Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This map is not upside down

maps.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 540 posts

Re: This map is not upside down

#431

Post by MangoToupe »

vladms wrote: post #385
MangoToupe wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think might have more to do with the ink getting wiped/mangled when the first books were written. Even today, if I would be to fill a page bottom to up while writing with an ink pen, I would probably make some mess of the text already written. Same reason for writing left to right probably (given someone that writes with the right, but that seems to be more common).

Perhaps! Then why do any societies write right to left?

Re: This map is not upside down

#432

Post by sunrunner »

nathan_compton wrote: post #428
vincvinc wrote: post #346

Earlier 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

Nuclear pun.

The Gall of the commenter to exploit such a Goode opportunity.

Re: This map is not upside down

#433

Post by mc32 »

opello wrote: post #322
travisjungroth wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m in Peru right now, and people talk about the local cultures in comparison to Western culture and I find it kind of confusing. They’re certainly not Eastern here. It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.

> The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. It doesn't even make sense there. It's not really a logical group of things that are geographically West of anything. The abstract cultural idea of "Western Civilization" or "the West" are poorly named.

It does make sense when you realize it’s a legacy term. Lots of things are legacies from the past.

Re: This map is not upside down

#434

Post by voxleone »

whstl wrote: post #186
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…

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 have a feeling you're a fellow Brazilian. Brazil has been Catholic for ages, so leaving it out of the “Western” category is honestly laughable. That said, the map actually gets it right -- it shows Brazil as not Western, but in a way that’s not cringey.

Re: This map is not upside down

#435

Post by sanderjd »

strken wrote: post #394
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.

Steady on now: there's an interesting psychological effect going on. A well known art exercise is to draw a subject upside down, particularly a person or a scene with a clear usual orientation. When you take something you're very familiar with and turn it upside down, you see all the details - volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour - with fresh eyes. With art, it becomes easier to draw a…

This is all very interesting, but I'm sorry, personally I just feel the same as the poster you replied to. I don't experience this as anything weird, I just experience it as if I'm looking at a map from the top.

Re: This map is not upside down

#436

Post by vladms »

jcattle wrote: post #391
vladms wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean, to me at least it is also interesting. Like Japanese writing or Arabic. It's interesting because it is different, there's a different predominant convention. You can also think further about how the writing convention might have had an impact on culture and the society itself. Also thinking of maps and Japan: where I am from (Germany) public overview maps of parks or street maps usually have north as up. In J…

Yes, I think there are many interesting things to consider about maps (like projection, orientation maps fixed on a panel/wall, orientation for digital maps). All those discussion will also transmit the basic idea (there is no "good/bad" way) while also discussing other problems ("can't represent area well", "people like different options", "different cases require different orientation").

Re: This map is not upside down

#437

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: This map is not upside down

#438

Post by potato3732842 »

navane wrote: post #147
navane wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We print black on white. Does that mean that words are bad and only defile the blank sheet?

What does the transition from white chalk on blackboard to black markers on whiteboard mean?

What about green chalkboards and multi colored whiteboard markers?

We're deep in contrivance at this point.

Re: This map is not upside down

#439

Post by ndriscoll »

matrss wrote: post #407
ndriscoll wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously "up" is the direction of of the normal vector for Earth's orbit around the Sun. North is then tilted but mostly up.

/s, right? Since the path of earth's orbit around the sun lies on a plane your decision to make the normal vector point in the same general direction of "north" seems arbitrary too. You could just as well call the negative of that the normal vector, and then south would be mostly up instead. In any case, within the reference frame of earth that seems to be a bad definition. Contrary to popular belief, I am pretty sur…

Mostly sarcasm (you already get North from Earth's rotation on its axis and don't need the Sun), but fixing "up" on a map (so that it doesn't rotate as you move around) makes sense, and agreeing with general mathematical convention is convenient so that we don't need to teach more exceptions. If we're going to flip the sign of something it should be electric charge.

Re: This map is not upside down

#440

Post by vladms »

MangoToupe wrote: post #431
vladms wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think might have more to do with the ink getting wiped/mangled when the first books were written. Even today, if I would be to fill a page bottom to up while writing with an ink pen, I would probably make some mess of the text already written. Same reason for writing left to right probably (given someone that writes with the right, but that seems to be more common).

Perhaps! Then why do any societies write right to left?

I don't know the distribution of people using left or right across the world and how it is determined. It might be even close to 50% everywhere in early infancy, but once one "main direction" emerged at society level (by luck - like there were 4 people writing in that direction versus 2 in the other), maybe everybody is "pushed" in that direction.

Anyhow it's a matter of trade-offs and each society ended up with different ones - I mean direction I find least controversial, think of Chinese and Ancient Egyptian scripts that are logographic - why did they end up with that?

We can also analyze if some convention makes sense or not and why, even if the initial decision was taken for the "wrong" (or some irrational) reasons (ex: the village priest heard a voice).

Post reply on HN