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Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

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Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#571

Post by tomxor »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #501
tomxor wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a particularly strange kind of overthinking, implicitly acknowledging the medical field is complex enough to consult a professional, and yet thinking something as common and (relatively) simple as interpreting left/right from patient descriptions hasn't already been considered. That's before even getting into the assumption of face to face orientation over a phone... is that in virtual terms, or in terms of ab…

As I said elsewhere, but I think it's worth repeating here - In an effort to avoid ambiguity, I always talk to my doctor in terms of "driver's side" and "passenger side" - thus adopting the maritime approach, but in more common terms.

That's country specific, maybe you should use port and starboard.

Really though, just use _your_ left and right as most people do, because as has been mentioned, the standard is for doctors to refer to and visualise left and right from the patients perspective - so every time you do something different they have to transform, translate or clarify which increases chance of mistakes.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#572

Post by qtzfz »

jjav wrote: post #565
el-salvador wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's used, but for the old ones with horses. This was new for me. The Spanish words carro, carreta, coche, carretilla, carrito all mean "something that has wheels on it", but the meaning keeps changing between car, horse drawn carriage, baby stroller, shopping cart, horse drawn cart or toy car between countries. Fortunately it's easy to figure out from context and doesn't have possible misunderstandings as the Span…

> Fortunately it's easy to figure out from context and doesn't have possible misunderstandings as the Spanish word for straw. What/where are the misunderstandings for sorbeto?

[dead]

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#573

Post by callamdelaney »

gkoberger wrote: post #105
callamdelaney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can dock a boat anyway you like, or have been instructed to do so by the dockmaster.

From Wikipedia: “Vessels with bilateral symmetry have left and right halves which are mirror images of each other. One asymmetric feature is where access to a boat, ship, or aircraft is at the side, it is usually only on the port side (hence the name)”

There are definitely more boats with bilateral symmetry than asymmetric these days.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#574

Post by lostlogin »

rprospero wrote: post #367
lostlogin wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can, maybe. However I’m a radiographer and pictures like this are my job. The orientation is screwed up and images should almost never be displayed like this. If the patient’s organs are in non-standard locations (situs inversus, dextrocardia etc), something very bad will happen when orientations are messed with. Use standard orientations and label the images.

I fully agree with you. I was mostly posting as an example that "left is the patient's left" is not sufficient without other standards (like image orientation).

And that went straight over my head.

Your point was well made.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#575

Post by lostlogin »

sandworm101 wrote: post #544
lostlogin wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. I was recently involved in a case where a patient decided that their left should be called the right side during a phone consultation as that would help their doctor. Good times.

I have heard stories of patients, entirely on their own, using black markers to indicate which leg/arm was to be operated upon. Surgeons are entirely OK with this. They appreciate it. I also heard a legend of a patient who themselves marked the wrong leg. This wasn't discovered until after sedation. The procedure was canceled until everything was clarified. When having my arm x-rayed years ago they places a small pad…

The letter being revered is a way of indicating if the beam went from the back to front (posterior to anterior) PA or front to back, AP.

X-rays are effectively shadows and things further from the X-ray plate get more magnified. Large structures like the chest benefit from being done a certain way, like having the heart near the plate. That way it’s less magnified.

PA or AP is often a thing you see on the corner of films, indicating the technique.

The film also used to be processed in a film processor, and it was very easy to accidentally flip. This is another reason we have conventions.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#576

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #450
yafbum wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the US and other places that have a grid system as their main road planning principle and route naming principle? In Europe, where roads tend to follow the terrain more, I've not really heard this.

Yes, highly likely. My experience of such is mostly in the Canadian prairies, which are sectioned into square mile grids.

I started to make a joke about correction lines, but couldn't come up with a punchline :-(

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#577

Post by wpietri »

anilakar wrote: post #199
wpietri wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concision is way less important than clarity.

Clarity stems from brevity i.e. concise, carefully chosen words that leave no room for ambiguity.

Clarity absolutely does not stem from brevity. Brevity is good, but it pushes toward ambiguity, not clarity.

For example, consider spelling a word. The briefest approach is to say the names of letters. But these are similar, often differing only in one phoneme. E.g., P and B differentiating sounds are both bilabial plosives, differing only in whether they are voiced. But people for whom clarity is important will use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. There, you'd say "papa" and "bravo". [1] It is much less brief, but much more clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#578

Post by wpietri »

tomohelix wrote: post #156
wpietri wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the reason you have in mind? I suspect it's different, in that I expect the reason for people is something like "handedness makes people better at violence". Whereas I suspect chirality is more like driving on the right/left side of the road. Which one you pick doesn't matter, but picking is less chaotic than not picking.

I actually don't know. Like I mentioned above, there have been a few theories about how life is so strongly asymmetrical but nothing concrete or proven yet. In fact, it is a bit counterintuitive because all natural chemical reactions produces racemic mixtures and only life produces specific stereoisomers. It also means life has evolved to give up nearly half of the natural resources available, a very strange thing in…

Speaking as a nominal leftie who is effectively ambidextrous for everything but writing, I don't think we're better. I'm just not particularly good at sports. Body-things take more time to learn, and I have to practice with both sides if I want to be good at both sides.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but your notion that being ambidextrous is better is a huge assumption. Having a dominant side could have the same sort of benefit that specialization usually does: better for the cases that really matter, worse for the cases that are less important.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#579

Post by kalleboo »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #200
fargle wrote: post #135

When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green. A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs. FWIW.

This would probably throw my girlfriend off. She has some kind of right/left dyslexia. When she's driving and I'm giving directions I have to tell her "short turn" or "long turn". Long turn being left, longer because it's across a lane, right turns are shorter. But if someone told her that left is shorter than right for remembering purposes, it would probably mess her up more when following driving directions.

I also have a hesitation when it comes to left/right. As a kid I could only ever remember it as "left is the arm I wear my watch" so even as an adult I always had to take a second to think "watch arm or not" even a decade into the cell phone era when I stopped wearing a watch.

Now I live in Japan and when I speak Japanese I don't have the same problem at all. The brain (or at least my brain,) is a weird.

Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

#580

Post by altec3 »

illegalsmile wrote: post #540
tuatoru wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in general hiking, referring to streams and rivers one may follow or cross, there are the "true left" and "true right" banks of the stream. Meaning, left or right looking the way the water is flowing: downstream.

We always say "river left" or "river right" but same same.

Yep, these are the terms I've always used when whitewater rafting.
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