Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have written the same article in four words.
And even at that a quarter of the words aren't needed.
I think "sundial" alone is probably enough for most people to understand.
Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#42That's a lot of words for what can be summarized in a short sentence: clockwise is clockwise because that's how a sundial moves in the Northern Hemisphere.
That was my guess, but stopped reading after the third paragraph, as there was no substance in the article by that point.
Wow. I did not expect this from HN. It's an interesting, well written account that covers a variety of things in human history that move in such a pattern, yet here are these two belittling it for its lack of brevity.
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#43Sundial. Northern hemisphere. Done.
If you didn't care to read it, why comment?
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#44Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
But almost the perfect amount of words for someone who wanted to write an article about a subject and not a quick summary.
I did not even read it, one picture was good enough
That's nice. If there were a competition of who could grasp the main point from this article the quickest without even reading it you might be in the running for first.
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my guess, but stopped reading after the third paragraph, as there was no substance in the article by that point.
Wow. I did not expect this from HN. It's an interesting, well written account that covers a variety of things in human history that move in such a pattern, yet here are these two belittling it for its lack of brevity.
I think part of it is that the article sounds incredibly speculative and "just so". It doesn't, in other words, appear to be researched, and it is about something (the causality of our directional associations) which would be really hard to know even if you were to stare at all the known historical facts without uncertainty about them.
So if it's all conjecture, and you wipe the conjectures away, you really do have "I think it's either because shadows in the Northern hemisphere go from left to right when you're facing North, or because when you track the Sun across the sky from that hemisphere, you have to face South and then the Sun describes an arc from left to right."
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#47That's a lot of words for what can be summarized in a short sentence: clockwise is clockwise because that's how a sundial moves in the Northern Hemisphere.
Which surprised me that he didn't pad it out more by talking about why it was based on the Northern Hemisphere. (He calls it "an accident of ... location.") I am unsatisfied with the explanation.
The Northern Hemisphere has twice as much land as the Southern. Today 88% of the World's population lives in the Northern hemisphere. The fact that we are North-biased is not a fluke, but an effect of geography.
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#48Regarding the questions at the bottom, much of this is believed to do with one leg being more dominant than the other. The stronger leg may take longer strides. This manifests in surprising emergent phenomena. Grocery stores for instance tend to be laid out so you enter on the right by the veggies and circle around the back to the meats and dairies and come around the left to check out. This isn't just limited to hum…
The writer's belief that all racing is counterclockwise
turns out to not be correct for horse racing, some
auto racing, and even some long-duration foot racing.
http://risaaustralia.blogspot.com/2012/12/why-race-courses-a...
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1001/why-are-races-...
Re: Why is clockwise Clockwise? (2008)
#49It sounds like a really reasonable explanation.
Until you mount the sundial on the wall.
On a wall-mounted sundial, the shadow moves counter-clockwise (in the Northern hemisphere, the hemisphere referred to throughout this article).
Yes, the idea of mapping the horizontal sundial to a vertically-oriented image in our minds seems to hold a certain sense...
...but the question of the vertically mounted sundial should not be so quickly dismissed.