What spherical coordinates would you rather suggest?
East plus/minus 23 degrees is where the Sun rises. And with a different plus/minus value every day of the year. I happen now to live with a view to an eastern shore, but with various landmarks between me and the shore. I often take pix of the sun rising from the sea, and the difference between the position of Sunrise in June and December is striking. Yep, 46 degrees difference.
And can you (any you) remember, 4 or 8 hours later which direction sunrise was? To what tolerance?
I fully agree w the idea that most folks’ innate sense of direction, including my own, is probably only good +/- 30 degrees. We subconsciously fine tune that by landmarks or the road network. Which is great until there are no known landmarks, or no road network, or the ones you do have are misleading. Then confusion reigns.
The Cleveland streets are mostly a fairly regular grid, and so if one refers to north, south, east, or west, one usually means along the street pointed in that direction. But downtown, that grid is rotated by about 40 degrees, so “east” is actually pretty close to northeast, and correspondingly for all of the others.
That depends on your latitude. At the arctic/antarctic circle, it can vary by the full 90º.
Now I am wondering about— picture a tidally locked planet, so that the sun does not rise or set. Then nudge the rotation just a little bit— not sure how long you could make it last— so that the distant stars rise in one direction while the sun rises in the other.
It doesn’t need to be a hypothetical. Venus meets that description. At least, if you don’t mind that you can’t see any of the celestial objects from the surface.
The car/road thing that always trips me up for a moment is “left-hand drive” vs. “right hand drive”. I have to think: “does left-hand drive mean driving on the left side of the road, or does it mean a driver situated on the left-hand side of the vehicle?”
I thought I knew, but now that you ask… I don’t know any more!
It describes which side the driver is on.
Left hand drive = Driver is on the left hand side (US)
Right hand drive = Driver is on the right hand side (UK)
Yes. I know. But it seems to me it should describe which side of the road one drives on instead because some vehicles have the driver on the “wrong” side (e.g. some US Postal Service vehicles in US where the driver is on the right -side) and thus it is ambiguous.
But which side of the road one drives on never changes (within one driving jurisdiction) so isn’t that a better way to refer to left or right-hand drive?
But “X hand drive” describes the vehicle. There are some insane countries that have right hand drive vehicles that drive on the right side.
I think Myanmar is one.
When referring to a specific vehicle, “left hand drive” refers to the design of that vehicle and is unambiguous. It would be unclear indeed to refer to a vehicle based on the traffic laws in the place where it usually drives. Does a vehicle change from LHD to RHD if you ship it to England?
A USPS truck with the steering wheel on the “wrong” side is a right hand drive vehicle, despite being driven in the US.
Also, just as there are outlier vehicles with the wheel on the “wrong” side, there are outlier roads (in the US) where traffic drives on the “wrong” side of the road.
The correct terminology is that the e.g. USA has right-hand traffic and left-hand drive vehicles. While conversely the e.g. UK has left-hand traffic and right-hand drive vehicles. Once one knows both the terms “left-/right-hand traffic” and “right-/left-hand drive”, there’s not much remaining room for ambiguity.
See Left- and right-hand traffic - Wikipedia for lots more details and some fun history.
The US Virgin Islands has the mirror image situation.
The cars are almost entirely US-standard with the driver on the left side of the vehicle (“left-hand drive”). But they drive UK/Japan style on the left side of the road (“left-hand traffic”). So the driver is adjacent to the curb, not the road centerline. Given that almost all roads on the mountainous island are twisty turny and barely two lanes worth of narrow, this is exciting stuff to experience.
The backstory is this US possession used to be a colony of Denmark. Which at the time cars were invented chose left-hand traffic. When the US later took over, it was decided to leave the traffic side as-is. And here we are, 110+ years later. The old right-hand drive cars are all lone gone, but the left-hand traffic remains.
There are many other islands in the Caribbean that have left-hand traffic, a legacy of their former (?) colonial masters. Such as the Bahamas. Many of which have a decent population of US-standard left-hand drive cars, as that’s the cheapest place to import large numbers of used cars from.
Personal anecdote … as inexpensive Chinese cars are making inroads throughout the Caribbean, new RHD Chinese cars are displacing a LOT of the existing stock of older former USA-based used LHD cars.
Yeah, y’all are right about the right-hand drive vs. right-hand traffic thing. I guess I only have ever heard the left/right-hand drive (not left/right traffic) so I thought it was referring to both or either? Or something? Anyway, I’ve got it clear now. Thanks.
But I imagine there are others who conflate the two (like @Johanna in this thread. perhaps?)
Don’t both the Sun and the distant stars rise in the west (or “west”— at any rate, the same orientation) on Venus?
I was confused the whole two years I lived in San Diego. I grew up on the coast of Maine, so towards the ocean is east. Not so over there.
My current directional discombobulation is the building I work in. It is sort of two trapezoids joined together, plus an area outside specifically designed to be a Fibonacci spiral. Then there’s the basement where the shop is, I can never figure out what I’m under.
I’m from San Diego. Mountains are east. Ocean is west. Having an ocean on the east would be weird and unnatural.
But it is funny how much the geography of one’s formative years makes an indelible stamp. At least for those of us who grew up in one place.
Yeah, I grew up all over. I first lived in Houston and Galveston, Texas. The ocean was to the southeast.
Then Alameda, California. The ocean was to the west. Which always felt a little backwards. Plus the water at the beach was always cold.
Then Fort Sheridan, Illinois. Lake Michigan was to to the east.
Now I’m in Connecticut. The coast is south/southeast of me, and the mountains are north of me. So the direction of the ocean is basically the same as where I first lived on the Texas gulf coast.
Let us put it this way: roughly speaking, there should be three cases:
- Planet rotates retrograde: sun and stars rise in the west
- Planet rotates prograde, but slowly: sun rises in the west, stars rise in the east
- Planet rotates prograde faster than it orbits the sun: sun and stars rise in the east
You would have to translate those maintenance manuals into the other country’s “language” by swapping the steering wheel from one side to the other, and the pedals, and (more recently) the control panel. Which means that “left”, “port” and “drivers side” are all going to be wrong somewhere and need translation.
Please run this by me again: is the claim that there are, or have been, maintenance manuals with erroneous information due to the fact that a specific model of car comes in both left- and right-hand drive variants?