381–390 of 540 posts
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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.
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I don’t seem to even get this effect, the map looks upside down not mind blowing. If I turn a mug over it’s not a mind blowing new thing, it’s an upside down mug.
Your analogy is not quite appropriate. An upside down mug is "wrong". The mug looses its meaning and you have to turn it around to use it as a mug. That's not the case with a map. An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map. The fact that it is upside down is not supposed to mind blowing, it's the fact that it isn't upside down at all. We are just used to it being represented this way up, but there's…
Is it as useful and/or efficient though? I could write a phrase in English from right to left and if you really wanted you could read it, but it would be highly inefficient.
An efficient society sometimes has to pick conventions (how to write text, how to print a map, what characters to use, etc) and I find not interesting to point that other conventions could have been used.
> 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.
Out of curiosity, why do you think humanity tends to read from top down? We do have inherent bias living in a world with gravity. Though such bias may be subtle, and any attempts to evince deep meaning futile, it is nevertheless present.
Same reason for writing left to right probably (given someone that writes with the right, but that seems to be more common).
I prefer maps where the arctic ice is shown in white. I know it isn't a landmass but you can go for a walk on it, unlike all the other blue areas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t seem to even get this effect, the map looks upside down not mind blowing. If I turn a mug over it’s not a mind blowing new thing, it’s an upside down mug.
Your analogy is not quite appropriate. An upside down mug is "wrong". The mug looses its meaning and you have to turn it around to use it as a mug. That's not the case with a map. An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map. The fact that it is upside down is not supposed to mind blowing, it's the fact that it isn't upside down at all. We are just used to it being represented this way up, but there's…
To me at least, it feels very wrong to see English written right to left, but I also know it wouldn't be objectively wrong.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block. And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
> while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block What? That sounds great! So if you're at house number 247 could you deduce, in meters, how far away house 1483 is?