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This map is not upside down

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Re: This map is not upside down

#421

Post by travisjungroth »

whstl wrote: post #344
adwn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White. It definitely does not. Russia, for example, would be considered "White", but is decidedly not part of "the West".

Exactly. Also the "only in the Northern Hemisphere" part goes out the window as soon as Australia is mentioned. It doesn't matter that Canada and USA have strong Native populations, "it's different in the south". In my view the "you're not West" discourse is just another tool to fuck with the souther hemisphere. Fucks you in the head to get this crap from "both sides".

My point is more like Australia is normally considered part of the West, even though it shares longitudes with China and Japan. “The West” and “Western longitudes” really breaks down in the Southern hemisphere. It also breaks down in other ways.

Re: This map is not upside down

#422

Post by bandie91 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #43
alwa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, and.. with the map South-up, all the stuff is crammed down at the bottom now, no? Aren’t most of the people and land and things in the North part? A casual Google [0] suggests 88% of the humans, for example? I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing, but it does make sense to me that you scan something “earlier” or “later” in casting your eye across a mass of stuff. If we read from top to bottom… doesn't…

>I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing The author has an inferiority complex.

the author wants to reinforce the lower instinct in people around the world of being tribal rivals toward each other across heavily averaged-out economic indicators in the geographically northern and southern regions of the globe.

Re: This map is not upside down

#423

Post by onraglanroad »

WA wrote: post #365
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The needle is pointing to the magnetic south, which is near our geographic north.

Err, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_magnetic_pole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass

From your own first link:

"Because opposite poles attract, Earth's south magnetic pole is physically actually a magnetic north pole"

Re: This map is not upside down

#425

Post by Levitz »

isqueiros wrote: post #361
j4coh wrote: post #329

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.

a mug cannot function when upside down and yet when you change the arbitrary orientation of a map it can still function the same you literally missed the point of the _title_ of the article, quite impressive

The direction with which you perceive the mug is not any more arbitrary than that of the map, you are just prioritizing the direction gravity takes rather than its opposite, same as magnetism and the north.

You can change your entire system of reference and the setup still makes sense. Same with the map.

Re: This map is not upside down

#426

Post by jzb »

rivetfasten wrote: post #7

The West Wing has such a good clip about this: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw

Came here to see if anyone recommended that clip. I watched it just last night, it never fails to crack me up, especially CJ's reaction. "You can't do that!" "Why not?" "Because it's freaking me out!"

Effective scene, too -- I've thought a bit differently about maps and some other things ever since, things that might not have ever occurred to me before. It's not a bad idea to expose people to different map projections / configurations to shake up their view of the world.

Re: This map is not upside down

#427

Post by ClarityJones »

tikhonj wrote: post #401

For whatever reason, the Berkeley campus maps[1] have East at the top. And, for whatever reason, it always felt natural—probably because it matches the terrain (East is up-hill). It's still surprising how much that has colored my mental orientation in Berkeley even 15 years later. I now consciously know to correct for it, but still think of campus "oriented" in that direction. For years I had to really think about it…

That's neat. The shape of the campus does fit better on the 8.5x11" paper when printed that way, but that wouldn't have required the text to be aligned the same. I see the main entrance is on Oxford, to the (not South...) West, making this a case where the campus has an orientation and they're putting the top of the campus at the top of the map.

Re: This map is not upside down

#428

Post by nathan_compton »

vincvinc wrote: post #346
patternMachine wrote: post #48

The 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…

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

Nuclear pun.

Re: This map is not upside down

#429

Post by Levitz »

kens wrote: post #177
hyperhello wrote: post #2

> 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.

I highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", which discusses how metaphors are not arbitrary, but are part of schemas. For instance, there are whole classes of orientational metaphors that fall into the schemas: "more is up, less is down", "good is up, bad is down", "virtue is up, depravity is down", "rational is up, emotional is down", "having control is up, being subject to control is down", and so on. (Yes,…

The problem is not considering them arbitrary or not. We are sure to derive expressions from reality in some way, I'm sure that many languages have different versions of saying that something is so boring it puts someone "to sleep", no matter if speech is not hypnotic, the human experience will relate the boredom with sleep.

The problem is when from that we derive, with little justification and with the by now widely recognized horrible standards of social science, that in those rationalizations lie very important hidden truths about our society and psychology.

Many things boil down to an implicit association test of some sort, and that's now considered basically junk science.

There's a pipeline in which basically anything that can be considered a social issue in some way can get picked up by someone in the social sciences whose biases it confirms and given a justification, and since it has a political backing and is powered by preconceived bias and academia it goes through and actually has a negative effect on the world.

The stupid Stanford prison experiment. Facilitated communication. Power posing. Trigger warnings. Learning styles. Priming. All bullshit. All popular. All part of "the science".

And people wonder why there's a problem of institutional trust.

Re: This map is not upside down

#430

Post by nathan_compton »

schoen wrote: post #54
hyperhello wrote: post #2

> 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.

At one point a character in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum says "archetypes don't exist, the body exists" and then gives some sexual and reproductive examples, followed by > And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because y…

I think its pretty weird to take this passage at face value. "Foucault's Pendulum" is, at least in part, about how facile this kind of yarn spinning is. Any prejudice or conclusion anyone might like to make is a few waves of the hand away from something that looks like a good argument.

Interestingly, Aristotelian physics would have described down as "the true, appropriate place" for material objects and "up" as the unnatural state, only produced by violence and bound to be corrected by the universe.

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