The article doesn't even mention stars and here I only see a few comments mentioning "Polaris", "pole star" or "North star" but I think Polaris is the main reason.
Furthermore, because it was seen up and not down, the cartographers instinctively placed north at the top.
This map is not upside down
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Re: This map is not upside down
#242Re: This map is not upside down
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent a solid ten minutes researching this and couldn't find any suggestion that there's any problem with the title. Could you explain how it's ungrammatical?
There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.
But... it's a title, not a sentence. Many book titles are even a single word, which is even less a sentence. Why would a grammatical convention for sentences apply to book titles?
Re: This map is not upside down
#244> 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.
Are you feeling down, or are things looking up for you?
Do you have people to look up to, or do you spend more time looking down on others?
Are you on top of the world, or working your way up from the bottom?
Etc, etc. It's suffused throughout our language, and not just this one language, either.
Re: This map is not upside down
#245I love maps that are in non standard orientations.
South up as a default I think is a little boring once you’ve seen it but thinking wider orienting a map to how it would best display whay you’re mapping (rather than defaulting North/South) is a must in my mind.
Re: This map is not upside down
#246> 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.
Are you feeling down, or are things looking up for you? Do you have people to look up to, or do you spend more time looking down on others? Are you on top of the world, or working your way up from the bottom? Etc, etc. It's suffused throughout our language, and not just this one language, either.
It's wrong in any case. The center is the most important part.
Re: This map is not upside down
#247The 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…
For clarity, you cannot call north up: North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east. Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
North being up doesn't make left west because left is relative to front, not up, and front can easily change directions whereas up cannot (at least not relative to the direction of gravity). It happens that when you're looking at a map mounted on a wall with north up, west is left, but if you were to turn 90° left yourself, then west would be straight (front). This is all consistent with north being up.
Re: This map is not upside down
#248I definitely recommend you to read A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Broton. It's very interesting and you learn a lot about our world and its history.
Re: This map is not upside down
#249SPLAT
Antarctica bug spanning the whole windshield
and people fuss about orientation?
They're looking at nothing but guts!
Re: This map is not upside down
#250East should be at the top so you can imagine the sun moving from top to bottom to visualize time zone offsets.
Right now the sun goes from right to left which is the opposite of how we read most languages.