The right-hand rule would have served you well here. Gonna spin something with threads? Nut, bolt, lamp base? Point right thumb in direction you want it to move, curled fingers will tell you which way to rotate it.
I remember I was once visiting some friends and their daughter, who was around four, was learning to draw triangles. And she was having a really difficult time with it. She just couldn’t figure out how to make the lines connect the right way.
How a triangle works seems like such an obvious thing. But we need to remember it’s not something genetic. We all had to learn very basic things like this at some point in our lives.
One strange directional metaphor I’ve mentioned before is how in western society, we see the future as being ahead of us and the past as being behind us. I never gave this much thought - I just assumed this was the obviously correct way - until I read about a tribe that uses the opposite metaphor. To these people, the past is ahead of them and the future is behind them. And they explain that this is reasonable; your eyes are in the front of your head so you can see things that in front of you but not things that are behind you. And we know what happened in the past so we can metaphorically see it while future events are unknown and we are metaphorically unable to see them. And I have to admit their logic seems to make more sense than ours.
A standard letter size sheet of paper in the US is 8 1/2 x 11. You can just say sheet of paper and most programs in the US will default. Please don’t try to create your own unless you need too. A superscript o can acts as a degree sign,
I remember learning how to make a five-pointed star, and also the standard Christmas tree shape - both were tricky, until I practiced enough for it to be natural.
As I recall, ancient Egyptians used “downstream” as a synonym for “north” - because the Nile worked that way. When their armies encountered rivers that traveled in the other direction, it was quite confusing for them. How could a river go downstream upstream?
https://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Classes/History%20&%20Systems%20(4090)/Papers/Hoyingen-Huene.htm
Some 3,500 years ago, in ancient Egypt, the southern direction could primarily be identified astronomically. In addition, it was possible to use the criterion “upstream,” as the Nile happens to flow from south to north in that region. The hieroglyph for “south” was a ship with sails, and that for “north” a ship without sails. This shows that a third criterion for directions could be used. If a moving ship were seen at some distance from the Nile, one could identify directions by noting whether or not sails were set: a ship with sails was moving south or upstream; a ship without sails, north or downstream. The coexistence of these criteria contains empirical knowledge, in this case about a geographical peculiarity of the region and about the use of sails. However, something very strange happened when, on an expedition outside their kingdom, the Egyptians discovered the river Euphrates, which happens to flow from north to south. In this new situation, the different but normally interchangeable criteria used to distinguish north from south no longer functioned properly. The astronomical criterion yielded a different result from the flow criterion and the sail criterion. The reason for this is quite clear: In the new geographical situation, the empirical knowledge on which the interchangeability of the criteria rested was no longer valid. But as this knowledge had become a part of language, its violation became actually apparent as a conceptual confusion. [End Page 13] This confusion has been recorded on a stele of King Thutmose I from the sixteenth century b.c., where the Euphrates is referred to as “that inverted water which goes downstream in going upstream,” or, equivalently, “that inverted water which goes north in going south.” 12
that would be my menstruations cramps. Why do I feel like I sill need to defend the pain I’m feeling!
The bit with the Egyptians is the same sort of thing we see with all the rest of these confusions left/right absolute/relative confusions.
They take two facts that are actually conceptually distinct, but that happen to coincide locally, and deeply intertwine the logic behind the facts them in their heads as individuals or as features of their culture. or worse yet, declare the two ideas to be equivalent. e.g. to them, North isn’t the same direction as downstream; North is downstream. Oops.
Then when placed in a situation where the homegrown local coincidence no longer holds, they can’t neatly separate the two ideas. Or can’t even comprehend what they are seeing; it’s as sensible to them as a square circle is to you or I.
This hijack about handedness/portnessness has gotten quite sinister.
[link to derivation of ‘left handed’]
It follows directly from the OP and post # 2.
No matter how many times people talk about being right-handed, I can’t understand why they can’t use both hands to do things like writing and mousing. It just seems so natural to me, and puzzling when people make a big deal of it.
I had to explain to a 26 year old at work once that Halloween wasn’t a “paid day off”. The person thought we would all literally be given the day off (keyword DAY) so we could get ready for our Halloween plans. Not even public schools close for Halloween, I have no idea how someone can go through life and not notice everything is still open on Halloween.
Even a trifle gauche, you might say.
You don’t get “backpay” if you’re out of sick/vacation leave and decided to just be at home for two weeks and deliberately calling it in as “Unpaid leave”. We have medical unpaid leave but this wasn’t it, they wanted the benefits of both being off and being paid that didn’t require them to have vacation days accrued. They threatened to sue for backpay when they were told to report to work tomorrow or stay home forever.
I was surprised that some people are confused by maps - when they’re traveling from the north to the south, and everything shown on the left side of the map is on their right, and vice versa.
One oil company’s gas stations used to give away a map for U.S. 1 that had Florida at the top and New York at the bottom
I was REALLY surprised: We were once in an “all hands” meeting where the big chief asked for questions from the floor. One employee, in a belligerent tone of voice, shouted out “WHY DON’T WE HAVE A UNION?” He wasn’t referring to any suppression of union activities - he honestly thought it was the Company’s role to unionize the employees.
This was the only explanation I could think of:
IS YOUR CO-WORKER A SPACE ALIEN? – Chicago Tribune
And meanwhile, there are a fair number of people today (outside of Egypt) who believe that all rivers flow from north to south. Oddly, this is even true here in Cleveland, where the local rivers all flow into Lake Erie, and hence south to north (at least, more or less-- The Cuyahoga is quite twisty).
I believe that something related to this is also tied up in my sense of direction. Growing up in Cleveland, I’ve always had a good sense of direction, because I could tell which way the lake was, and that’s north. When visiting Toronto or Chicago, I can still tell which way the lake is, which understandably causes some degree of confusion (more so in Chicago, because then I have to remember which direction to rotate my mental compass). And there are some other places where my sense of direction works but is wrong, and others where it doesn’t work at all. But it wasn’t until I moved to Bozeman, MT, where it worked correctly without a lake, that I figured out why: I think I’m intuitively noticing the overall slope of the land, and assuming that the downhill direction is lakewards and hence north. Which is an assumption that works fairly well in Cleveland (and incidentally, in Bozeman), but not so well in some other places.
Has nothing to do with it.
I would have said cack-handed.
In a similar vein people in the Shenandoah Valley will talk about going down to Washington DC, rather than up because the Shenandoah river flows Northeast so, down to DC means going down river, even though if you looked at a map, it would be located up from where they live.
//i\\
I believe you’re mistaken. I just walked through a parking lot. For some cars, “shotgun” was on my left, and for others it was on my right.