Honorary mention to one of the officials maps of Argentina <a href="https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/medium/ARG%20BICO%20INVERTIDO%20COPLA%20A4%202021.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.ign.gob.ar/gallery-app/mapas-escolares-202307/me...</a>

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.

> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’<p>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.

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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.

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.

Since it's a globe you could also have North on the left and with on the right. Right?

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.<p>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.

It's also a wonderful metaphor for how the opposite can also be true.<p>Japanese addresses that name the blocks, not the streets: <a href="https://sive.rs/jadr" rel="nofollow">https://sive.rs/jadr</a><p>West African music that uses the "1" as the end of the phrase instead of the start: <a href="https://sive.rs/fela" rel="nofollow">https://sive.rs/fela</a><p>“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true”, Joan Robinson<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_differe...</a>

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.<p>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.

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

This is the correct map, but New Zealand should be in the center as we are middle earth

Huh. I wonder if part of this is that, when you make a globe, you’ll pretty much always look “down” on it. And as another poster said, most of the land (and thus peoples and nations) are in the north. So it makes sense it’d end up on top?

Really, it should be in portrait mode to suit phone screens. Vertical scrolling spins the globe.

The West Wing has such a good clip about this:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY?si=05KQjltJ8fVsqMDw</a>

Totally mind blowing. I would not have known that one could have oriented a map with a different direction at the top had a blog post not been written about it.<p>Does this work for having East at the top?!?

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).<p>".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

Tbh east on top would in some ways be more interesting because map projections usually are symmetrical across the equator but are not rotationally symmetrical. So east up map would have potentially different shapes of land masses, while south up map has exact same shapes as north up.

Fun fact: if you rotate a regular map (north on top) counterclockwise, you’ll notice the American continent looks like a duck.<p>Even more fun fact: once you’ve seen this, you cannot unsee it. It’s a duck.

To me it just looks like a world map rotated by 180 degrees. Not strange or disorienting.

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.

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.<p><a href="https://hemamaps.com/products/upside-down-world-in-envelope-folded-map" rel="nofollow">https://hemamaps.com/products/upside-down-world-in-envelope-...</a>

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.<p>Example: <a href="https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ" rel="nofollow">https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ</a>

Though some view me as a stodgy, patriotic American "right-winger" I feel this country needs to make actual north orientation great again and also adopt the goddamn metric system. FLIP THE MAP

Here's a map I put together <a href="https://northerngesture.com" rel="nofollow">https://northerngesture.com</a>

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.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70</a>

I love stuff like this. I encourage everyone to check out 'Méditerranée Sans Frontières' map. [1][2]<p>[1] <a href="http://mediterraneesansfrontieres.org/babel4.html" rel="nofollow">http://mediterraneesansfrontieres.org/babel4.html</a> [2] <a href="https://amroali.com/2020/12/what-a-sideway-map-of-the-mediterranean-reveals/" rel="nofollow">https://amroali.com/2020/12/what-a-sideway-map-of-the-medite...</a>

Sundials also point northly throughout the day if you're in the northern hemisphere, another reason that North can be interpreted as "up"

If we start using south-side-up maps, how are fantasy writers supposed to come up with shapes for their fictional continents?

Some trivia: the North Pole is actually the magnetic <i>south</i> pole.<p>Out of convention we call it the “North Pole” because on a compass the north magnet is point toward its attract magnetic south.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole</a>

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.<p>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.<p>We’ve all seen ragged-right and ragged-left typesetting, but never ragged-top.

Well if we're all just sharing our favorite world map projections:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map</a>

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.<p>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 :-)

There's a Map Men video on it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70</a>

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.<p>They're reading our freaking brains!

I guess they didn't come from a land down under after all.

Thought of this old Mafalda strip, haha.<p><a href="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geografiainfinita.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F12%2Fmafalda.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=8c64c51b997957cefbdbec1b43db4f1e5b7329a528be828276ebe5e006ce6648" rel="nofollow">https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...</a>

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.

I like alternative maps including this one, but Robinson was an unfortunate choice for a map where Antarctica is so prominent.

A similar map was published by the Brazilian government:<p><a href="https://www.gmexconsulting.com/cms/the-world-from-a-brazilian-perspective-and-a-market-for-your-with-over-200-million-customers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gmexconsulting.com/cms/the-world-from-a-brazilia...</a>

It would be great if that map respected internationally accepted borders and attributed Crimea to Ukraine.

My Kerbal brained thinking: shouldn't it be east up with KSP at center?

Is there a way to purchase this map for printing so Robert Simmon gets compensated?

There are old Arabic maps which have south at the top.

Wow look at Australia upside down it looks strikingly resembles USA!

90% of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere[1].<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere</a>

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?

Disappointed there was no discussion of maps where east or west are up.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

Somebody know where to get a higher resolution of that map?

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.<p>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.

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.<p>The earth is a sphere and we could just as well pick any pode/anti-pode we want when drawing.

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?<p>Russia looks small flipped on its head and I can't quite figure out why.

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Obligatory "there's an xkcd for everything": <a href="https://xkcd.com/1500/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1500/</a> (:

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Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:<p>1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.<p>2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.<p>3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.<p>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.

> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’<p>Yea, sure. That's why we all try to vacation in a "tropical paradise", which tend to be in the middle of the map.<p>People are dumb, really dumb even, but even a two year old is going to realize vertical map position doesn't equate to "good".