This map is not upside down
181–190 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 that applies to high-level apps (like a spam phone call) stealing the screen too.
Re: This map is not upside down
#183Re: This map is not upside down
#184Re: This map is not upside down
#18590% 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.
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.
Re: This map is not upside down
#186The 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…
Re: This map is not upside down
#187Is 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
#188Re: This map is not upside down
#189Also, 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.
In Europe. And probably even only far from the Mediterranean.
Re: This map is not upside down
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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Could you explain how it's ungrammatical?