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.
This map is not upside down
81–90 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: This map is not upside down
#83As 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
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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#84I 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#85Putting 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#86Fun 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#87Anyone 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#88I like alternative maps including this one, but Robinson was an unfortunate choice for a map where Antarctica is so prominent.
Re: This map is not upside down
#89Relatedly 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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#90It would be great if that map respected internationally accepted borders and attributed Crimea to Ukraine.