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Merged two threads on the same column into one.
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Of course North is up. Otherwise Australia couldn’t be called “down under”.
Cecil wrote in the second paragraph, “People who live in the southern hemisphere like to give the impression they could care less about how maps are oriented.” I think they couldn’t care less. The “could/couldn’t care less” thing is an old pet peeve of mine. The first is slang and implies the opposite of what it actually means; the second is grammatically correct.
And why again would this be? Because you think we would still want “Spring” to start the calendar, so would set the calendar to start with July in the middle of Southern winter?
Eh, that doesn’t make much sense for cultures that expect to read from left to right. Wouldn’t we want to orient so that the left is the sunrise and right is the sunset, so facing south?
No, what he’s saying is instead of calendars running from January through December, they would run July through June or some such. That way the calendar starts in “spring” (except it’s midwinter) and ends in winter (midwinter, not winter’s end). So after June 2011, we’d get a new calendar starting with July for the year 2012. Because apparently one form of cultural baggage (the idea that the year runs “spring through winter”) outweighs another form of cultural baggage (the year runs Jan through Dec).
Irishman and Wheelz,
Using the Georgian calendar as an example, currently January through December (if we skip the argument on the when winter starts and ends but simply go with the Winter Solstice being the end/start of the progression of the seasons, an event celebrated in many cultures) follows Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter, in the Northern Hemisphere, the top hemisphere. If the South was made top and its progression of the seasons is given dominance (as currently the Northern hemisphere is) the seasons and the Calendar don’t align, January is no longer the start and December the end of the season progression. So the Calendar would need to take a 6 month skip. So January starts shortly after the Southern hemisphere’s Winter Solstice, as it did when the North was top.
The seasons and the calendar don’t align now. January first has no particular significance pertaining to the seasons, it’s an accident of the history of the calendar. Even if the population of the temperate and sub-tropic areas of the southern hemisphere suddenly rose to despotic world power and decided all maps would henceforth have south on the top they’d see no need to change the calendar as they’d be used to the way it is now and there’s no inherent connection between the start of the year and anything relating to the seasons.
Why does January have to be first? Because it’s currently done that way? Why does changing one historical arbitrary convention require you to change another historical arbitrary convention? The Southern Hemisphere folks are already accustomed to thinking of July as winter and January as summer - they won’t want to change that merely to make us silly northern hemisphere goobers feel a little better about losing the globes and maps.
Winter solstice is in December. So really winter starts sometime around Dec 1 and runs until Dec 21, at which point it’s Spring? Even though some of the coldest weather doesn’t occur until late January and even February?
Why should we pick some arbitrary social convention over the currently established social convention?
Since we’re on the topic of reckoning directions, and reckoning of some calendars other than Gregorian, note that the key direction of a traditional Chinese magnetic compass is the compass point oriented towards the SOUTH (not to the north as in today’s conventional magnetic compass i.e. the ‘top of the hour’).
China is in the northern hemisphere so southward faces towards the SUN, which is the male aspect (to the female moon) in the Yin (f) Yang (m) duality.
The invention of the compass in China arose more from the practice of geomancy (feng shui) than for applying to navigation, to which it was eventually adapted.
As for Chinese calendrical reckoning, a combination or mixed solar-lunar cycle is the basis. The agricultural seasonal markers are referenced to the solar cycle, but since the ~29 day lunar cycles are more readily observable by farmers at night, 12 or 13 lunar months can occur within a given ‘year’. Every so often a leap 13th month has to be inserted so that the start of the lunar new year cycle doesn’t drift out of synch with respect to constellations that occur around the winter solstice. The summer solstice is considered to be the mid-summer season (longest period of daylight in the northern hemisphere), not the beginning of the summer season as is now customary.
[quote=“John_W.Kennedy, post:7, topic:567651”]
[ul]
[li]navigational degrees start with north because that’s where a compass starts, and then go clockwise because clockwise is “natural” (at least in the Northern Hemisphere[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
So why do clock hands rotate clockwise and why is this ‘natural’ I wonder. They could just as well rotate anti-clockwise (and there are some novelty mirror image clock mechanisms available to purchase that do in fact work ‘backwards’).
So why is the expression “north south east west”, and not “north east south west”? Perhaps to avoid confusion with northeast and southwest?
The school or academic year start times… but did children of nobility who did not tend fields in the spring-summer-fall follow this same academic year I wonder. What was Oxford`s academic year hundreds of years ago before todays universal education (in the west) for 5 - 20 year olds qstnmrk
Mercator projection cartography originated to depict vertical merdians and parallel latitudes, which facilitates solving navigational problems of speed-time-distance-direction by graphical methods of inspection at a time when sailing ship speeds were comparatively slow.
One can navigate with a map orientation of either north up or head(ing) up as is common also for radar and GPS route plotting displays. If you head up sun, rather than down sun or cross sun, then you squint.
Gnomon shadows and sun dial rays lie to the north in the nor.hem.
My guess is that meridians are based on orange fruit segments!
In the northern hemisphere, sundials go clockwise.
Or rather, clockwise is the direction that a sundial goes in the northern hemisphere. To put the cause and effect in the right order. And the reason that the northern hemisphere sundials got precedence is that, even aside from the fact that there are more people in the north, the northerners also happen to have invented clocks before the southerners.
Do you mean to say that clocks were invented before the southerners were?
/Nitpick/
“People who live in the southern hemisphere like to give the impression they could care less about how maps are oriented.”
I’ll let David Mitchell explain. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxLdIbKaPlY
It’s an accident of history that sundails were invented in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, as the sun progresses across the sky, the shadows cast by the sun roll from West to East across the ground. Clocks were invented to mirror the timekeeping system already in place, so “clockwise” matches the movement of the sundial in the Northern hemisphere. Because “clockwise” is conditioned behavior, it is “natural” to proceed clockwise from the straight ahead bearing when navigating.
Possibly, but also possibly to pair the opposites. North-South versus East-West, making a grid.
My brother! See post 23.
Slightly off subject, in medieval times east was at the top of the page because that was the holy land, the origion of all that was important.