"Yeah but you can't do that"
"Why not?"
"Because it's freaking me out"
This map is not upside down
251–260 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#252another reason why w -> e makes sense to me is that most cultures see progression as from left to right. in terms of timekeeping, west is in the "past" and east is in the "future", so it makes sense west would be on the left, and east would be on the right, and n up, s down as the result.
Re: This map is not upside down
#253Whilst this map may be not upside down, it is just wrong - it has Crimean peninsula marked as russian, disregarding all existing border treaties and being valid in only one fascist kingdom.
Re: This map is not upside down
#254Fun fact: former Brazilian president Dilma Roussef took this map to show to Xi Jiping, her dearest friend at BRICS.
Thing is, in China, any map that doesn't show Taiwan as being part of China is illegal. This map doesn't show that.
Things didn't go as smooth as she expected.
Re: This map is not upside down
#255Splitting the east/west sides with the Atlantic instead of the Pacific can also be interesting.
Re: This map is not upside down
#256Honorary mention to one of the officials maps of Argentina https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/me...
Casually claiming a bunch of British territories
Re: This map is not upside down
#257A south-up map article that doesn't mention the classic (pre-internet even) Theory of Continental Drip? (basically that you can overlay "teardrop" shapes on south america, africa, mexico, and a bunch of other places depending on how artistic you get about it; though there were apparently later attempts to tie it to actual plate tectonics, it was originally a simple visual pun...)
Re: This map is not upside down
#258The thing I resent most is the terms Global North and Global South. It seems like an offensive classification no matter which side you are placed.
China is an incredibly rich, highly developed industrial economy with a history that goes back thousands of years with massive cultural influence. They are firmly in the northern hemisphere. They have high speed electric trains and their cities look like something out of Blade Runner. I live in a comparatively underdeveloped, de-industrialised Australia, way to the South where we get classified as part of the North because white people invaded 200 years ago? If we are ex-colonial doesn't that put us in the South?
As much as I love New Zealand its very clear visiting that they suffer massive under investment compared even to Australia though at least they have an orbital launch capacity but then so does India which is in the South. Is it because we speak a European language. Why is Argentina, the country with nuclear technology that build our research/medical reactor in the South when we don't have that technology?
It is completely arbitrary, political and divisive. It portrays countries like Australia and NZ as being in conflict with our neighbor when we have had really good relations with our neighbors. It puts China in with countries they have territorial disputes with. It puts Russia in with Ukraine. I don't get it.
Re: This map is not upside down
#259The 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…
I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.
[0] page 907: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...
Re: This map is not upside down
#260Earlier 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.
I’m not sure it’s arbitrary. For one, starting at the top and ending at the bottom is natural progress of things because of gravity. I’m not sure if that means anything, but down-to-up seems very unnatural (of coure I can’t ignore my cultural biases). Is there any writing systems like that?
It is indeed rare, I could find only a single example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanunoo_script