That map is upside down, as the convention is that north is up. It's so widespread that people also say that they live "up north" or "down south".
˙ɹǝɥʇᴉǝ uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ʇou sᴉ ʇxǝʇ sᴉɥʇ 'ɔᴉʇuɐpǝd ƃuᴉǝq ǝɹ,ǝʍ ɟᴉ 'ɹO
This map is not upside down
411–420 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#412Re: This map is not upside down
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Gravity is just a random natural process to pick for your point. You could just as easily say “bottom to top is natural because that’s the direction trees grow”. It’s all arbitrary.
yes and we daily see plants growing upward rapidly like 9.8 m/s²... maybe vapour and smoke going up are which we experience collectively as upward going things, but those are quite rare compared to like everything which falls to the ground.
Re: This map is not upside down
#414Almost every map is oriented wrong. They should be oriented towards the East (orient comes from the Latin word for east)
Re: This map is not upside down
#415.lufpleh eb nac snoitnevnoC
Re: This map is not upside down
#416>Viewed with south on top, a map of the world can seem strange and unfamiliar.
Actually no, we could say this one is the closest we might build from the most usual one. Now, not everyone might be equally at ease with this but this is it, how much can we stretch from the most frequent view before we feel some difficulties to find familiar repairs. Here it's not even using an alternative projection.
Re: This map is not upside down
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh? I think the outrage over making the reader feel like "a bad or prejudiced person" that accompanies any invitation to challenge assumptions is so tedious. How come this culture war mindset infuses everything we do online now? Nowhere does this map or its description even imply you are a bad person. It's pure ... projection
"Deciding to put south, or north, at the top of maps is a decision of consequence. Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’ This can influence our interpretation of maps at both global and local scales." There it is, the implication that "North is up" is morally bad. Since it's an implication, it does not need to be read that way, but it's clearly there.
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Re: This map is not upside down
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map. 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…
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Re: This map is not upside down
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because their population is so huge. Their Dollar GDP is about 2/3 that of the USA and is 4.5x that of Japan. In a sense it’s set of highly developed urban industrial zones that also has a massive underdeveloped rural area.
And that's why it is called "developing" - because some parts are developed but some are massively underdeveloped.
Sure, and I'm not arguing that designation is wrong, just that people have a tendency to package up a lot of assumptions with the developing country status that don't necessarily apply. It's a technical designation that needs to be taken into context.
My wife is Chinese and last year we went to my father in law's home village in Hebei and stayed with his brother and his family. They have a really nice bungalow they moved into about 10 years ago in a compound right next to the decaying remains of their former house. Almost the whole village has been rebuilt in the last few decades. Hardly anywhere in China is anything like the way it was 30 years ago.
Growing up in Shropshire in the 70s and 80s there were plenty of people in the little villages and isolated farm houses that lived like it was still the 1800s. France too in the early 2000s. Development is never evenly distributed.
Re: This map is not upside down
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone from the southern hemisphere, the only thing more patronizing and infuriating than this is the insistence from the same moralizing group that my country isn’t part of “The West”, despite it being physically and culturally there.
I try to say "countries around the northern Atlantic" because that's really what people mean by "West".
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