Tuesday, April 17, 2007

standing visual argument on its head



This may be familiar to those of you who were West Wing fans. We sold these maps at my old bookstore in California.

3 comments:

Joe Chevalier said...

What would make it even cooler is if the Pacific Ocean were in the center.

Mrs. Van Til said...

I've heard these are very popular in Australia, also. It is strange how disorienting this can be, but I think that it is highly persuasive. Of course the map is just as accurate with south at the top (I almost wrote upside down!), but even as much as we may recognize that, I think that it is difficult to keep that in mind sometimes.

It's strange the ways in which our orientation of a thing impacts the ways in which we think about it.

Irina Avkhimovich said...

I like this argument because actually it is so simple to turn the map upside down yet it does not come easily to my head. It demonstrates how we tend to see relative ideas as absolute ones. Universe has no "up" and "down" so this map is what couls be an official version of the world as well... in virtual history.