the center.
It hurts my head to even try to visualize this
It’s because to make it work you split just half the equator. Think of the prime meridian and the antimeridian (by the date line). They make a circle that goes all the way around like the equator, but you only split on half.
That's one that not even XKCD made yet. I guess everybody will agree about it, but the people in tropical countries will agree louder.
If it’s at the bottom and you put it on a table, more of the land is closer to you and therefore easier to read.
Its all arbitrary, and we can all make up random minor pro/cons all we like but it don’t change that.
> more of the land is closer to you and therefore easier to read.
As most people age, that gets less true. The optimum placement ends up being around an arms length away, so being away from the edge could help.
But if you're showing the whole world, typically the details aren't that important, so it's mostly arbitrary.
…why? Why is it better for it to be in the upper half of the map than the lower half?
Let's say you have a globe. It's easier to look at the top half than the bottom half.
Two axis globe is best globe.
People read things top to bottom. If you have half a page worth of content will you put it at the top and leave the bottom half of the page empty or the opposite? If you are writing a TL;DR will you put it at the top or bottom of the page?
> People read things top to bottom.
Even in Berber?
I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
I think the convention was born by magnetic north. I suppose it might also point to non magnetic south. Maybe a combination of the explorers and compass convention.
I suppose we can ask Australians and the kiwis.
Kiwis are just happy New Zealand is on the map (https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/).
Though it appears we don't have any cities.
> I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
No, the preference is conventional.
I should note, though, that Chinese maps were traditionally south-up. There's no reason to expect what hemisphere people are from to control that decision.
(Not only did the Chinese come from the northern hemisphere - they had an official orthodoxy holding that the north of China, where they originated, was morally superior to the south!
Nevertheless, they drew their maps with south at the top and referred to compasses as "south-pointing needles".)
But what about the 10% who are bottomies
Why?
In Japan, physical maps like in parks and city information booths are oriented to be aligned with the actual geography. Meaning, north on the map points to actual north.
Made me think of how much more accurate the end to end process of putting up that map has to be vs. maps oriented by "north is up".
Just imagine the map needs to be moved by 10m and rotated around for some last minute restructuring of the park before finalizing the project.
Anyway, it was fun to read these maps and think about how many assumptions we carry around that are shaped by objects around us we use daily.
This is similar to the modern car GPS question → do you always have the little arrow pointing up in the middle and the map rotates, or is the map still and the car rotates?
True! When I started driving, I was using the "north is always up" setting as it helped me get a better understanding of where I was in the city. Somehow this was more fun.
At some point I switched to the more common setting (I assume) of having the map rotate.
I still have my map as going in the direction I'm going. Being from Europe wind directions don't matter. The roads don't care.
Then the 3d view came out, and that got my preference, and I'm always hoping one day the clouds will represent actual weather.
Anyway, the first car I got when moving to the USA got one of those direction things in the mirror, and I actually started to force myself to think in those terms. It removes a lot of ambiguity when explaining things, for example: you then turn left is more ambiguous than you then turn West.
Arrow points up, map is displayed with a slight perspective.
If there is no perspective, then at the very least, the car is about halfway between the middle of the screen and the bottom of it. I care far more about what's in front of me than what's behind me.
What I really hate is that the nav in my Tesla will typically show a perspective view while navigating, but as I approach a turn, it changes to a top-down view and zooms in, often to the point where the actual turn is no longer even on the screen, so I don't know where I'm actually supposed to go anymore.
Ouch! Whatever representation you agree on, the one thing you don't do is changing everything and throwing the driver out of their context at random.
And that applies to high-level apps (like a spam phone call) stealing the screen too.
Yeah, viewer up maps need be updated.
It just needs to me moved not rotated if it's horizontal though, those are not so uncommon either as physical/tactile minature models or maps on podestals, tables or on the floor even in europe.
Einnorden used to be quite a thing with paper maps in the field.
The term Orientation even goes back further referencing to the era of T and O maps in occidental Europe where east was up and where the sun rises and also of significance to Christianity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
Then again nobody seems to notice the Manhattan grid is actually not north up.
Local maps at streets in the UK are like that as well. I am too used to north always being up that I had to lean my head to comprehend them.
Reminds me of guide books. They probably do it to fit the maximum useful map on the quarter page they have allocated for it.
It's also a wonderful metaphor for how the opposite can also be true.
Japanese addresses that name the blocks, not the streets: https://sive.rs/jadr
West African music that uses the "1" as the end of the phrase instead of the start: https://sive.rs/fela
“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true”, Joan Robinson
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_differe...
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block.
And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
Sometimes. I know of places in america where numbers are sequential. I know of other places where they a sequential but increase by five.
I grew up in a neighborhood where they were numbered by the order the lots were sold. Completely random madness the poor postman has to deal with.
I haven't seen the increase by five, but by twos when the odds/evens are separated across the street from each other. 101's next door neighbor is 103 while 102 is across the street next door to 104.
Could you share some examples please? I'm not doubting you, just want to look at some maps.
I don't know how to do this... I also don't remember where anymore.
In Brasilia, Brazil only main avenues are named and all addresses are also by block, just like in Japan.
Putting the north at the top was an artifact of the need to select a standard orientation when the printing press enabled mass production of maps.
It was going to be north or south, thanks to the widespread existence of the magnetic compass at the time, and the printing press was invented by people in the north.
North was established earlier by European sailors as the north star is visible in the sky and is hugely useful for navigation, divining latitude etc. in the northern hemisphere. The coincidence of the north star and magnetic north as major navigational tools was really too hard to ignore.
Printing press and maps really started following the sailors and navigators knowledge and needs, where previously it was often religious or political (east at top facing jerusalem or 'oriented')
The word "orientation" literally means pointing towards the rising sun i.e. East.
What did maps from China look like around then? I assume they'd center their continent somehow
They still do. Took those pictures a few days ago in China: https://gist.github.com/olalonde/d293e54c46143c3dd905da4c0eb...
That's a Pacific-centered map not a China-centered map. You can buy these in the U.S. too; I'm sure the people of Hawaii would prefer these. https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-classic-pacific-centered or https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-executive-pacific-center...
The name of China in Chinese is middle/central kindgom and there are maps with different areas being at the centre, so yep.
As someone from the Southern Hemisphere, the article's point falls flat. There's more land area in the top so it makes it easier to look at it
You lose a lot of the details of the northern hemisphere when its compressed downwards in that map.
That seems to be due to the pseudocylindrical projection, not the rotation of the map.
Not just land area; ~90% of the world population lives on the northern hemisphere, so it's more important in that sense, political and historical considerations aside.
Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise". So to "orient" would specifically mean looking East.
Before compasses all indicated North, "the North" was associated with cold and evil, the south was associated with warmth and prosperity, and the East was considered neutral when establishing bearings.
> Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise".
Even more literally "of the rising" ("occidental" meaning "of the falling"). The sun is of course implied here, but the Latin verbs orior and occido more generally indicate rising and falling motions of anyone and anything.
Interestingly “meridional” could mean south in some languages because it was towards the equator… which is funny when it’s used south of the equator.
So again, even more literally, it's "of the midday, of the noon", so "toward the noon, noonwards". And in the northern hemisphere, the noon happens in the direction of the equator, so southward.
> "the North" was associated with cold and evil, the south was associated with warmth and prosperity
In Europe. And probably even only far from the Mediterranean.
The main concern when making maps is not philosophical but practical. The usual orientation responds to the simple fact that two thirds of Earth’s land is in the Northern hemisphere.
European and American maps place the Atlantic in the middle, because it minimises the distortions to those regions and makes them more visible. Asian maps put the Pacific in the middle for the same reason.
Reading the article, I am reminded of the medieval maps that put Jerusalem in the center, with Asia at the top and the Mediterranean flowing down from it. A spiritual map.
Perhaps what the article is describing is also a spiritual map in its own way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
This is the correct map, but New Zealand should be in the center as we are middle earth
if only the axis was in the middle of middle earth would I agree
Yeah, sure, I've heard that before... master/slave, black/white lists... and now, north/south. I wonder what they'll come up with now to explain reading from left to right (don't even think about the majority of right-handed writers, that would ruin the fun).
".snoitnevnoc fo yticilpmis eht dnihneb noitnetni neddih a eb ot dnuob si erehT"
I mean several languages are right to left?
I'd be interested to see if handedness in those countries is different.
I suppose that would make those employing Boustrophedon ambidextrous?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
> I mean several languages are right to left?
So?
Anyway, handedness bias is a humanity thing.
You're not interested to see if they don't care about majority, are you? But let's be honest: it's just other cultures to me. I don't even think WE often care about majority either.
I'm wondering if they have the same handedness for writing and for other tasks or not, if practice writing rtl makes them on average more ambidextrous on average etc. Does it have any cultural impacts like how we had the "sinister" thing in English?
There is nothing cultural about an individual's ability to write with their right hand. Studies have been conducted on this subject: it is a physiological/neurological factor (which also applies to other parts of the human body).
I know this because, well... I'm a left-handed writer and it interested me at one point (strangely enough, I find it very difficult to throw something with my left hand; and I'm right-handed at tennis, and I kick with my left foot in soccer).
Culturally, there has been pressure in the past to use the right hand for writing. But this has been considered harsh for decades and is now seen as an archaic practice.
In the past, left handed people were sometimes punished and forced to write with the other hand. Their right handed writing was an artifact of that culture.
> Their right handed writing was an artifact of that culture.
Sure. But that does not define a person as a right-handed writer. That's precisely why I wrote "individual's ABILITY to write with their right hand".
If you can't write with your left hand, because you never learned to do so, and you can with your right hand, you're a right handed writer. That's the only form of writing you can do.
Yes, the underlying handedness is independent of culture, but the actual ability is cultural.
Relatedly there's a Map Men video on why north is up. [0] I don't buy the whole top is 'good' and lower is 'bad'. I think the bias is just a lot of the groups that made maps were located north(ish) and traveling roughly southward which made it a convenient orientation, especially during the age of sail.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70
And looking at the map, it would be hard for those map makers not to be north(ish) since the South is mostly ocean. Not too many civilizations that have sprung up in the ocean.
The West Wing has such a good clip about this:
https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw
One of my favorite episodes! This immediately came to mind. I was due for a rewatch, thanks for linking.
Beautiful Torres García painting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9rica_Invertida
A south-up map article that doesn't mention the classic (pre-internet even) Theory of Continental Drip? (basically that you can overlay "teardrop" shapes on south america, africa, mexico, and a bunch of other places depending on how artistic you get about it; though there were apparently later attempts to tie it to actual plate tectonics, it was originally a simple visual pun...)
My favorite is the Dymaxion projection created by Bucky Fuller. It shows all seven continents as one roughly contiguous chain of islands from Australia to Antarctica, surrounded by a giant ocean. It's no more or less correct than "north up" projections.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Dymaxion...
In college I wanted to buy a large printed Dymaxion map of the world to put in my dorm, as opposed to the usual movie posters. I could not find any place selling such a print.
The thing that I like about that projection is that it shows just how close North America and Russia really are.
Eyeballing distances is probably my biggest problem with dymaxion map, it is pretty difficult to do. Admittedly it is problem on many projections to some degree, but dymaxion is especially tricky
Huh. I wonder if part of this is that, when you make a globe, you’ll pretty much always look “down” on it. And as another poster said, most of the land (and thus peoples and nations) are in the north. So it makes sense it’d end up on top?
This map feels confusing because Canada, Russia, Greenland and antarctica are the same color, I feel like they should not be the same and antarctica should not be a country color
Some countries do not even have same color for whole area in that map.
Fun fact: if you rotate a regular map (north on top) counterclockwise, you’ll notice the American continent looks like a duck.
Even more fun fact: once you’ve seen this, you cannot unsee it. It’s a duck.
Much like this:
https://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/...
It's also a rabbit :)
"North" is better correlated with the direction of travel that our planet/solar system is moving within[0]
Given the context in our movement compared to the milky way, maybe it's better to have East/West for top/bottom, with the poles on each edge of the map ;) [1]
Or better yet, let's make the top of the map Galactic North, instead of Celestial North :P
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU
[1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-ear...
It would be great if that map respected internationally accepted borders and attributed Crimea to Ukraine.
I was taught in high school that during the Cold War, there were maps with the US centered and USSR divided on either side to imply American unity in the face of opposition.
Example: https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ
The maps were common, but there was nothing anti-USSR about them, and they go way back before the Cold War.
It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.
These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.
In China, world maps have China more centered with America to the right. Some pics I took recently: https://gist.github.com/olalonde/d293e54c46143c3dd905da4c0eb...
Splitting the east/west sides with the Atlantic instead of the Pacific can also be interesting.
Here's a map I put together https://northerngesture.com
> The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD). "Perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient for study if they were in the upper right-hand corner," historian Daniel Boorstin opines. Mapmakers haven't always followed Ptolemy; during the Middle Ages, Boorstin notes, maps often had east on top--whence the expression "to orient."
Strange. “Upper Egypt” is the southern part of Egypt and “Lower Egypt” is the northern part. The source of the Nile (to the south of Egypt) was the key reference point to ancient Egyptians.
I searched, and Ptolemy was a Greek who lived in Egypt, not an ethnic Egyptian.
Upper is literally higher up with respect to distance from the Earth’s centre of gravity.
When I was 8 or 9 in school we studied Egypt and I had to know and no one could answer. Might have been one of the first things I used Google for.
The first time I realized the Nile flowed from South to North, I thought someone was pranking me. It just felt fundamentally wrong. That’s probably because when you look at a globe, the Nile seems like it should be dripping downward…
Since it's a globe you could also have North on the left and with on the right. Right?
yeah but then you have to start imagining the earth orbiting the sun by climbing over and under it each year
The article doesn't even mention stars and here I only see a few comments mentioning "Polaris", "pole star" or "North star" but I think Polaris is the main reason. Furthermore, because it was seen up and not down, the cartographers instinctively placed north at the top.
"Yeah but you can't do that"
"Why not?"
"Because it's freaking me out"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPaca-SrvEk&t=208s
I bought a similar map from a shop in Australia and thought it was a really cool way to look at things from a different perspective. Perhaps un-surprisingly, it has Australa front and centre.
https://hemamaps.com/products/upside-down-world-in-envelope-...
I think rather than berating people for allegedly stodgy thinking that a better approach is just that everyone has an equal moral right to produce a map in which they are in the position of prominence, and since everyone can do that equally, nobody should be running around complaining about any particular orientation.
Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.
Tbh east on top would in some ways be more interesting because map projections usually are symmetrical across the equator but are not rotationally symmetrical. So east up map would have potentially different shapes of land masses, while south up map has exact same shapes as north up.
I love stuff like this. I encourage everyone to check out 'Méditerranée Sans Frontières' map. [1][2]
[1] http://mediterraneesansfrontieres.org/babel4.html [2] https://amroali.com/2020/12/what-a-sideway-map-of-the-medite...
Intriguing. I wonder if an Arabic reader looks more prominently at the right side (Europe), the way an English speaker looks more prominently at the left side (Africa).
Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.
I love maps that are in non standard orientations.
South up as a default I think is a little boring once you’ve seen it but thinking wider orienting a map to how it would best display whay you’re mapping (rather than defaulting North/South) is a must in my mind.
My Australian Geography teacher (in the UK) had an upside-down map and anti-clockwise clock on the wall and told us that was how all maps and clocks were in Australia. We might not have been convinced, but it certainly gave a different perspective on the way things are.
East should be at the top so you can imagine the sun moving from top to bottom to visualize time zone offsets.
Right now the sun goes from right to left which is the opposite of how we read most languages.
Totally mind blowing. I would not have known that one could have oriented a map with a different direction at the top had a blog post not been written about it.
Does this work for having East at the top?!?
Of course. Open Google Maps on your phone. Use two fingers to rotate.
(Apple Maps won't work here because it uses a globe.)
My sixth grade teacher had this map pinned to the wall. I’ll never know if it really had a meaningful influence on my outlook, but I think it probably did. Then again my opinions evolved to be opposite many of hers, so maybe it had some unintentional side effects.
I definitely recommend you to read A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Broton. It's very interesting and you learn a lot about our world and its history.
Really, it should be in portrait mode to suit phone screens. Vertical scrolling spins the globe.
This is a great map, they should show it alongside the typical one when teaching geography. I'll show this to my kids later, see what they think and ask them to find some countries on it.
A similar change of perspective "trick" is knowing that when we look up at the stars, it's not really "up", it can be "down", too. Imagine being suspended head down, feet stuck to the ground looking at the space below, with billions of light years worth of almost nothing out there. A bit terrifying, I suppose, so maybe don't think too much about it :-)
In practical terms, though, 90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere contains ~65% of the earth's land mass, so it's not entirely without merit that we orient the map that way.
"The enemy's gate is down"!
Some trivia: the North Pole is actually the magnetic south pole.
Out of convention we call it the “North Pole” because on a compass the north magnet is point toward its attract magnetic south.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole
I think in this case the concept of North came first and which end of a magnet points that way came second. Compasses are old, but not as old as the sunrise/set, which are (presumably) the original vaguely universal directions and define all four cardinal directions.
I have been rewatching Stargate SG-1 recently and noticed in S07E08 "Space Race" the surface of the planet (Hebridan) clearly had India and the Arabian Peninsula in it https://i.imgur.com/ocNHrpi.png but nearly upside down.
I wonder how many times I missed similar things just because the perspective was different than I'm used to.
The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.
They're reading our freaking brains!
Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.
So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).
I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.
As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.
Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.
SPLAT
Antarctica bug spanning the whole windshield
and people fuss about orientation?
They're looking at nothing but guts!
Thought of this old Mafalda strip, haha.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Translation:
Panel 1: But Libertad¹, you’re hanging it upside down.
Panel 2: Upside down in relation to what? Earth is in space, and space has neither up nor down.
Panel 3: Saying the northern hemisphere is up is a psychological trick from those at the top, so that those who believe we are below continue to believe we are at the bottom. And the worst part is that if we keep believing we’re below, we’ll continue to be. But starting today, that’s over!
Panel 4, top: Where were you, Mafalda?
Panel 4, bottom: I don’t know, but something just came to an end.
¹ It’s her name: https://mafalda.fandom.com/es/wiki/Libertad
My uncle had a south-up map of the US on his wall when I was growing up. I always thought it was funny and slightly profound.
Sundials also point northly throughout the day if you're in the northern hemisphere, another reason that North can be interpreted as "up"
Well if we're all just sharing our favorite world map projections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
Butterfly for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection
A similar map was published by the Brazilian government:
https://www.gmexconsulting.com/cms/the-world-from-a-brazilia...
There's a Map Men video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70
If we start using south-side-up maps, how are fantasy writers supposed to come up with shapes for their fictional continents?
I get the philosophical idea of challenging our default assumptions and remember people who are’t right in the middle of our conventional map. Good thing to do, sure.
But, the fact that Africa and South America are pointy on their southern sides makes these kind of maps look awkward and bad IMO. It is like adjusting a paragraph so that the extra white space is in the first, instead of the last, line. Or putting the shortest line of a multi line function definition at the top, instead of the bottom.
We’ve all seen ragged-right and ragged-left typesetting, but never ragged-top.
Yeah I'm not sure why taking the same projection and mirroring it does anything. Surely you'd want a different style of map entirely for this kind of project? Africa could be much larger in it for instance
To me it just looks like a world map rotated by 180 degrees. Not strange or disorienting.
Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:
1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.
2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.
3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.
4. Orienting a map with such an impactful direction at the top creates a strong literal connection to the territory it represents, rather than to a part-abstracted direction that must be identified and agreed.
The sun doesn’t rise directly in the east though unless you live exactly on the equator, and it rises a different amount off of east every day. However, at noon, the sun is always either due north or due south depending on what hemisphere you’re in, so number 3 is quite arguable.
Also the North Star being a thing is quite influential.
There are many ways to accurately determine north that have been known since antiquity. A magnetic compass was but one method of many.
Also, where the sun rises and sets varies enormously over the year. Using the sun to determine north (e.g. shadow-stick method) is more reliable.
From our perspective the sun doesn't travel top to bottom, so why orient the map that way?
My Kerbal brained thinking: shouldn't it be east up with KSP at center?
Is there a way to purchase this map for printing so Robert Simmon gets compensated?
Print regular map in a design you like and hang it upside down. It's literally that. Or if you want to be strict you can use "flip" function in image editing tool. You can compensate me for saving your money
To be fair, it's nice to have the typography rearranged to work upside down.
Recently I had been looking for a specific map of a local trail system and found a map store near me that might have it, and had seen this exact map in the store. Crazy to see it here a couple days later!
I believe you should be able to get it shipped wherever. https://www.mapcenter.com/store/p/upside-down-world-by-rober...
I mean you could just Venmo him
Fun fact: former Brazilian president Dilma Roussef took this map to show to Xi Jiping, her dearest friend at BRICS.
Thing is, in China, any map that doesn't show Taiwan as being part of China is illegal. This map doesn't show that.
Things didn't go as smooth as she expected.
I like alternative maps including this one, but Robinson was an unfortunate choice for a map where Antarctica is so prominent.
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
Yea, sure. That's why we all try to vacation in a "tropical paradise", which tend to be in the middle of the map.
People are dumb, really dumb even, but even a two year old is going to realize vertical map position doesn't equate to "good".
Wow look at Australia upside down it looks strikingly resembles USA!
It is almost the same area if you exclude Alaska but considerably closer to the equator. Cat-dog disappears when shown the right way up so I think the Europeans were right to draw their maps upside down.
90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere[1].
It would be a deliberately weird design choice to make a globe (which is almost always viewed from above) with the northern hemisphere n bottom.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
Weirdness isn't the issue. It would be literally much harder to see the bottom side (which is where most cities and humans are located, as you mention) unless you make the globes easy enough to lift, or tall enough to go above most people's heads. I fail to see how that would be better UI.
Why do the maps have to look bulbous horizontally?
another reason why w -> e makes sense to me is that most cultures see progression as from left to right. in terms of timekeeping, west is in the "past" and east is in the "future", so it makes sense west would be on the left, and east would be on the right, and n up, s down as the result.
Arguments about map projections are tiring. If you want to understand the whole planet, use a globe. Most people use maps via screens these days and there is no problem with projection or orientation. Most apps will let you orient the map how you like or according to your current bearing etc. and use a local projection. Can't we just stop using these whole world projections completely?
I guess they didn't come from a land down under after all.
There are old Arabic maps which have south at the top.
Ancient Egypt too. It was more natural for the Nile to run 'downwards'. This is also why upper Egypt is South and lower Egypt is North.
The traditional (folk? premodern?) Finnish view of the world places Finland at the bottom.
Another fun arbitrary thing is which meridian you decide to cut, because the earth is round.
If you do an image search for, say, "world atlas," you'll see all the maps have cut the Pacific in half, so the West Pacific is at the right edge and the East Pacific is at the left edge of the map.
Now, if you search for, say, "세계전도", then you'll see that most maps have cut the Atlantic in half, because otherwise kids (for whom those atlases are intended) would see their own hometown shoved all the way to the end of the map.
While technically choice of prime meridian is arbitrary, there is a particular cartographic reason to prefer so called Florence meridian, as it minimizes interruption of land masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_meridian
Whilst this map may be not upside down, it is just wrong - it has Crimean peninsula marked as russian, disregarding all existing border treaties and being valid in only one fascist kingdom.
Somebody know where to get a higher resolution of that map?
Though some view me as a stodgy, patriotic American "right-winger" I feel this country needs to make actual north orientation great again and also adopt the goddamn metric system. FLIP THE MAP
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left, which is east.
In school, everyone learns that north is not up, and south is not down. Only us dumb grown-ups use that. ALL. THE. TIME. ALL. OF. THEM.
I can see Marley and Paradis!
I know the planet has poles, but it surprises me somehow that basically every map I've ever seen respects the poles as top bottom.
The earth is a sphere and we could just as well pick any pode/anti-pode we want when drawing.
For navigation, having the poles at top and bottom is really the only way to do it. Lining up positions of constant noon sun angle along a horizontal line (i.e. latitude line) makes the paper map correspond nicely to the navigational information available.
Is this map projection making Russia look small an artifact of the projection (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south in this projection in general) or an optical illusion?
Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.
> (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south
Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).
The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.
It does seem to look visually less squished if I flip the image over, so beyond the projection, I would also say yes to optical illusion to some extent: https://i.imgur.com/JPIuvYl.jpeg
I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps. When I was growing up in Russia, the map I had in my room was a similar projection -- except with the North up, of course -- and Russia was about the same size on it.
> I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps.
I think that GP is accustomed to Mercator maps and is thus more surprised by it.
(I'm not really sure why this is a thing. My elementary school classrooms in the late 80s showed a variety of projections, and globes.)
Disappointed there was no discussion of maps where east or west are up.
Obligatory "there's an xkcd for everything": https://xkcd.com/1500/ (:
This article feels AI-generated