> 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.
There is the term "global south", but 90% of the poor countries that are considered part of the global south are actually north of the equator. Its only really western Europe that is abnormally north to give such a skewed perspective.
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.
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 :-)
Came here to see if anyone recommended that clip. I watched it just last night, it never fails to crack me up, especially CJ's reaction. "You can't do that!" "Why not?" "Because it's freaking me out!"
Effective scene, too -- I've thought a bit differently about maps and some other things ever since, things that might not have ever occurred to me before. It's not a bad idea to expose people to different map projections / configurations to shake up their view of the world.
I think the West Wing clip highlights how out of date the thinking in the article is. When this clip was filmed, turn by turn navigation didn't exist yet. If the average person saw a map, it had north at the top. By contrast, these days, if I see a map, the direction I'm currently going is normally up. I don't find it freaky for maps to be oriented with north down because I see a map like that every time I drive south in my car.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
143 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 88.3 ms ] threadThis, 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.
They're reading our freaking brains!
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 :-)
https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw
Effective scene, too -- I've thought a bit differently about maps and some other things ever since, things that might not have ever occurred to me before. It's not a bad idea to expose people to different map projections / configurations to shake up their view of the world.
Even more fun fact: once you’ve seen this, you cannot unsee it. It’s a duck.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.
The earth is a sphere and we could just as well pick any pode/anti-pode we want when drawing.
Example: https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ
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...
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
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.
https://www.gmexconsulting.com/cms/the-world-from-a-brazilia...
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.