On 8/26/05, Andrew Fildes <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> http://www.flourish.org/upsidedownmap/
> "The most surprising thing was that I found it surprising. It is
> completely artificial that we have North at the top of a map. The
> convention came a few centuries ago when Northern hemisphere,
> European navigators started using the North star and the magnetic
> compass. Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is
> where the word orientation comes from."
Found the site pretty interesting. I own a map of the Russian
Federation (in Russian) which is centered on Russia as the author of
the site mentions. It really does help to show how much of a
difference the way the map is centered and the way in which it's
projected onto a 2-dimensional surface can change the way it looks.
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