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.
This map is not upside down
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Re: This map is not upside down
#12Is 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#13I 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#14The 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).
Re: This map is not upside down
#15> 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.
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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#16[dead]
Re: This map is not upside down
#17As 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
Re: This map is not upside down
#18This 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…
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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#19Somebody know where to get a higher resolution of that map?
Re: This map is not upside down
#20I 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