Honorary mention to one of the officials maps of Argentina https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/me...
Just to clarify, it might be official but I'm argentinean and I never saw a map like this with south on top
This map is not upside down
281–290 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness
Don’t bother trying to learn the new shibboleths. By the time the majority has accepted them, they’ll be outdated and the progressives will have moved onto another set. Before ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ we had ‘first world’ and ‘third world’.
Re: This map is not upside down
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.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?
Heck if I know. All I know is I am a lot more worked up about the misuse of “less” when the correct word is “fewer”.
Re: This map is not upside down
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. No, the preference is conventional. I should note, though, that Chinese maps were traditionally south-up. There's no reason to expect what hemisphere people are from to control that decision. (Not only did the Chinese come fro…
…except when they put East at the top. The compass points go 東南西北, after all.
Re: This map is not upside down
#285Apparently we're due for a pole flip [0] pretty soon.
If that happens, do we stick with putting North at the top and all maps look like this, or do we stick with keeping the maps the same way up and putting South at the top?
Re: This map is not upside down
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange. “Upper Egypt” is the southern part of Egypt and “Lower Egypt” is the northern part. The source of the Nile (to the south of Egypt) was the key reference point to ancient Egyptians. I searched, and Ptolemy was a Greek who lived in Egypt, not an ethnic Egyptian.
The first time I realized the Nile flowed from South to North, I thought someone was pranking me. It just felt fundamentally wrong. That’s probably because when you look at a globe, the Nile seems like it should be dripping downward…
But the Mediterranean is right there. Did you think the Mediterranean drains into some sinkhole in the middle of Africa?
Re: This map is not upside down
#287The 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 B…
I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt the same. There are so many edge cases to the incredibly broad and outdated classification of the world in terms of “north” (rich) and “south” (poor), the terms have lost all meaning. They don’t account for the fact that countries rise and fall. It speaks to the human penchant for short term black and white thinking.
Re: This map is not upside down
#288On account of the earth spinning, and all the globally universal constants that derive from this fact, from the magnetic field to the sun rising in the East, at the very least an orientation which puts a cardinal direction on top was inevitable.
Re: This map is not upside down
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
That is such an odd list. I also love that Singapore is both 'developing' on this list and int the Small Island Developing States list, despite it easily being in the top 10 of most developed countries in the world.
Yep, living in a de-industrialised, undiversified economy, second most southern in the global north I can only wish by kids had access to a Singaporean education.
Regional politics is complicated. Australia needs to be in the ASEAN group. We have common interests in regional security and stability and have complementary capabilities and resources. But its convenient to label us as outsiders and characterise us as imperialists or American agents (which sadly we sort of are but give us some options). Doesn't matter that we are right here and 20% of our population originated from the asian countries to the north of us. For some reason we are on the imperialist side.
Re: This map is not upside down
#290The 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…
It’s also one of those things that gets repeated as a ‘myth’ or ‘misconception’ so often that nowadays, the real misconception is that there is a significant population of literate humans who haven’t encountered this topic at least once.