Map Is Not Upside Down
67 comments
·September 18, 2025hyperhello
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schoen
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.
davidczech
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.
vman81
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.
InitialLastName
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.
mitthrowaway2
How would top-to-bottom benefit right-handed writers any more than left-handed ones?
ks2048
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?
hidroto
alabhyajindal
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.
alwa
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...
bobsmooth
>I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing
The author has an inferiority complex.
y-curious
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...
dvt
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...
sivers
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...
throw-the-towel
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!
bluGill
Sometimes. I know of places in america where numbers are sequential. I know of other places where they a sequential but increase by five.
throw-the-towel
Could you share some examples please? I'm not doubting you, just want to look at some maps.
evandrofisico
In Brasilia, Brazil only main avenues are named and all addresses are also by block, just like in Japan.
emulatedmedia
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
gaborcselle
This article feels AI-generated
patternMachine
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.
dbl000
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.
legitster
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.
schoen
> 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.
daedrdev
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
loloquwowndueo
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.
cyberlimerence
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...
gausswho
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.
buzzy_hacker
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
crazygringo
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.
rdtsc
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 :-)
disillusioned
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.
eckmLJE
"The enemy's gate is down"!
> 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.