Pfff, wake me up when someone makes a sideways map, where either east or west is "up".
This map is not upside down
521–530 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#522Pfff, wake me up when someone makes a sideways map, where either east or west is "up".
Boring. We need a map as seen from the center of the earth out, instead of seen from space.
Re: This map is not upside down
#523Re: This map is not upside down
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you're sitting on the opposite side of a table looking at a map that a person on the other side laid out in front of them, you don't just see the map from the other side? You instead see details about volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour, and so on? I sincerely just see the same map even if I'm across the table, except flipped. I'm not sure how it would impact my drawing a map, thou…
I can read upside down, but it's an acquired skill. I can't read at a 90 degree angle without difficulty, although I could probably learn to.
It's not that I don't see the map from the other side, it's that when it's the right way up I see all the extra information I have about it. For example, I bet an eye tracker would show me focusing on Western Europe, Central Asia, Australia, and the US. When the map is flipped, I see it closer to how it really is because I can ignore those preconceived ideas more easily. I don't see e.g. the Iberian peninsula as represented by a land mass, I see the actual land mass, and can concentrate on its size and distance more easily.
This is really interesting!
Re: This map is not upside down
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I do realize it's a legacy term. A legacy from the 1500s if not from earlier during the split of the Roman Empire into Greek-East and Latin-West. A legacy that predates Modern English as a language. A legacy the use of which makes no geographic sense with a line at around 22°E Longitude in Europe and then including parts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand all of which would not have been included as having representative cultures at the time of the establishment of the term. But sure, I guess a more descriptive, representative, relevant term isn't something to reasonably call out as nonsense.
Being a product of history, a legacy, is not a shortcut to sensible. It's an explanation for why the term is used. My complaint was that it does not even "make sense" in the context of the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth.
Re: This map is not upside down
#526The 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.
C'mon, let teenagers have some fun.
Re: This map is not upside down
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you feeling down, or are things looking up for you? Do you have people to look up to, or do you spend more time looking down on others? Are you on top of the world, or working your way up from the bottom? Etc, etc. It's suffused throughout our language, and not just this one language, either.
What’s up with people thinking that the word “up” cannot have negative connotations?
Their thinking is all messed down.
Re: This map is not upside down
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you turn my home into a warzone and I have to flee, plus I may buy into your propaganda of a better life, so surely that's a good indication of... what? Developed vs. developing? I'd perhaps call that cynicism.
Good governance helps a lot even if you had previously suffered invasion, we’re occupied or were a colony: see Taiwan (invaded, occupied), Panama (invaded), USA (colony and invaded subsequently). It’s doable but people will have to want it. It doesn’t come free and it doesn’t come by listening to charlatans like Marx and his peddlers who promise utopia at no cost but the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. From then on it…
This perspective ignores the relationships and influence of other players inside and (even more) outside of the country. It is not "someone with strong singular vision". Specifically, historically, if the USA does not want you to prosper (because your independence threatens their objectives), you will not.
Re: This map is not upside down
#529Earlier 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.
"The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives. It hasn't been a directional term for centuries. Everyone intuitively knows this based on the usage but, every now and then, someone like you thinks they are clever and nobody else understands.
> "The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives.
Yep. This is the definition I use.
Re: This map is not upside down
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an Australian, I do find it a bit perjorative for countries north of us (many of them in the northern hemisphere!) to be deemed the "global south", while we are excluded despite actually being the only inhabited continent entirely in the south. It just reminds one that nobody cares about the southern hemisphere, and that northern hemisphere types think anything south of the mediterranean is "south". North/South do…
Why do you think the southern hemisphere is mostly ignored? genuinely curious.
Why? Because we are a small fraction of the population and economy of the planet.
How? Most of the population in the southern hemisphere is in ex-colonies from the north; our cultures are thus full of concepts that don't really work but we make do. Simple things like all the holidays being inappropriately aligned to the seasons, or the constellations in our skies being afterthoughts in the system, or of course maps being north up without a second thought.