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You've gotta hand it to the DI Media Complaints Division - when their PR team gives them a catchphrase-laden response to something, they repeat it so many times that they begin to sound like Rain Man (just replace Judge Wapner with Judge Jones). Rob Crowther continues to beat this drum in yet…
I live just around the corner from Joe Paterno.
This morning there was a little horde of reporters and cameras across the street, hoping to get that little 15 second glimpse of the man, for the early evening news shot.
Last night, several hundred students gathered outside to voice support for the…
I don't know whether it's by design or fortuitous incompetence, but creationists are masters of the fuzzy statement that opens the doors to all kinds of new opportunities for ignorance. Missouri, for instance, just passed a law giving themselves the freedom to pray (a freedom they already had,…
Readers of the Worldnutdaily are by now familiar with a columnist who goes by the pseudonym Vox Day. His real name is Theodore Beale and his rich father is on the board of directors of the Worldnutdaily, which is the only explanation for how he got his position as a columnist there. It's bad…
I used to think that that howler "Krakatoa, East of Java" was just the result of ignorance, or because they'd heard of Java, so Sumatra must be Java, because it's bigger.
Then I started seeing people, even in fairly scholarly books, get east and west switched around when dealing with the Pacific or the Far East. I think people have some idea that the Earth has an east and west pole, so if you pass the west pole, east and west trade places. Or something.
I think the idea is that the International Date Line is supposed to represent the demarcation point between east and west. This despite the fact that it's just a line on the map.
It's even stranger for us Australians. We are part of the North, even though we are in the South, and we are part of the West, even though we are in the East.
Ahh... the problems of having a map that has the United States in the center. If you look at the following URL, you will see that it is easier to understand why "East" is east and "West" is west.
http://www.realitymapping.co.uk/images/about/World%20Map%20Large.jpg
And "North" and "South" are socio-economical. (Hell, Mongolia is geographically North, but socio-economically South.)
If you look at the URL below of the world map from the POV of Japan, "West" is east and "East" is west:
http://www.sira.or.jp/english/recipe/image/world_map_e.jpg
(Stupid your-own-country-centrism viewpoint of cartography.)
And in this view of the world, South America and Africa don't even exist.
The question of which projection to use never really bothered me until shortly after my arrival in Australia around the end of the Vietnam war. An engaging historian published a little book about how the right wing views were distorting history by asserting that the view that there was a "Yellow Peril" threatening Australia. It could easily be countered by printing the map upside down and showing how threatening to Asia was the sharp projection of Cape York Peninsula.
It also seemed strange to talk about the Middle or Near East when teaching about the origins of agriculture.
Then I started to get serious, and the version with Australia in the centre is the only way to go (unless you live in Greenland which gets cut in half--but then not many people do live in Greenland). It makes much more sense for the purposes of teaching about human origins in Africa and the migration through Asia to Australia and the Americas (but is not much good if you want to get primates from Africa to South America).
Just a thought
Iain