In Japan, physical maps like in parks and city information booths are oriented to be aligned with the actual geography. Meaning, north on the map points to actual north.
Made me think of how much more accurate the end to end process of putting up that map has to be vs. maps oriented by "north is up".
Just imagine the map needs to be moved by 10m and rotated around for some last minute restructuring of the park before finalizing the project.
Anyway, it was fun to read these maps and think about how many assumptions we carry around that are shaped by objects around us we use daily.
This is similar to the modern car GPS question → do you always have the little arrow pointing up in the middle and the map rotates, or is the map still and the car rotates?
I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
People read things top to bottom. If you have half a page worth of content will you put it at the top and leave the bottom half of the page empty or the opposite? If you are writing a TL;DR will you put it at the top or bottom of the page?
Putting the north at the top was an artifact of the need to select a standard orientation when the printing press enabled mass production of maps.
It was going to be north or south, thanks to the widespread existence of the magnetic compass at the time, and the printing press was invented by people in the north.
North was established earlier by European sailors as the north star is visible in the sky and is hugely useful for navigation, divining latitude etc. in the northern hemisphere. Printing press and maps really started following their knowledge and needs, where previously it was often religious (east at top facing jerusalem or 'oriented')
> 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 you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
You could also argue that because of gravity and potential energy, up is usually the result of purposive action and effort, while down is often the result of accident or neglect ("you often hurt yourself falling"). That potential energy (and wide-open space) can also be used for maneuvering, so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground. The lower party has less energy available to direct toward the opponent, and usually less room to move, being more constrained by the presence of the ground.
First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory.
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.
I'd bet a lot of this behavior is heavily correlated with how we generally read top to bottom, which is in itself, probably an arbitrary decision made by ancient text writers.
Writing top to bottom, and even left to right has/had advantages for mostly right-handed writers to avoid moving your hand over and smudging previously written text.
Writing top-to-bottom has advantages for all writers whose eyes are above their hands. The bit of the writing surface that's blocked by your hand hasn't been written on yet.
Top to bottom advantages everyone. Left to right advantages the right-handed. Right handed being the majority, top to bottom and left to right wins in almost every writing system.
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”.
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 it make sense to put the part where the stuff is earlier in order than the part with mainly oceans?
It makes slightly more sense to me to argue about which continental masses should go on the left or the right of the map, e.g. [1]. Although compositionally, if you put the Eurasian continent on the left side (“first” for left-to-right readers), doesn’t the massive Pacific exaggerate the impression of a discontinuity or a vast gap between geographical clusters of humans?
I read it and their methodology is embarassingly bad, especially for the kind of study that can be done en masse so easily (heck, a Twitter poll would be more useful). N=28, where all were undergraduates, and 24 were women. Could easily be influenced by the college campus, location, student housing, etc. It's literally the kind of project you'd do in middle school for a science fair.
Probably as kid, but at some point in maturing you learn that what you consider good/bad is your own prejudice and working off that is going to cause social troubles.
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block.
And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
I haven't seen the increase by five, but by twos when the odds/evens are separated across the street from each other. 101's next door neighbor is 103 while 102 is across the street next door to 104.
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 arbitrary orientation.
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east.
Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise". So to "orient" would specifically mean looking East.
Before compasses all indicated North, "the North" was associated with cold and evil, the south was associated with warmth and prosperity, and the East was considered neutral when establishing bearings.
> Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise".
Even more literally "of the rising" ("occidental" meaning "of the falling"). The sun is of course implied here, but the Latin verbs orior and occido more generally indicate rising and falling motions of anyone and anything.
Not just land area; ~90% of the world population lives on the northern hemisphere, so it's more important in that sense, political and historical considerations aside.
I get the philosophical idea of challenging our default assumptions and remember people who are’t right in the middle of our conventional map. Good thing to do, sure.
But, the fact that Africa and South America are pointy on their southern sides makes these kind of maps look awkward and bad IMO. It is like adjusting a paragraph so that the extra white space is in the first, instead of the last, line. Or putting the shortest line of a multi line function definition at the top, instead of the bottom.
We’ve all seen ragged-right and ragged-left typesetting, but never ragged-top.
Yeah I'm not sure why taking the same projection and mirroring it does anything. Surely you'd want a different style of map entirely for this kind of project? Africa could be much larger in it for instance
Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.
Yeah, sure, I've heard that before... master/slave, black/white lists... and now, north/south.
I wonder what they'll come up with now to explain reading from left to right (don't even think about the majority of right-handed writers, that would ruin the fun).
".snoitnevnoc fo yticilpmis eht dnihneb noitnetni neddih a eb ot dnuob si erehT"
This map feels confusing because Canada, Russia, Greenland and antarctica are the same color, I feel like they should not be the same and antarctica should not be a country color
I was taught in high school that during the Cold War, there were maps with the US centered and USSR divided on either side to imply American unity in the face of opposition.
The maps were common, but there was nothing anti-USSR about them, and they go way back before the Cold War.
It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.
These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.
I bought a similar map from a shop in Australia and thought it was a really cool way to look at things from a different perspective. Perhaps un-surprisingly, it has Australa front and centre.
I think rather than berating people for allegedly stodgy thinking that a better approach is just that everyone has an equal moral right to produce a map in which they are in the position of prominence, and since everyone can do that equally, nobody should be running around complaining about any particular orientation.
Relatedly there's a Map Men video on why north is up. [0] I don't buy the whole top is 'good' and lower is 'bad'. I think the bias is just a lot of the groups that made maps were located north(ish) and traveling roughly southward which made it a convenient orientation, especially during the age of sail.
And looking at the map, it would be hard for those map makers not to be north(ish) since the South is mostly ocean. Not too many civilizations that have sprung up in the ocean.
Intriguing. I wonder if an Arabic reader looks more prominently at the right side (Europe), the way an English speaker looks more prominently at the left side (Africa).
Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.
I think in this case the concept of North came first and which end of a magnet points that way came second. Compasses are old, but not as old as the sunrise/set, which are (presumably) the original vaguely universal directions and define all four cardinal directions.
This is a great map, they should show it alongside the typical one when teaching geography. I'll show this to my kids later, see what they think and ask them to find some countries on it.
A similar change of perspective "trick" is knowing that when we look up at the stars, it's not really "up", it can be "down", too. Imagine being suspended head down, feet stuck to the ground looking at the space below, with billions of light years worth of almost nothing out there. A bit terrifying, I suppose, so maybe don't think too much about it :-)
In practical terms, though, 90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere contains ~65% of the earth's land mass, so it's not entirely without merit that we orient the map that way.
The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.
Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.
So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).
I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.
As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.
Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.
Panel 1: But Libertad¹, you’re hanging it upside down.
Panel 2: Upside down in relation to what? Earth is in space, and space has neither up nor down.
Panel 3: Saying the northern hemisphere is up is a psychological trick from those at the top, so that those who believe we are below continue to believe we are below. And the worst part is that if we keep believing we’re below, we’ll continue to be below! But starting today, that’s over!
Panel 4, top: Where were you, Mafalda?
Panel 4, bottom: I don’t know, but something just came to an end.
North is not up. That would make left west.
When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left, which is east.
In school, everyone learns that north is not up, and south is not down. Only us dumb grown-ups use that. ALL. THE. TIME. ALL. OF. THEM.
Print regular map in a design you like and hang it upside down. It's literally that. Or if you want to be strict you can use "flip" function in image editing tool. You can compensate me for saving your money
Recently I had been looking for a specific map of a local trail system and found a map store near me that might have it, and had seen this exact map in the store. Crazy to see it here a couple days later!
Another fun arbitrary thing is which meridian you decide to cut, because the earth is round.
If you do an image search for, say, "world atlas," you'll see all the maps have cut the Pacific in half, so the West Pacific is at the right edge and the East Pacific is at the left edge of the map.
Now, if you search for, say, "세계전도", then you'll see that most maps have cut the Atlantic in half, because otherwise kids (for whom those atlases are intended) would see their own hometown shoved all the way to the end of the map.
While technically choice of prime meridian is arbitrary, there is a particular cartographic reason to prefer so called Florence meridian, as it minimizes interruption of land masses.
Arguments about map projections are tiring. If you want to understand the whole planet, use a globe. Most people use maps via screens these days and there is no problem with projection or orientation. Most apps will let you orient the map how you like or according to your current bearing etc. and use a local projection. Can't we just stop using these whole world projections completely?
For navigation, having the poles at top and bottom is really the only way to do it. Lining up positions of constant noon sun angle along a horizontal line (i.e. latitude line) makes the paper map correspond nicely to the navigational information available.
Is this map projection making Russia look small an artifact of the projection (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south in this projection in general) or an optical illusion?
Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.
> (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south
Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).
The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.
I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps. When I was growing up in Russia, the map I had in my room was a similar projection -- except with the North up, of course -- and Russia was about the same size on it.
Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:
1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.
2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.
3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.
4. Orienting a map with such an impactful direction at the top creates a strong literal connection to the territory it represents, rather than to a part-abstracted direction that must be identified and agreed.
The sun doesn’t rise directly in the east though unless you live exactly on the equator, and it rises a different amount off of east every day. However, at noon, the sun is always either due north or due south depending on what hemisphere you’re in, so number 3 is quite arguable.
Also the North Star being a thing is quite influential.
In Japan, physical maps like in parks and city information booths are oriented to be aligned with the actual geography. Meaning, north on the map points to actual north.
Made me think of how much more accurate the end to end process of putting up that map has to be vs. maps oriented by "north is up".
Just imagine the map needs to be moved by 10m and rotated around for some last minute restructuring of the park before finalizing the project.
Anyway, it was fun to read these maps and think about how many assumptions we carry around that are shaped by objects around us we use daily.
This is similar to the modern car GPS question → do you always have the little arrow pointing up in the middle and the map rotates, or is the map still and the car rotates?
Honorary mention to one of the officials maps of Argentina https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/me...
90% of the world's population and 68% of the land mass being in the northen hemisphere is probably a good enough reason to put north up top on a map.
Disagree completely.
Your map should be bottom-heavy for stability.
It's true, that's how Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.
No no no.
We should put Asia at the top, Europe bottom left, Africa bottom right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
Also if the map is flat on a table, more stuff is closer to you.
I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
I suppose we can ask Australians and the kiwis.
If it’s at the bottom and you put it on a table, more of the land is closer to you and therefore easier to read.
Its all arbitrary, and we can all make up random minor pro/cons all we like but it don’t change that.
…why? Why is it better for it to be in the upper half of the map than the lower half?
People read things top to bottom. If you have half a page worth of content will you put it at the top and leave the bottom half of the page empty or the opposite? If you are writing a TL;DR will you put it at the top or bottom of the page?
> People read things top to bottom.
Even in Berber?
Putting the north at the top was an artifact of the need to select a standard orientation when the printing press enabled mass production of maps.
It was going to be north or south, thanks to the widespread existence of the magnetic compass at the time, and the printing press was invented by people in the north.
North was established earlier by European sailors as the north star is visible in the sky and is hugely useful for navigation, divining latitude etc. in the northern hemisphere. Printing press and maps really started following their knowledge and needs, where previously it was often religious (east at top facing jerusalem or 'oriented')
What did maps from China look like around then? I assume they'd center their continent somehow
The word "orientation" literally means pointing towards the rising sun i.e. East.
> 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 you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
You could also argue that because of gravity and potential energy, up is usually the result of purposive action and effort, while down is often the result of accident or neglect ("you often hurt yourself falling"). That potential energy (and wide-open space) can also be used for maneuvering, so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground. The lower party has less energy available to direct toward the opponent, and usually less room to move, being more constrained by the presence of the ground.
> so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground
Tell that to a BJJ fighter.
Those who claim the top is viewed as good by most people would also have to defend the claim that most people are Alaskan supremacists.
Started at the bottom, now we're here.
Up-and-coming.
Top-of-the-line.
I could go on, but I don't want to get you down.
Heaven and hell, not hell and heaven. The stock market goes up as spirits rise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
What do you mean by discriminatory?
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north?
Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.
it is discriminatory, though that wasn't the original intention
I'd bet a lot of this behavior is heavily correlated with how we generally read top to bottom, which is in itself, probably an arbitrary decision made by ancient text writers.
Writing top to bottom, and even left to right has/had advantages for mostly right-handed writers to avoid moving your hand over and smudging previously written text.
Writing top-to-bottom has advantages for all writers whose eyes are above their hands. The bit of the writing surface that's blocked by your hand hasn't been written on yet.
How would top-to-bottom benefit right-handed writers any more than left-handed ones?
Top to bottom advantages everyone. Left to right advantages the right-handed. Right handed being the majority, top to bottom and left to right wins in almost every writing system.
And why would that make the top better than the bottom anyway? That's like saying the meal is worse after you finish it.
Because of Primacy Bias.
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?
Just look at how all of the continents tend to be shaped like they are dripping down. That just proves TFA map is upside down.
Any one can make arbitrary reasons to support a decision.
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.
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 it make sense to put the part where the stuff is earlier in order than the part with mainly oceans?
It makes slightly more sense to me to argue about which continental masses should go on the left or the right of the map, e.g. [1]. Although compositionally, if you put the Eurasian continent on the left side (“first” for left-to-right readers), doesn’t the massive Pacific exaggerate the impression of a discontinuity or a vast gap between geographical clusters of humans?
[0] https://brilliantmaps.com/human-hemisphere/#:~:text=88%25%20...
[1] https://www.mapresources.com/products/world-digital-vector-r...
>I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing
The author has an inferiority complex.
They link this[1] article, which I don't plan to read. I, too, rolled my eyes.
1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061140104...
I read it and their methodology is embarassingly bad, especially for the kind of study that can be done en masse so easily (heck, a Twitter poll would be more useful). N=28, where all were undergraduates, and 24 were women. Could easily be influenced by the college campus, location, student housing, etc. It's literally the kind of project you'd do in middle school for a science fair.
Absolutely terrible study. Full paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189192_Spatial_M...
Really? Before you read this article you never associated being on top = good and being at the bottom = bad?
Probably as kid, but at some point in maturing you learn that what you consider good/bad is your own prejudice and working off that is going to cause social troubles.
It's also a wonderful metaphor for how the opposite can also be true.
Japanese addresses that name the blocks, not the streets: https://sive.rs/jadr
West African music that uses the "1" as the end of the phrase instead of the start: https://sive.rs/fela
“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true”, Joan Robinson
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_differe...
Also in the address department: Europe numbers houses roughly sequentially along the whole street, while the Americas (generally) assign house numbers based on the distance to the beginning of the block.
And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!
Sometimes. I know of places in america where numbers are sequential. I know of other places where they a sequential but increase by five.
I haven't seen the increase by five, but by twos when the odds/evens are separated across the street from each other. 101's next door neighbor is 103 while 102 is across the street next door to 104.
Could you share some examples please? I'm not doubting you, just want to look at some maps.
I don't know how to do this... I also don't remember where anymore.
In Brasilia, Brazil only main avenues are named and all addresses are also by block, just like in Japan.
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 arbitrary orientation.
For clarity, you cannot call north up:
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east.
Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise". So to "orient" would specifically mean looking East.
Before compasses all indicated North, "the North" was associated with cold and evil, the south was associated with warmth and prosperity, and the East was considered neutral when establishing bearings.
> Also, I was quite old by the time I learned that "Oriental" literally just means "direction of the sunrise".
Even more literally "of the rising" ("occidental" meaning "of the falling"). The sun is of course implied here, but the Latin verbs orior and occido more generally indicate rising and falling motions of anyone and anything.
This is the correct map, but New Zealand should be in the center as we are middle earth
if only the axis was in the middle of middle earth would I agree
As someone from the Southern Hemisphere, the article's point falls flat. There's more land area in the top so it makes it easier to look at it
Not just land area; ~90% of the world population lives on the northern hemisphere, so it's more important in that sense, political and historical considerations aside.
You lose a lot of the details of the northern hemisphere when its compressed downwards in that map.
That seems to be due to the pseudocylindrical projection, not the rotation of the map.
I get the philosophical idea of challenging our default assumptions and remember people who are’t right in the middle of our conventional map. Good thing to do, sure.
But, the fact that Africa and South America are pointy on their southern sides makes these kind of maps look awkward and bad IMO. It is like adjusting a paragraph so that the extra white space is in the first, instead of the last, line. Or putting the shortest line of a multi line function definition at the top, instead of the bottom.
We’ve all seen ragged-right and ragged-left typesetting, but never ragged-top.
Yeah I'm not sure why taking the same projection and mirroring it does anything. Surely you'd want a different style of map entirely for this kind of project? Africa could be much larger in it for instance
Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.
Yeah, sure, I've heard that before... master/slave, black/white lists... and now, north/south. I wonder what they'll come up with now to explain reading from left to right (don't even think about the majority of right-handed writers, that would ruin the fun).
".snoitnevnoc fo yticilpmis eht dnihneb noitnetni neddih a eb ot dnuob si erehT"
I mean several languages are right to left?
I'd be interested to see if handedness in those countries is different.
Fun fact: if you rotate a regular map (north on top) counterclockwise, you’ll notice the American continent looks like a duck.
Even more fun fact: once you’ve seen this, you cannot unsee it. It’s a duck.
Much like this:
https://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/...
It's also a rabbit :)
This map feels confusing because Canada, Russia, Greenland and antarctica are the same color, I feel like they should not be the same and antarctica should not be a country color
Some countries do not even have same color for whole area in that map.
The West Wing has such a good clip about this:
https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw
One of my favorite episodes! This immediately came to mind. I was due for a rewatch, thanks for linking.
I was taught in high school that during the Cold War, there were maps with the US centered and USSR divided on either side to imply American unity in the face of opposition.
Example: https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ
The maps were common, but there was nothing anti-USSR about them, and they go way back before the Cold War.
It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.
These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.
There are old Arabic maps which have south at the top.
I bought a similar map from a shop in Australia and thought it was a really cool way to look at things from a different perspective. Perhaps un-surprisingly, it has Australa front and centre.
https://hemamaps.com/products/upside-down-world-in-envelope-...
I think rather than berating people for allegedly stodgy thinking that a better approach is just that everyone has an equal moral right to produce a map in which they are in the position of prominence, and since everyone can do that equally, nobody should be running around complaining about any particular orientation.
Well if we're all just sharing our favorite world map projections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
Butterfly for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterman_butterfly_projection
Relatedly there's a Map Men video on why north is up. [0] I don't buy the whole top is 'good' and lower is 'bad'. I think the bias is just a lot of the groups that made maps were located north(ish) and traveling roughly southward which made it a convenient orientation, especially during the age of sail.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70
And looking at the map, it would be hard for those map makers not to be north(ish) since the South is mostly ocean. Not too many civilizations that have sprung up in the ocean.
There's a Map Men video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70
I love stuff like this. I encourage everyone to check out 'Méditerranée Sans Frontières' map. [1][2]
[1] http://mediterraneesansfrontieres.org/babel4.html [2] https://amroali.com/2020/12/what-a-sideway-map-of-the-medite...
Intriguing. I wonder if an Arabic reader looks more prominently at the right side (Europe), the way an English speaker looks more prominently at the left side (Africa).
Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.
Some trivia: the North Pole is actually the magnetic south pole.
Out of convention we call it the “North Pole” because on a compass the north magnet is point toward its attract magnetic south.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole
I think in this case the concept of North came first and which end of a magnet points that way came second. Compasses are old, but not as old as the sunrise/set, which are (presumably) the original vaguely universal directions and define all four cardinal directions.
I like alternative maps including this one, but Robinson was an unfortunate choice for a map where Antarctica is so prominent.
It would be great if that map respected internationally accepted borders and attributed Crimea to Ukraine.
This is a great map, they should show it alongside the typical one when teaching geography. I'll show this to my kids later, see what they think and ask them to find some countries on it.
A similar change of perspective "trick" is knowing that when we look up at the stars, it's not really "up", it can be "down", too. Imagine being suspended head down, feet stuck to the ground looking at the space below, with billions of light years worth of almost nothing out there. A bit terrifying, I suppose, so maybe don't think too much about it :-)
In practical terms, though, 90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere contains ~65% of the earth's land mass, so it's not entirely without merit that we orient the map that way.
"The enemy's gate is down"!
The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.
They're reading our freaking brains!
Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.
So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).
I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.
As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.
Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.
My uncle had a south-up map of the US on his wall when I was growing up. I always thought it was funny and slightly profound.
Thought of this old Mafalda strip, haha.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Translation:
Panel 1: But Libertad¹, you’re hanging it upside down.
Panel 2: Upside down in relation to what? Earth is in space, and space has neither up nor down.
Panel 3: Saying the northern hemisphere is up is a psychological trick from those at the top, so that those who believe we are below continue to believe we are below. And the worst part is that if we keep believing we’re below, we’ll continue to be below! But starting today, that’s over!
Panel 4, top: Where were you, Mafalda?
Panel 4, bottom: I don’t know, but something just came to an end.
¹ It’s her name: https://mafalda.fandom.com/es/wiki/Libertad
A similar map was published by the Brazilian government:
https://www.gmexconsulting.com/cms/the-world-from-a-brazilia...
My Kerbal brained thinking: shouldn't it be east up with KSP at center?
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left, which is east.
In school, everyone learns that north is not up, and south is not down. Only us dumb grown-ups use that. ALL. THE. TIME. ALL. OF. THEM.
Is there a way to purchase this map for printing so Robert Simmon gets compensated?
Print regular map in a design you like and hang it upside down. It's literally that. Or if you want to be strict you can use "flip" function in image editing tool. You can compensate me for saving your money
To be fair, it's nice to have the typography rearranged to work upside down.
Recently I had been looking for a specific map of a local trail system and found a map store near me that might have it, and had seen this exact map in the store. Crazy to see it here a couple days later!
I believe you should be able to get it shipped wherever. https://www.mapcenter.com/store/p/upside-down-world-by-rober...
I mean you could just Venmo him
Wow look at Australia upside down it looks strikingly resembles USA!
The traditional (folk? premodern?) Finnish view of the world places Finland at the bottom.
Another fun arbitrary thing is which meridian you decide to cut, because the earth is round.
If you do an image search for, say, "world atlas," you'll see all the maps have cut the Pacific in half, so the West Pacific is at the right edge and the East Pacific is at the left edge of the map.
Now, if you search for, say, "세계전도", then you'll see that most maps have cut the Atlantic in half, because otherwise kids (for whom those atlases are intended) would see their own hometown shoved all the way to the end of the map.
While technically choice of prime meridian is arbitrary, there is a particular cartographic reason to prefer so called Florence meridian, as it minimizes interruption of land masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_meridian
Arguments about map projections are tiring. If you want to understand the whole planet, use a globe. Most people use maps via screens these days and there is no problem with projection or orientation. Most apps will let you orient the map how you like or according to your current bearing etc. and use a local projection. Can't we just stop using these whole world projections completely?
90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere[1].
It would be a deliberately weird design choice to make a globe (which is almost always viewed from above) with the northern hemisphere n bottom.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
Somebody know where to get a higher resolution of that map?
This article feels AI-generated
I can see Marley and Paradis!
I know the planet has poles, but it surprises me somehow that basically every map I've ever seen respects the poles as top bottom.
The earth is a sphere and we could just as well pick any pode/anti-pode we want when drawing.
For navigation, having the poles at top and bottom is really the only way to do it. Lining up positions of constant noon sun angle along a horizontal line (i.e. latitude line) makes the paper map correspond nicely to the navigational information available.
Is this map projection making Russia look small an artifact of the projection (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south in this projection in general) or an optical illusion?
Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.
> (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south
Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).
The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.
I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps. When I was growing up in Russia, the map I had in my room was a similar projection -- except with the North up, of course -- and Russia was about the same size on it.
> I don't think Russia looks small on this map, it's just not as blown-out as on Mercator maps.
I think that GP is accustomed to Mercator maps and is thus more surprised by it.
(I'm not really sure why this is a thing. My elementary school classrooms in the late 80s showed a variety of projections, and globes.)
Obligatory "there's an xkcd for everything": https://xkcd.com/1500/ (:
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Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:
1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.
2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.
3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.
4. Orienting a map with such an impactful direction at the top creates a strong literal connection to the territory it represents, rather than to a part-abstracted direction that must be identified and agreed.
There are many ways to accurately determine north that have been known since antiquity. A magnetic compass was but one method of many.
Also, where the sun rises and sets varies enormously over the year. Using the sun to determine north (e.g. shadow-stick method) is more reliable.
The sun doesn’t rise directly in the east though unless you live exactly on the equator, and it rises a different amount off of east every day. However, at noon, the sun is always either due north or due south depending on what hemisphere you’re in, so number 3 is quite arguable.
Also the North Star being a thing is quite influential.
From our perspective the sun doesn't travel top to bottom, so why orient the map that way?