I can see Marley and Paradis!
This map is not upside down
41–50 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#42[deleted]
Re: This map is not upside down
#43> 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 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…
>I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing
The author has an inferiority complex.
Re: This map is not upside down
#44> 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.
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...
Re: This map is not upside down
#45The 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How would top-to-bottom benefit right-handed writers any more than left-handed ones?
Re: This map is not upside down
#47My Kerbal brained thinking: shouldn't it be east up with KSP at center?
Re: This map is not upside down
#48The 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#49I 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#50Is 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.